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Grace Overwhelming Religions and Discourse 22 Grace Overwhelming John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Extremes of the Baptist Mind von Anne Dunan-Page 1. Auflage Grace Overwhelming – Dunan-Page schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG Peter Lang Bern 2006 Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: www.beck.de ISBN 978 3 03910 055 2 Inhaltsverzeichnis: Grace Overwhelming – Dunan-Page Introduction Sometime in the mid-1660s, when pondering the twenty most significant aspects of his ministry in the ‘language of my heart’, the Yorkshire Presbyterian Oliver Heywood expressed the difficulties of his calling with a horticultural metaphor: I find christians of different tempers, some apt to run into one extreme others into another. I find it very hard to suit every condition, so as to give every one their grain of allowance and yet indulge them in no sin, to curb their frowardnes so as not to nip the buddings of grace, and prevent the sproutings of what is good in their harts and lives.1 Heywood had daily experience of a spiritual garden which was tempted to extremes, whether that meant falling into despair of 1 The Reverend Oliver Heywood: His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. Horsfall Turner, 4 vols (Bridgehouse: A. B. Bayes; Bingley: T. Harrison, 1881–85), 1: 206. On Heywood, see Joseph Hunter, The Rise of the Old Dissent, exemplified in the Life of Oliver Heywood, one of the Founders of the Presbyterian Congregations in the County of York, 1630–1702 (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1842); ‘Oliver Heywood’, Calamy Revised: Being a Revision of Edmund Calamy’s Account of the Ministers and Others Ejected and Silenced, 1660–1662, ed. Arnold G. Matthews (1934; Oxford: Clarendon P, 1988), hereafter cited as Matthews; W. J. Sheils, ‘Oliver Heywood’, Oxford DNB; David Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling: An Exploration in Literature, Psychology, and Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1980), 60–66, 92–99; Patrick Collinson, ‘The English Conventicle’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), Voluntary Religion, Papers read at the 1985 summer meeting and the 1986 winter meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 223–59; W. J. Sheils, ‘Oliver Heywood and his Congregation’, ibid., 261–77; and John Smail, ‘Local Politics in Restoration England: Religion, Culture and Politics in Oliver Heywood’s Halifax’, in Muriel C. McClendon, Joseph P. Ward and Michael MacDonald (eds), Protestant Identities: Religion, Society, and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1999), 234–48. Smail attributes Heywood’s ministerial success to an effective ‘practical divinity’ that was attractive to many outside nonconformist circles. salvation or a rash confidence of being among God’s chosen.2 The pastor, as a conscientious gardener, had to find an equilibrium between trenchant words that would induce a conviction of sin and nourishing words for those whose good beginnings were as fragile as early buds. This conception of the pastor was complicated by the multifariousness of the believers’ spiritual conditions, a variety that makes Heywood’s image of a garden prone to profligate growth and confusion especially apt. There was little chance of striking a balance between the communal need of the congregation and the individual needs of the worshippers. Such a balance had nevertheless been defined some years earlier as the chief duty of the good pastor by Richard Baxter, who considered the pastor’s knowledge of each individual believer, each case history, to be an absolute necessity.3 2 For puritan and dissenting pastoral, with special emphasis on spiritual counselling, see William Haller, ‘Physicians of the Soul’, in The Rise of Puritanism: Or, The Way to the New Jerusalem as Set Forth in Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton, 1570–1643 (New York: Columbia UP, 1938), 3–48. For an overview of pastoral literature, see John T. McNeill, A History of the Cure of Souls (New York: Harper, 1951), esp. 247–86, although he has very little to say on Restoration dissenters; Patrick Collinson, ‘Shepherds, Sheepdogs, and Hirelings: The Pastoral Ministry in Post-Reformation England’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), The Ministry: Clerical and Lay, papers read at the 1988 summer meeting and the 1989 winter meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 185–220; Isabel Rivers, ‘Dissenting and Methodist Books of Practical Divinity’, in eadem (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester UP; New York: St Martin’s P, 1982), 127–64; and Neal Enssle, ‘Patterns of Godly Life: The Ideal Parish Minister in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Thought’, Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997): 3–28. 