Tim Cooper. Crossway, 2024. 167pp. This review was originally written for Laidlaw College’s Stimulus magazine which can be viewed HERE. I received a free copy of this book from the author as a gift – not for review purposes. Tim is a professor in church history at Otago University, New Zealand.
When Christians Disagree explores the fraught relationship between two of England’s most famous Puritan leaders. These are John Owen (1616–1683) and Richard Baxter (1615–1691), both of whom have enjoyed renewed popularity in recent years. This book is a shorter, simpler, and reflective version of an earlier work by Cooper.[1] The approach it takes as a work of history is novel, for several reasons.
For a start, the examination of the lives and contexts of thought-leaders from the past is a relatively new approach to intellectual history, and Cooper pushes this to a new depth by discerning intriguing and suggestive factors that shaped the internal lives of each of these men.[2]
Additionally, the book traces not simply their lives and writings in their contexts, but brings them together to better explain the fractious relationship between them.
Last of all, the author uses this historical relationship to draw lessons and provide questions for readers in the present. When Christians Disagree makes a compelling case from the past to speak wisdom to the present.
The opening chapter presents the biographies of the two protagonists. Both men lived through the same events of the seventeenth century, and during their same life stages, yet had vastly different experiences of them. Their formative years as young men were during the English Civil Wars, followed by their best years during the Interregnum, and their difficulties and disappointments of ministry after the Restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660, when they nevertheless rose in influence to become the de facto leaders of Congregational and Presbyterian Puritanism in England. Through these tumultuous decades, Owen made a name for himself as a prolific theological author, as a dean and then Vice-Chancellor at Oxford University, and as an architect of religious policy for the interregnum government. Baxter’s reputation flowered out of his highly successful career as a parish pastor in Kidderminster, and his even more voluminous output as an author.
Chapters two through four explore the differences between these men in their experience, their personalities, and their theology. These differences predisposed Owen and Baxter to clash with each other.
For experience, Cooper highlights each man’s encounter with the civil war. Baxter witnessed firsthand a range of the ill-effects of war, while Owen was almost completely sheltered from all of it. This coloured their concerns as theologians and pastors, in that Owen was able to appreciate the strategic advantages of the war for reformation Christianity while Baxter’s horizons were filled with how detrimental it was at a grassroots level.
For their personalities, Cooper perceptively identifies how easily Baxter irritated Owen. Their volatile dynamic was a case in which Owen was easily exasperated while Baxter was inordinately exasperating.
For their theologies, Cooper again demonstrates how their differing life experiences make different theological systems more attractive. He emphasizes how similar these men were as broadly “Reformed” in their outlook, but points out how they metaphorically stood “back to back, looking in opposite directions and subject to opposite fears” (p. 69).
Chapters five, six, and seven detail in stages the trainwreck that was Owen and Baxter’s relationship.
Chapter five, “Contact”, reveals their very first encounter with each other: an off-hand and cack-handed critique of a point of Owen’s theology, buried in a lengthy appendix to one of Baxter’s books. This triggered a years-long row in print in which neither man was willing to let the other have the last word and in which Owen’s contempt for Baxter was put on public display. The dispute deeply undermined their later efforts at effecting unity between different Congregationalists and Presbyterians. This would come in 1654—six years after their first (literary) encounter—when Baxter was a late addition to a parliamentary subcommittee formed for this very purpose.[3]
This is the subject of chapter six, “Collision”. At this point, Baxter’s and Owen’s contrasting visions for the achievement of national church unity were further causes of friction, and the goals of the subcommittee were very nearly frustrated by the inability of the two to work together.
The final chapter, “Memory”, recounts how Owen’s potential and perceived involvement in the overthrow of the Protectorate regime (and the consequences of that) poisoned Baxter’s mind against Owen, thus making the animosity mutual. Later efforts at reconciliation would be fruitless, leaving the respective leaders of the two main branches of non-conformist Christianity firmly at odds.
Each chapter ends with a reflection and a series of questions to prompt consideration and discussion for contemporary Christians. This is a major feature of the book and highlights its practical purpose and its targeted popular-level audience. In a conclusion, Cooper ponders five possibilities that might have made a positive difference in Owen’s and Baxter’s relationship. Three appendices provide a timeline of events for Owen, Baxter, and England, a glossary of key terms, and a guide to further reading on the book’s subject.
When Christians Disagree is a story of repeated frustrations and offenses. Cooper shows two remarkable Christian leaders at their worst, and to the detriment of the church in their times. Perceptivity and care mark Cooper’s treatment of his subjects. His approach does not infer that experiences dictate outcomes, but he discerns the way each man was shaped by them, and how they disagreed in so toxic a fashion. One omission this reviewer notices is Owen’s negative experiences at Oxford under Archbishop’s Laud’s policies, and how these might have hardened him against Arminian and Roman Catholic doctrine. Perhaps in this short book this influence was deliberately left out, as it is less relevant for the specific focus of Owen’s relationship with Baxter.[4] This book is an excellent entry to discovering two influential Puritan leaders, and an insightful reflection on the causes and prevention of religious conflict.
[1] John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011).
[2] As Crawford Gribben has noted about Cooper’s earlier book, “Cooper’s outstanding discussion was sensitive to psychological as well as cultural and theological factors, and opened up an important new approach to Owen’s life”. See his John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 13.
[3] Incidentally, Baxter replaced James Ussher, the Archbishop of the Church of Ireland, on the subcommittee.
[4] Cooper does discuss this in his longer book, and suggests the actual impact—while undoubted—is difficult to define. See his Formation of Nonconformity, 84–85.
When Christians Disagree is available from Paper Plus for NZ$42, or from FishPond for $33.
