John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity

Tim Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754663614
• eBook ISBN: 9781317110460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

John Owen (1616-1683) and Richard Baxter (1615-1691) were both pivotal figures in shaping the nonconformist landscape of Restoration England. Yet despite having much in common, they found themselves taking opposite sides in several important debates, and their relationship was marked by acute strain and mutual dislike. By comparing and contrasting the parallel careers of these two men, this book not only distils the essence of their differing theology, it also offers a broader understanding of the formation of English nonconformity. Placing these two figures in the context of earlier events, experience and differences, it argues that Restoration nonconformity was hampered by their strained personal relationship, which had its roots in their contrasting experiences of the English Civil War. This study thus contributes to historiography that explores the continuities across seventeenth-century England, rather than seeing a divide at 1660. It illustrates the way in which personality and experience shaped the development of wider movements.

Chapter 1
Different Wars/Different Worlds

From the beginning of these troubles … you have held forth religion and the gospel, as whose preservation and restoration was principally in your aims.

John Owen (1646)1

In a word, I never yet saw the work of the gospel go on well in wars.

Richard Baxter (1647)2

John Owen and Richard Baxter were born within a year of each other. Their careers spanned much the same period, even if Baxter outlived Owen by eight years; they lived through the same events. And yet their experience of some of those events, and how they interpreted them, could hardly provide a greater contrast. This is especially true of the first civil war. It is the foundational difference of experience that gave rise to all those that followed. Before we can begin to understand the complexities of their relationship and the reasons for the strain that it bore, we must understand how their contrasting experiences of the war left them living worlds apart. Owen sailed through the war years largely unscathed; he saw in those events the hand of God rescuing the gospel in England from its Arminian bondage. But for Baxter the war was a personal disaster that brought extended disruption and transiency; he felt he saw the gospel in England slipping irreparably into Antinomian abuse. These contrasting perspectives profoundly reinforced or shaped their soteriological agendas, which we will explore in Chapter 2. In this way Owen and Baxter illustrate a dynamic that was true for England as a whole: the implications of this mid-century upheaval could last a lifetime, and long after the fighting had finished England’s inhabitants carried the memory with them, shaping them still and exerting a lingering influence on the country decades after the event. This, then, is how so much of later seventeenth-century English history begins, in a conflict that most just wanted to end.

John Owen: ‘A Vision of Free Mercy’

King Charles I slipped out of Oxford disguised as a servant in the early hours of 27 April 1646.3 For nearly four years the city had been the headquarters for his military operations against the forces of the English Parliament. This inglorious departure offered a tacit acknowledgement that his cause was lost.4

After nine days of wandering that initially took him within sight of London he surrendered himself to the Scottish forces some 90 miles to the north of Oxford in Nottinghamshire, and the first civil war came to a close.

On 29 April 1646, just two days after Charles had abandoned Oxford, John Owen preached his first sermon to the House of Commons. Four years earlier, Parliament had instituted regular days of ‘public humiliation’ and fasting in which sermons were preached and published that affirmed the work of God on Parliament’s behalf in the struggle underway.5 But the choice of Owen was part of a significant change of affairs within the Parliamentarian cause.6 ‘The old regulars … and many others who will soon abandon the revolution, are joined by their future supplanters.’7 Presbyterian influence was losing ground and at that point Owen was an emerging Congregationalist. This lent some distinctive touches to his sermon, but even so ‘these new preachers had to be discreet’8 and their essential task remained unchanged – to renew national vigour in a time of war.

