Baxter, Scougal and motivation

and thus gives no room for ‘common grace’, ie the awareness that others beyond the Church may represent the resources that God has provided. As Niebuhr puts it: ‘the world of culture – man’s achievement – exists within the world of grace – God’s kingdom.’114 This issue of ‘wisdom theology’ is explored in the next chapter (Model of Health).

It has been noted that during the Reformation Augustine’s ideas were revitalised by, amongst others, Calvin and Luther. Richard Baxter is one example of a reformed Puritan pastor who utilised an approach to ‘counselling’ rooted in the premise that most problems stemmed from concupiscence (disoriented desire). Regarding Baxter’s method Roth states:

His goal was to move the counselee away from dysfunctional living: that is, seeking to satisfy sinful drives (Rom. 6:12; James 1:14–15), towards seeking happiness in the One who truly can satisfy the heart – God Himself (Rom. 6:11; Psa. 37:4; Matt. 5:6).115

According to Baxter, this inward ‘revolution’ is the starting point of all godly change, and so is of primary focus in his method. Packer, who wrote his doctorate on Baxter’s doctrine of humanity, speaks of Baxter’s influence on other Christian leaders including John Wesley in the eighteenth century, Charles Spurgeon and Francis Asbury (‘the Methodist apostle of America’) in the nineteenth century. Roth argued that Puritans like Baxter believed original sin distorted motivation and hence the direction chosen in order to obtain wish fulfilment and thus satisfaction of desire. This pervasive view of corruption led Puritans (as did Augustine) to rely heavily on revealed truth (viewed as incorrupt due to a ‘high’ doctrine of inspiration) in Scripture as a means of transformation to health. This is clearly paralleled by Hughes’ view of Scripture (see Chapter 1). In the context of ministry, Baxter’s ideas regarding truth are clear; speaking of Scripture he states: ‘The wisdom of the world must not be magnified against the wisdom of God, philosophy must be taught to swoop and serve, while faith doth bear the chief sway.’116

A contemporary of Baxter, Henry Scougal, also emphasised the necessity of inner renewal of desire by revelation of God’s Spirit as the only means to true happiness and ‘health’. The theme already articulated by Hughes, Crabb, Augustine and Baxter, runs through the ‘core’ of Scougal’s anthropology:

Again, as divine love doth advance and elevate the soul; so it is that alone can make it happy; the highest and most ravishing pleasures; the most solid and substantial delights that human nature is capable of, are those which arise from the endearments of a well-placed and successful affection.117

The converse is equally portrayed – love as a central human desire can become destructive when it is looking elsewhere for satisfaction: ‘To all these evils are they exposed whose chief and supreme affection is placed on creatures like themselves, but the love of God delivers us from them all.’118 The ‘inward’ emphasis within the Waverley Model abides amidst longstanding and diverse Christian traditions. Scougal’s notion of true religion comprising an inward affective love of God has been regarded as having a vast legacy. Packer, declares it to have been ‘favourite reading in Oxford’s Holy Club’ where Whitfield and the Wesleys first met. Scougal was part of what some scholars have referred to as the ‘devotional revival’ which, according to Packer also included Puritans like Perkins, Baxter and Owen; Anglicans like Jeremy Taylor; the Lutheran Johannes Arndt; and Roman Catholics like Ignatius Loyola, Francis de Sales, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross. Whilst it has been established that an emphasis on inwardness within the Church goes back as far as Augustine (and Pauline theology – although this is debated) it is interesting to note that the people listed lived during the Enlightenment, and so it could be argued that their subjective emphases reflect the tendency toward inwardness of this movement. Crabb and Hughes inherit this with the resultant marginalisation of identifying the self as socially embedded and shaped. Dyke asserts that the social selfpredominated thinking from Socrates until the Enlightenment.