Why John Owen and Richard Baxter Didn’t Like Every Different

How Folks See Us

After I first entered full-time pastoral ministry a few years in the past, there was somebody within the congregation who, I’m sorry to say, I did my greatest to keep away from. He was an outdated man with a grim visage, agency views, and old style methods. However in a small church there could possibly be no avoiding him for lengthy, and the extra I interacted with him the extra I got here to love and respect him. Removed from ducking for canopy after I seen him heading in the direction of me, I started to deliberately search him out.

Rather more just lately I had the other expertise. Somebody who I’ve sometimes engaged with over a few years who I assumed was totally skilled and reliable stated one thing about me in a public setting that was, for my part, not simply unprofessional but in addition deeply private. Given our earlier optimistic interactions, I used to be shocked, to say the least, by what I used to be listening to. I had no concept that was in her.

The actual fact is that we don’t see individuals as they really are. This must be no shock. I’m fifty-four years outdated and I’m unsure I do know myself, not to mention anybody else. Solely God sees us as we actually are. After we see different individuals, we accomplish that by a filter that operates on the idea of the one proof we’ve: what we see them do and listen to them say. It’s straightforward to get that improper.

When my sons had been youthful, they delighted to take a photograph of me—and never for any flattering objective. They might apply all kinds of distorting filters that turned my face into one thing grotesque and disturbing. I might nonetheless see myself within the picture, nevertheless it was mangled virtually past recognition. I feel we do the same factor once we view different individuals. If we’re not cautious, we permit their actions to distort our view of them even to the purpose the place they’ll turn out to be virtually unrecognizable.

Seventeenth Century Disagreement

That is no new factor. Some years in the past I got down to perceive why two towering seventeenth-century English Puritans got here to dislike one another so deeply. John Owen (1616-1683) and Richard Baxter (1615-1691) had a lot in widespread that they need to have gotten alongside famously. However they didn’t. That was partly on account of their contrasting personalities and life experiences that predetermined the trajectory of their relationship earlier than they even met. But it surely additionally got here right down to the character of their interactions as soon as they did come into contact. Wanting again, we are able to see how their respective filters got here into play.

It hardly helped that Baxter had earlier criticized Owen’s theology in print, even when he did so in what was, for him, a comparatively measured manner. Owen was not one to simply accept criticism simply, particularly public criticism. So when the 2 males met in 1654 as a part of a small group of main English ministers to advise Parliament on a brand new non secular settlement, Baxter bolstered by his habits what Owen had already assumed from their printed dispute: that Baxter was an unbearable irritant. Baxter, who noticed that Owen was “the nice doer” throughout the group, felt he noticed along with his personal eyes Owen’s satisfaction and touchiness. Thus, their private interplay merely bolstered their pre-existing beliefs, and every one’s filter was bolstered and sharpened. As a consequence, their subsequent written exchanges turned noticeably extra bitter and private.

Two years earlier a fellow Puritan had recognized the final dynamic we’re seeing. In his ebook The Moderator, Joseph Caryl defined that the one that “doesn’t speak in confidence to his neighbors hinders them from confiding in him, and he that fears others creates in them a concern towards himself.” If one thinks the opposite doesn’t belief him, he “will readily suspect him”. Thus, “if I give technique to these ideas, I’m at warfare with him in my coronary heart and the one factor that may foster confidence in him, the love of Christian love and beneficiant sincerity, is misplaced between us.” That is precisely how relationships break down. In our early interactions and as battle begins, these valuable qualities of affection and generosity are rapidly misplaced, and from there a relationship is nearly not possible to get better.

Solely God sees us as we actually are.

So it was with Baxter and Owen. The worst got here in 1659 when Owen dedicated what was, in Baxter’s eyes, his unpardonable sin. At the moment Owen was chaplain to England’s foremost military leaders who engineered, in impact, a coup d’état. Their actions introduced down the republican regime of the Lord Protector, Richard Cromwell (the son of the better-known Oliver Cromwell). Baxter had invested in Richard Cromwell extraordinarily excessive hopes for a change of English faith, however all his expectations and optimism collapsed in mud and smash with Cromwell’s demise. A yr later the monarchy was restored, England’s Puritan reformation was reversed, and Baxter, together with round two-thousand different Puritan ministers, had been on their technique to being ejected from their positions within the Church of England.

Who was responsible? John Owen. No less than, that was Baxter’s view. However whereas Owen was on the fringes of those occasions and, maybe, could have helped nudge them alongside, he was removed from essentially the most highly effective participant. He was simply as dismayed at these eventual outcomes as Baxter was. As for Baxter, he was working off second-hand data that was tenuous at greatest. However he believed it. He believed it as a result of it meshed all too simply along with his filter, by which it was solely too believable that Owen had wrecked the whole lot. For the remainder of his days, he continued responsible Owen for the tragic finish to godly reformation in England. And this mattered. These two males had been the foremost leaders in the course of the thirty years through which the Puritans got here underneath state persecution for his or her nonconformity to the calls for of the established church. The place they could have introduced their respective streams collectively in a typical trigger, their historical past and their mutual animosity saved them from working in unison. That damaging, distorting filter had executed its work.

I feel there’s a lesson on this for us. It’s all too straightforward to permit perceived slights and offenses to build up in order that ultimately we see the opposite particular person solely by a prism of damage and offense. I’m decided to mirror on that myself as I proceed to have interaction with the one that just lately let me down. I do know I can’t be as unguarded as I’ve been along with her—belief is a valuable commodity that’s onerous to rebuild as soon as it’s misplaced—however I can’t let that one motion decide our relationship, and I’ll discover methods to maintain open communication and collegiality. The sobering instance of Owen and Baxter teaches us that a lot. Could all of us show the fruit of the Spirit—not least love, peace, endurance, kindness, gentleness, and self-control—and once we encounter the worst in others, could it deliver out the perfect in ourselves.

Tim Cooper is the writer of When Christians Disagree: Classes from the Fractured Relationship of John Owen and Richard Baxter.

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