"An unlearned Antinomian-Anabaptist": Richard Baxter on John Bunyan

Abstract

As far as is known, Baxter and Bunyan, the two outstanding figures of late seventeenth-century nonconformity, never met, nor, apart from a categorization of Bunyan as an “unlearned Antinomian-Anabaptist”, did either refer to the other in print. That one comment, however, is illuminating: it spans the great ecclesiological and theological fault line of the period, within the established church as well as within nonconformity. Bunyan’s commitment to the autonomy of independent gathered churches was an expression of a convinced Calvinism, intolerant of other theologies. By contrast, Baxter’s commitment to a more inclusive national church was combined with, and articulated through, rationalist and moralistic theological emphases and a liberal disinclination to limit orthodoxy any more than necessary. This contrast was enacted in their responses to The Design of Christianity (1671) by the Latitudinarian Edward Fowler. On the one hand it prompted Bunyan’s heated Defence of the Doctrine of Justification, by Faith (1672) against Fowler’s “Feigned design of Christianity”; on the other, Baxter’s defence of Fowler and his thesis in How Far Holinesse is the Design of Christianity (1671) against those who (like Bunyan) thought the book had “a scandalous design” to substitute “the meer morality of a Heathen” for the Christian doctrine of justification. This essay explores this profound difference of opinion between Puritanism’s two leading representatives on the nature of Christian faith and duty and their contrasting literary personae, and it speculates that its origins may lie in their Civil War experiences.