WAWICRUZ
Puritan Board Freshman
What are the ways in which the Puritan, Richard Baxter, veered off from confessional Protestantism?
I found the ff., but perhaps you can add more:
The Enigma of Richard Baxter*|*Meet The Puritans
I found the ff., but perhaps you can add more:
The Enigma of Richard Baxter*|*Meet The Puritans
"Although an English Puritan (that is, a minister in the Church of England who would not conform to episcopacy), Richard Baxter (1615-91) alarmed many fellow Puritans by revising and rejecting key features of Reformed theology. Baxter first labeled as 'mere Christianity' turned out to be another set of doctrines that were diametrically opposed to the confessions he had subscribed. Many today think that Baxter is the original source of our maxim, because he appealed to it to justify his program. Where churches had agreed in representative assemblies on what Scripture teaches, Baxter’s spirit is in many ways that of modern evangelicals. 'Essentials' are whatever I think they are; church dogmas are the letter without the Spirit. The most important doctrines are the ones that all professing Christians can agree to, which of course leaves out doctrines like original sin and the sovereignty of God’s grace in election, justification, the new birth, and preservation of the saints. Professing Christians disagree over the sacrifice of the mass, purgatory, merits, and ultimate authority in the church, so these matters must also be excluded from any list of essentials—or 'mere Christianity.'
...
First, who decides what essentials and non-essentials are? Rejecting the Anglican and Puritan consensus on justification, Baxter forged under this banner what fellow-Puritans branded as 'neo-nomianism': that is, turning the gospel into a new law. Yet in doing so, Baxter thought he could unite not only Protestants (Arminians, Lutherans, and Calvinists) with each other, but also with Rome. So he definitely had a horse in this race.
It’s clear enough from Baxter at least that 'essentials' didn’t include what the Reformation confessions regarded as essential. Before long, the great Puritan and Oxford vice-chancellor John Owen was warning of his erstwhile friend’s creeping Socinianism (basically, Unitarianism). Whether or not this is a fair judgment of Baxter, many leading Arminians in Holland and England regarded the Trinity as a 'non-essential' and then, within one generation, many of Baxter’s sympathizers were in fact Unitarian." — Michael S. Horton, Westminster Seminary California
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