Richard Baxter

Who Was Richard Baxter?

Richard Baxter was the most influential Puritan pastor and writer of seventeenth-century England — a man of extraordinary industry, pastoral seriousness, and theological breadth whose works shaped Protestant piety in England and New England for generations. Born in Rowton, Shropshire, largely self-educated in theology, he served as curate and then as unofficial minister at Kidderminster from 1641, where he transformed a notoriously ungodly town into a model of Reformed parish life over the following two decades.

His pastoral manual The Reformed Pastor (1656) remains one of the most searching and challenging accounts of what it means to care for souls ever written. His devotional classic The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650), written when he believed himself to be dying, became one of the most widely read books in English religious history. His Christian Directory (1673) is the most comprehensive manual of practical Christian ethics produced in the English language.

Baxter lived through the English Civil War, the Interregnum, the Restoration, and the persecution of Nonconformists that followed. He was ejected from his living in 1662 for refusing to conform to the restored Church of England, imprisoned in 1685 on a charge of libeling the church in his commentary on the New Testament, and harassed intermittently for most of the last three decades of his life. Through all of this he wrote — nearly 200 published works in his lifetime.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Saints' Everlasting Rest — 1650
• The Reformed Pastor — 1656
• A Call to the Unconverted — 1658
• Christian Directory — 1673
• Reliquiae Baxterianae — 1696 — autobiography, posthumous