The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Puritans & Pietists
Richard Baxter
1615–1691EnglishPuritan
The town pastor who sat down with every family in his parish, one household at a time.
Summary
- Lived 1615–1691, English.
- Stood in The Puritans & Pietists (1600–1730).
- Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists.
- Tradition: Puritan / Nonconformist.
The life
Richard Baxter came to Kidderminster in 1641 as a young minister in a rough weaving town, and stayed long enough to change it. His method was not clever: he and his assistant worked through the parish register household by household, spending an hour with each family, roughly fourteen families a week, until they had covered some eight hundred homes a year. He wrote The Reformed Pastor to explain it to other ministers, and pastors have been reading it ever since.
He was often ill and often expected to die, which is how The Saints' Everlasting Rest got written. When the Act of Uniformity came in 1662 he refused to conform and lost his living along with roughly two thousand other ministers. He kept writing anyway, around 140 books, and in 1685 an aging Baxter was hauled before Judge Jeffreys and jailed for eighteen months on a charge of libeling the church.
What was happening while he lived9 moments · 1600–1730
- 1611The King James Bible is finishedAbout four dozen scholars, working in six companies at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge, complete a translation built largely on Tyndale's English. Its rhythms will shape how English speakers hear Scripture for the next three hundred years.
- 1620The Mayflower sailsRoughly a hundred passengers, about half of them from a separatist congregation that had already fled to Holland, cross to a cold New England coast in November. Close to half die before spring.
- 1628John Bunyan is born at ElstowA tinker's son in a Bedfordshire village, baptized that November. He will have almost no formal schooling and will write the most-read book in English after the Bible.
- 1636Harvard is founded to train ministersThe Massachusetts Bay colony votes money for a college because, as an early account put it, they dreaded leaving an unlearned ministry to the churches once the first pastors were in the dust. It is named in 1639 for John Harvard, who willed it his library.
- 1643–1646The Westminster Assembly meetsCalled by Parliament, some 120 ministers and 30 laymen sit in Westminster Abbey through the English Civil War. They produce the Westminster Confession (1646) and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms (1647).
- 1675Spener's *Pia Desideria*Philipp Jakob Spener, a pastor in Frankfurt, publishes six plain proposals: more Bible in laypeople's hands, believers meeting in small groups, faith that shows up in life, gentler argument, ministers trained for godliness, preaching aimed at the heart. The book names a movement: Pietism.
- 1678*The Pilgrim's Progress* is publishedBunyan had spent twelve years (1660–1672) in Bedford jail rather than promise to stop preaching, making shoelace tags to feed his family, including a blind daughter. Out of those years came the dream of a man with a burden on his back, running toward a distant light.
- 1679–1688Scotland's Killing TimeCovenanters who kept preaching in open fields after outdoor worship was outlawed are hunted across the moors of the southwest. Richard Cameron falls at Airds Moss in 1680; James Renwick, the last of them executed, dies in 1688.
- Oct 1685The Edict of Nantes is revokedLouis XIV cancels the protection French Protestants had held since 1598. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 150,000 to 200,000 Huguenots flee France for England, Holland, Prussia, Switzerland, the American colonies, and the Cape.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Richard Baxter at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Visited every family in his town one hour at a time, then wrote the book that still teaches pastors how.
Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists: The examined heart: the century that asked whether the opened Bible had opened you.
Standing beside himThe Puritans & Pietists · 17 on this stretch of wall
Gave refugees his estate and got back a hundred-year prayer meeting and the first Protestant missionary wave.
Wrote Pilgrim's Progress in the Bedford jail rather than promise the court he would stop preaching.
The Puritans' deepest thinker, who warned that you must be killing sin or it will be killing you.
Preached Christ's tenderness toward weak believers, in a small book that changed Richard Baxter's life.
Banned from preaching, he wrote his congregation letters so full of Christ that people still read them.
Asked what Christ feels toward struggling believers right now, and wrote a whole book answering from Scripture.