3 Richard Baxter, Gildas Salvianus; The Reformed Pastor (London, 1656), 60– 61. Specifically on Baxter’s conception of the ministry and Church discipline, see T. H. Martin, ‘Richard Baxter and “The Reformed Pastor”’, Baptist Quarterly 9 (1939): 350–61; John T. Wilkinson, ‘Introductory Essay’, Gildas Salvianus: Or, The Reformed Pastor (1939), rev. edn (London: The Epworth P, 1950), 15–47; McNeill, 266–67; Geoffrey Nuttall, ‘The Reformed Pastor’, in Richard Baxter (London: Nelson, 1965), 40–63; Neil H. Keeble, ‘The Pastor and the Practical Divine’, in Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford: 18 Heywood had read Baxter’s Gildas Salvianus during a bout of sickness, and had found himself ‘convinced and awakened’ by it.4 One might safely assume that he strove to abide by the standards that Baxter had set for all the ‘painful’ ministers of puritan tendency: to convert while ‘building up’ those already converted through ‘confirmation and progress’, ‘preservation’ and ‘restauration’; to comfort those labouring under special temptations while admonishing the schismatics and keeping the seducers and the profane at bay.5 But even Baxter thought it very difficult to reconcile the need to awaken and the need to comfort. In the 28th direction of The Right Method for a Setled Peace of Conscience, he advises distressed Christians to talk to their minister in private, without ‘hurting’ the others by demanding comforting sermons, and to ‘consider what a strait Ministers are in that have so many of so different conditions, inclinations and conversations to preach to.’6 Pastoral theory and pastoral practice necessarily conflicted in the reclamation of Christians from the extremes of sin or the extremes of despair. The ministers, however, did not entirely accept the blame for any pastoral failure. The believer’s individual responsibility was also involved: The Ministers of the Gospel must be good Stewards, giving to every one their Portion [...]. And as Ministers must give, so People must take every one their own Portions; as Ministers so People must apply the Word of God aright. Let every Man take his own Portion, and not be catching at that which is another’s. There is too great an aptness in the distressed, to lay hold on those words, that Clarendon P, 1982), 69–93; Timothy R. Cooke, ‘Uncommon Earnestness and Earthly Toils: Moderate Puritan Richard Baxter’s Devotional Writings’, Anglican and Episcopal History 63 (1994): 51–72; and J. William Black, ‘From Martin Bucer to Richard Baxter: “Discipline” and Reformation in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England’, Church History 70 (2001): 644–73. Philip Doddridge pronounced Gildas Salvianus to be ‘a most extraordinary performance, [that] should be read by every young minister, and the practical part of it reviewed every three or four years; for nothing would have a greater tendency to awaken the spirit of a minister to that zeal in his work’, quoted by Martin, 356. 4 Heywood, 1: 177. 5 Baxter, Gildas Salvianus, 68–77. 6 The Right Method for a Setled Peace of Conscience and Spiritual Comfort In 32 Directions (1653), 3rd edn (London, 1657), 309. 19 are spoken to the secure; if there be ever an afrighting word in a whole Sermon, that’s my Portion, saith the Distressed, this Word belongs to me; and so the secure are too ready to lay hold on those healing and comforting words, which belong to the broken and distressed [...].7 Baxter had much to say on the subject of spiritual extremes and it earned him the reputation of being an effective ‘practical’ pastor. He professed a desire to avoid ‘extreams in [his] doctrinal Directions’ for believers to escape ‘the desperate extreams of Ungrounded Comforts, and Causless Terrou[r]s’ in their own spirit.8 This mission greatly benefited from a personal interest in medicine that he had practised, albeit without a licence, in Kidderminster.9 His cure of melancholy, or ‘over-much’ sorrow, is by ‘Faith and Physick’, as the title of one of his works on the subject unambiguously proclaims.10 But this was only one aspect of the believer’s life that the pastors had to confront. Even more dangerous was the tendency of the faithful to run to doctrinal extremes, in the form of heresies or ‘novelties’: Some will first believe, that God is nothing else but Mercy, and after take notice of nothing but his Justice. First, They believe that almost all are saved, and afterwards that almost none [...]. First, they think that all that Papists hold and do must be avoided: and after that there needed no reformation at all: now they 7 R[ichard] A[lleine], Godly-Fear: Or, The Nature and Necessity of Fear, and Its Usefulness (London, 1674), 220. 8 Baxter, Right Method, 2. 9 For Baxter as physician, see, for instance, Andrew Wear, ‘Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth Century England’ (1985), repr. in Health and Healing in Early Modern England: Studies in Social and Intellectual History, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 55–99 (original pagination).
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