What led Richard Baxter (1615–1691) to formulate his unique soteriology, which the famous Kidderminster pastor promoted as a moderate “middle way” between Calvinism and Arminianism? While Timothy Cooper has rightly pointed toward Baxter’s disillusionment arising from the English Civil War as an inciting incident for this formulation, the uniqueness of Baxter’s education is just as significant. I will argue that his early development as a largely self-taught pastor and theologian, informed especially by his personal study of the medieval scholastics, shaped his soteriology in ways that would have been unthinkable to many of his university-educated brethren. “Self-taught” does not mean “uneducated,” and Baxter should be recognized as an intellectual giant among the English Puritans. However, his pastoral concerns and free thinking overrode the theological obligations of his more credentialed colleagues.
I will explore how, from his first stirrings of faith to the degeneracy of his schoolmasters to the decision not to pursue a university degree to his “hands-off” tutelage at Ludlow Castle, Baxter was educated almost completely by personal reading and study. He was drawn to the writings of the scholastics as a cure for theological confusion, and though he came to abandon much of their theology, their methods continued to prove influential on him in his lifelong struggle against doctrinal confusion. His intellectual debt to the scholastics is reflected in the speculative nature of his soteriology, which combines justification by faith with the need for human obedience in an imaginative arrangement both logically alien and theologically abhorrent to many of his contemporaries.
This paper contributes to the fields of Church History and Historical Theology, with particular interest to the study of Puritan history and the history of soteriology. As Cooper has noted, Baxter is a key figure in the movement away from Calvinism by the English Puritans. Additionally, Robert Striven has explored Baxter’s soteriology, specifically its influence on Philip Doddridge. Cooper’s work is particularly influential for my thought here. As noted, I agree with him on the influence of Baxter’s experiences in the Civil War as formative. I am following him in my work to drill deeper into the earlier influences on Baxter’s theological formation, a relatively less-explored topic than the theological controversies to which he contributed. I believe this study significantly informs us not only on how Baxter developed his soteriology but on how unguided, unaccountable speculation, informed by devotion and intense personal study, can lead to theological innovation.