Depression, Anxiety, and the Christian Life: Practical Wisdom from Richard Baxter

by J. I. Packer (Introduction), Michael S. Lundy (Noted by)

Overview

This book presents 17th-century pastor Richard Baxter’s wise, gentle advice to comfort and strengthen all who struggle with depression or know someone who does.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433542060
Publisher:	Crossway
Publication date:	07/31/2018
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

J. I. Packer (1926–2020) served as the Board of Governors’ Professor of Theology at Regent College. He authored numerous books, including the classic bestseller Knowing God. Packer also served as general editor for the English Standard Version Bible and as theological editor for the ESV Study Bible.

Michael S. Lundy (MD, Tulane University) is a practicing physician, board certified in adult and child psychiatry. He has practiced psychiatry in a variety of settings: academic, private, public, and governmental, domestically and abroad. He is an active member of All Saints Anglican Church (ACNA) in the Greater Atlanta area. He enjoys reading, writing, music, growing camellias, and watching wildlife.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Richard Baxter, Spiritual Physician

J. I. Packer

Human nature does not change, but times and seasons do, and all humans are children of their own age to a greater extent than either they or those who look back to them, whether for praise or blame, tend to realize. This is notably true of the great Christian communicators of days past: Augustine, Luther, Bunyan, Whitefield, Wesley, Spurgeon, and their like. Rightly we hail as heroes our blood-brothers in the faith, and in so doing we fail to see them in terms of their own world. Richard Baxter is another such. While he transcended his time in many ways, he was very much a man of it, and we should begin our account of him by noting some key facts about the history and culture of which he was part.

Puritanism

In his adult life Baxter was called a Puritan, a term of disrespect, but one he accepted, though increasingly he referred to himself as a "meer Christian," a cautious friend to all creedal churches and their adherents, while yet showing an unqualified commitment to none of them. "Puritan," however, tagged him as involved in a sometimes impatient and imprudent left-wing Reformational movement that had been making waves in England ever since Elizabeth's reign began.

It had developed in two directions, political and pastoral. The political wing clamored, unsuccessfully, for a radicalizing of the Elizabethan settlement in a number of ways. From its ranks were to come the revolutionaries who, provoked beyond endurance by Charles I's autocracy and bad faith, finally fought and executed him and set up the well-meant but short-lived Commonwealth. Pastorally oriented Puritans, on the other hand, gave themselves to preaching, teaching, and what we would call evangelism. Their goal was the conversion of all England to vital biblical and Reformed faith. To this end they produced a steady flow of catechetical, homiletical, and devotional literature. This was Baxter's own prime field of ministry; while he dabbled in political concerns, his main contribution was as one of Puritanism's most gifted writers of didactic devotional material, as we shall see.

The Puritan pastoral purpose can be focused as the fostering of a Reformed brand of Augustinian piety, starting with a regenerative conversion (faith in Christ, Godward repentance, assurance of justifying acceptance and adoption into God's family, worshipful communion with the Father and the Son, and daily obedience to God's law by the power of the Holy Spirit). Christian life as such would then take the form of love and service (good works) in family, church, and society, monitored by conscience pursuing its two concerns. Concern number one was the discerning of duty, that is, the specifics of God's biblically revealed will for each day's action. Concern number two was self-examination or self-search, the regular reviewing of one's motives and actions to make sure that one was living as a real believer and not a self-deluded "gospel hypocrite," as pew-sitting formalists were sometimes called. The Puritans viewed life as a landscape crisscrossed by many paths, of which one must always seek to discern and follow the most God-honoring, which will be the wisest and best for others and oneself. Casuistry was the Puritan name for study of the principles for making this choice each time, and conflict with the world, the flesh, and the Devil was understood to be involved in actually doing that. Baxter was an expert teacher in relation to all these concerns, and something like half of Kidderminster's two thousand adult inhabitants became Puritans under his instruction.

The Life of Baxter

Richard Baxter lived from 1615 to 1691. Though sickly from his late teens on, he never lacked mental energy and enterprise. He experienced the Civil War as an army chaplain, the Commonwealth as an urban pastor, the Restoration as a pastor ejected, the persecution that followed as one who, after years of avoiding arrest for unauthorized preaching, finally spent two years in prison, and the 1689 Act of Toleration following the Revolution as bringing him full freedom for ministry for the last two years of his life. He was born and raised in rural Shropshire, in England's west Midlands; he was the son of a village gentleman in the seventeenth-century sense of that word, that is, a property owner, in this case on a small scale. Baxter's father, having gambled away much wealth, had become a serious Christian. One day he bought a Puritan devotional, Richard Sibbes's Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax (1630), from a peddler at the door; his son Richard read it, and it was this more than anything else that brought Richard Baxter to a serious Christian commitment at some point in his teens. He did brilliantly at school, but his father unwisely diverted him from university; however, having resolved on pastoral ministry as a career, he secured ordination in 1638. Following a year as a schoolmaster he became a "lecturer" (supplementary preacher, privately funded), first at Shropshire's Bridgnorth and then in the Midlands weaving town of Kidderminster, where, as chief pastor from 1647, he enjoyed his great success.

