A Reader’s Guide to Richard Baxter

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. 2 TIMOTHY 2:15

Baxter presents the reader with two difficulties: there is far too much of him, and his prose is heavy going. He published around a hundred and forty works. His sentences are long even by seventeenth-century standards, he qualifies everything, and he never uses one clause where four will serve. His friends complained about it in his lifetime. The good news is that everything is in the public domain, that several of his best works exist in excellent modern abridgements, and that the abridgements are the right place to start. There is no virtue in struggling through an unabridged folio when a competent editor has already done the work.

Begin here

The Reformed Pastor (1656). His most useful book and the one still read. Modern abridged editions run to a couple of hundred pages and lose nothing essential. Every pastor, elder and Sunday school teacher should read it once, with the caution of chapter seven in mind. A Call to the Unconverted (1658). Short, plain, and written for people with little education. Still usable as an evangelistic gift. The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650), in abridgement. The full work runs to four substantial parts; the abridgements generally preserve the description of heaven and the directions for heavenly contemplation, which are what most readers want.

On the Christian life

Dying Thoughts (1683). Meditations on Philippians 1:23, written in old age. Short and moving. The Life of Faith. The basis of chapter eleven; on living by the unseen. The Poor Man’s Family Book. Written for households with little education, in dialogue form. A window into how he actually taught. A Breviate of the Life of Margaret Baxter (1681). His memoir of his wife, written within weeks of her death. Not theology, and one of the most affecting things in the century — a widower’s portrait of a woman he plainly thought his better.

The great practical work

A Christian Directory (1673). An enormous manual of practical theology and cases of conscience, running to something like a million words, covering private devotion, family life, church relations and public dealings. Not to be read through. It is a reference work, and it is worth consulting on any question of Christian practice you can think of, because he almost certainly addressed it.

On melancholy

Baxter’s writings on melancholy and overmuch sorrow, discussed in chapter fifteen, are scattered and less easy to obtain, but worth seeking out. They are three centuries ahead of most of what followed and remain among the wisest Christian counsel on the subject. Read them with the modern note supplied in that chapter: seek qualified medical help.

Approach with care

Aphorisms of Justification (1649) and the long train of controversial writings that followed it. This is the material discussed in chapter six. Read it only if you want to understand the debate, and read the objections alongside it. The polemical works more generally. There are a great many, they are exhausting, and Baxter himself came to regret their number and their sharpness.

His own account

Reliquiae Baxterianae, his autobiography, published in 1696 after his death. The full text is unwieldy; the standard abridgement is far more readable and contains the famous passage on how his mind changed with age, which is the single best thing he wrote about himself.

About Baxter

Geoffrey Nuttall’s Richard Baxter (1965) is a compact and reliable scholarly life. J. I. Packer wrote his doctoral work on Baxter’s theology and returned to him repeatedly afterwards; the chapters on Baxter in A Quest for Godliness are the best short appreciation available, and are candid about the justification problem. N. H. Keeble has written well on Baxter as a writer and on the Nonconformist world he inhabited. Read more than one. Baxter attracts admirers who overlook his faults and critics who overlook everything else.

Three counsels for reading him

Read the abridgements first, and without embarrassment. The editors have removed repetition, not substance. Read him for the burden rather than the system. Where he presses beyond Scripture — and on justification he does — take the pastoral concern and leave the framework. And read him in small quantities. Baxter is rich and heavy, and a few pages digested will do more than fifty pages endured. He would have said the same; he said it about his own writing more than once.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21