Owen’s sermon neatly fitted the mould. He called it ‘A Vision of Unchangeable, Free Mercy, in Sending the Means of Grace to Undeserving Sinners’, and he chose Acts 16:9 for his text. In its context, the Apostle Paul was prevented by the Holy Spirit from taking the gospel into the province of Asia. Instead, this verse describes Paul’s vision of a man calling him to go to Macedonia. Owen used this passage to demonstrate in classically Calvinist fashion that God chose some, but not others, to salvation.9 Yet his choice of text made it possible for him to read ‘this discriminating counsel of God from eternity’ not just in the experience of individuals, but in the history of entire countries and in England’s present troubles. ‘Amongst other nations, this is the day of England’s visitation … a man of England hath prevailed for assistance, and the free grace of God hath wrought us help by the gospel.’ Thus Owen discerned ‘the mighty working of Providence’ in England’s civil war.10 His purpose was ‘to discover how the great variety which we see in the dispensation of the means of grace, proceedeth from, and is regulated by, some eternal purpose of God, unfolded in his word’, understanding that ‘[a]ll things below in their events are but the wax, whereon the eternal seal of God’s purposes hath left its own impression; and they every way answer to it’.11 Framed in such a way, Owen’s sermon identified the hand of God in the nation’s history. Going all the way back to the fifth century, Owen showed how the country had twice been blessed with the gospel and twice had allowed it to be lost to corruption, first at the hand of the Saxons, then at the hands of the ‘Roman harlot’, the Catholic Church.12 More recently, and much more urgently, the gospel had again been endangered, this time by the Laudians who had risen to such dominance in the Church of England.

It is some time now since Nicholas Tyacke laid out his influential thesis that the English Church carried a Calvinist consensus into the seventeenth century.13

That consensus began to break down late in the reign of King James I. At an official level at least it disintegrated during the reign of Charles, whose preferment of Archbishop William Laud and his apparent Arminianism served to marginalize the Calvinists. Admittedly, Tyacke’s thesis has not been accepted without question,14 but Kevin Sharpe’s well-made point remains obvious: ‘Whatever the historical reality, or the uncritical dependence of Tyacke, Russell and others on Laud’s detractors, it remains the case that significant contemporaries did perceive Laud to be the spawn of a papist and an Arminian threat and did fear dangerous innovations in the Caroline church.’15

Owen’s sermon tied into these fears and suspicions. The Arminians had wanted nothing less than to deliver England up to the Pope:

In worship, their paintings, crossings, crucifixes, bowings, cringings, altars, tapers, wafers, organs, anthems, litany, rails, images, copes, vestments – what were they but Roman varnish, an Italian dress for our devotion, to draw on conformity with that enemy of the Lord Jesus? In doctrine, the divinity of Episcopacy, auricular confession, free-will, predestination on faith, yea, works foreseen, ‘limbus patrum,’ justification by works, falling from grace, authority of a church, which none knew what it was, canonical obedience, holiness of churches, and the like innumerable, – what were they but helps to Sancta Clara, to make all our articles of religion to speak good Roman Catholic?16

The Arminians had brought England to the brink of corrupting the gospel for a third time in its history, a betrayal that would surely bring in its train God’s wrath and judgement. But the providence of God had gloriously intervened. ‘O Lord, how was England of late, by thy mercy, delivered from this snare! … O how hath thy grace fought against our backsliding!’17 The first civil war had been England’s redemption. Looking back, it was clear to Owen that England had come to the brink of repudiating the gospel for the last time. Had that occurred, the nation’s lamp-stand might have been removed.18 But disaster had been averted by the free grace of God whose greatest concern was the gospel itself. Owen brought his hearers back to the sovereign purposes of God, ‘by discovering that all revolutions here below – especially every thing that concerns the dispensation of the Gospel and kingdom of the Lord Jesus – are carried along according to the eternally fixed purpose of God’.19 Seen in this light, the war had been a vindication of God’s unchanging purposes. The gospel had been rescued, preserved, secured. The hazards and hardships that England had so recently navigated were necessary sacrifices in a great cause that had the backing of God himself.

But such a view dismissed too quickly the pain involved in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• A Note on Quotations and References
• Introduction
• 1 Different Wars/Different Worlds
• 2 Opposite Ends
• 3 An Accidental Animosity
• 4 Personality
• 5 Unity, Or Not
• 6 1654
• 7 Silence and Speech
• 8 1659
• 9 Fatal Memory
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index