In Search of a Lasting Zion: Increase Mather, Richard Baxter, and Transatlantic Millenarianism

The nature of Christ’s millennial kingdom was one that greatly preoccupied English theologians across the long seventeenth century. The national trauma of the English civil war throughout the 1640s and the execution of Charles I in 1649 produced many millennial postulations, yet upon Charles II’s rise to the throne in 1660 and the 1688 “Glorious” Revolution, these discourses took upon themselves a new, precarious tenor amidst the ever-contingent political and ecclesiastical situation of English puritanism. Increase Mather, the foremost New England puritan divine in the late seventeenth century, was a committed millenarian, believing in a coming literal 1,000 year reign of Christ with His saints on the earth. Conversely, Richard Baxter, a senior puritan statesman who lived through most of the tumult of the 1600s in England by the time of his death in 1691, sought to articulate a more traditional, non-“chiliastic” understanding of the millennial kingdom that possessed politically-suggestive intricacies in view of the accession of William and Mary in 1689. From the plight of the persecuted French Huguenots to the perceived global threat of Catholicism, both Mather and Baxter were deeply attuned to the international dimensions of their exegesis and the significance of the millennium as a matrix for expressing religious dissent. By studying Mather and Baxter’s exchange over millennial ideology within a comparative Atlantic framework for England and New England during in the late seventeenth century, we can better come to terms with the long-term consequences of the English Reformation and its implications for the waning of English puritanism in a constantly changing world of reformational fortune and failure on the eve before evangelicalism’s formal rise in England and America.