Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-thh2z Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-18T11:19:26.202Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

2 - ‘Prudent Charity’: Richard Baxter's The Reasons of the Christian Religion (1667)

Katherine Calloway
Affiliation:
Westmont College, Santa Barbara, CA
Get access

Summary

Life is short: and we are dull: and eternal things are necessary: and the souls that depend on our teaching are precious.

The Reformed Pastor (1656)

In the previous chapter we considered the surprising development by which a Cambridge Platonist – committed in many ways to the revivification of old ideas – gave England its first work of physico-theology, decades before the genre would begin to flourish in the 1690s. This chapter continues to explore the pre-history of that explosion, in the work of an author of a very different temper. Where More made clear the nature of his relationship to contemporary ‘sensualists’ in An Antidote, Richard Baxter's relationship to the developments associated with modern science is notoriously difficult to pin down. Ejected from the established church and largely self-educated, in many ways Baxter stands apart, not only from More, but from all the other authors considered in this study. The natural theology that infuses his works of practical divinity as well as his more scholastic volumes thus represents an important contribution to natural theology in the seventeenth century: the puritan natural theology. Crucially, unlike many of his Cambridge Platonist contemporaries, Baxter presumed an audience whose consciences had already been awakened by grace; unlike many of his fellow puritans, however, he argued stringently that reason could and should be deployed in the pursuit of theological truth, and even subjected scripture to rational scrutiny.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
First published in: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×