Tall and thin, alert and friendly, Baxter was a quick thinker, an easy and fluent speaker, a passionate preacher, a formidable debater, and a very rapid writer on a wide range of topics. He soon became known for his remarkable productivity; Charles I knew of him and referred to him as "scrib[b]ling Dick." He hit the ground running with his first devotional book, over eight hundred large quarto pages long, The Saints' Everlasting Rest (1650), which quickly became a best seller and was reprinted annually for the first ten years of its life. During his pastorate he was in constant production on many subjects, and after his ejection from the Church of England pastorate under the 1662 Act of Uniformity he saw writing as his prime God-given kingdom task; for the last three decades of his life, therefore, he labored accordingly, becoming the most voluminous English theological writer of all time. Most significant pastorally was his completion of a series already begun for discipling church people from their first adult steps toward personal faith and devotion for the entirety of their Christian lives. Archbishop Usher had at one time encouraged him to attempt this, and Baxter came to feel that it was a mandate from God. The titles in this series up to its final item were as follows:

The Right Method for a Settled Peace of Conscience and Spiritual Comfort (1653)
And the family handbook that had been planned to round off the series had swelled by 1673, its publication date, to (I give the full title):

A Christian Directory
(Let it be remembered that in the days before dust jackets whatever a writer wanted bookstore browsers to know about the contents of his book had to be put on the title page.) For range, size, and analytical coverage this work by Baxter was unique in its day, not to speak of ours; it is well over a million words long. During the years of his ejection Baxter also published two folios of systematic theology — one of them in Latin — and many smaller writings on church questions. His pen was never idle.

In 1662 he married Margaret Charlton, a dispossessed young gentlewoman, bright and highly strung, who after having her home destroyed in the Civil War came to assurance under Baxter's ministry. She was twenty-one years younger than Baxter, scarcely more than half his age, and they were both difficult people by ordinary standards, but it was a love match and their marriage was a happy one, something indeed of a model, as appears from the touching breviate (short account) of her life that Baxter wrote within weeks of Margaret's death in 1681.2 Their life together was lived in and round London, where Baxter continued to live until his own death ten years later.

It was William Haller who, in 1938, first characterized Puritan pastors as physicians of the soul. The phrase fits, particularly in Baxter's case. When he began his Kidderminster ministry, the town lacked a doctor, and he acted as one till he could recruit a qualified man to move there. He had evidently gained a good deal of medical knowledge from living with his own sickliness, and his sense of responsibility would have matched what he wrote in the Directory about "The Duty of Physicians." But he would always have insisted that his job as a pastor required him to keep telling his people that their first task, like his, was to care for their souls, center their lives on God and the realities of eternity, seek the fullness of conversion, and aim at thorough discipleship to Christ according to the Scriptures. The pastor's God-given role as a guide in this should be seen as twofold: as a teacher and mentor in revealed truth through biblical instruction and systematic catechizing, and as spiritual health expert, able to diagnose and prescribe for spiritual well-being as need arose. By spiritual disorder Puritans meant any condition that sin in any form was shaping, while they equated spiritual health with love, service, communion with Christ, and a walk with God — in one word, holiness. It can fairly be said of his ministry from start to finish that Baxter was expressing in one way or another this sense of ministerial vocation, much of which he verbalized very vividly for himself and his colleagues in his 1655 classic, The Reformed Pastor.

Baxter's Ground Plan for Discipling

A fuller view of the first half of A Christian Directory is in order here. Baxter's gift for topical analysis serves him well as he goes through all that he sees to be involved in the proper conduct of one's personal spiritual life. This overview has masterpiece quality and authority; it is fundamental and constitutes the frame within which spiritual depression is to be discerned and treated.

Following the evangelistic and catechetical material with which the Directory opens (for Baxter is clearly thinking of the whole work on the model of a catechism course), Baxter sets out seventeen "Grand Directions" for a "Life of Faith and Holiness: Containing the Essentials of Godliness and Christianity." Abbreviated, the list looks like this:

1. Understand the nature, ground, reason, and order of faith and godliness.

2. How to live by faith in Christ.

3. How to believe in the Holy Ghost and live by his grace.

4. For a true, orderly, and practical knowledge of God.

5. Of self-resignation to God as our owner.

6. Of subjection to God as our sovereign King.

7. To learn of Christ as our teacher. The imitation of Christ.

8. To obey Christ our physician or Savior in his repairing, healing work.

9. Of Christian warfare under Christ.

10. How to work as servants of Christ our Lord.

11. To love God as our Father and felicity and end.

12. Absolutely to trust God with soul and body, and all.

13. That the temperament of our religion may be a delight in God and holiness.

14. Of thankfulness to God, our grand benefactor.

15. For glorifying God.

16. For heavenly mindedness.

17. For self-denial.

After these general "Grand Directions" come specific instructions to counter "the great sins most directly contrary to godliness": unbelief, hardness of heart, hypocrisy, man-pleasing, and sensuality, plus guidance for governing one's thoughts and one's tongue, one's passions and senses, and for practicing some further forms of self-control. The work is then rounded off with detailed discussion of serving God at home and in church.

The relevance of this material for us is that it shows the quality of life to which Baxter, like other Puritans, sought to lead those whom he pastored, persons in depression along with the rest. Current culture sees depressives as healed when they can once more function well in society, but Puritans saw all humans as sin-sick and not in good inner health till they had learned to know Christ and to live in the manner sketched out above. Puritan counsel about depression, and about salvation, therefore, melded into one. (A fine example of this is Baxter's The Right Method for a Settled Peace of Conscience and Spiritual Comfort, noted above.)

Three basic perspectives pervade all of Baxter's practical writings, each a guideline toward spiritual well-being as he understood it.

The first is the primacy of the intellect. All truth, so he says repeatedly, enters the soul via understanding. All motivation begins in the mind as one contemplates the realities and possibilities that draw forth affection and desire; all fellowship with Christ the Mediator also begins in the mind, with knowledge of his undying love and present risen life; all obedience begins in the mind, with recognition of revelation concerning his purpose and will. Calls to consider — to think, that is, and so get God's truth clear first in one's head and then in one's heart — are accordingly basic to Baxter's instruction. The heavily didactic, intellectually demanding quality that this imparts to his writings is, from his point of view, a necessity. It is the mind that must grasp and lead.

The second perspective is the unity of human life before the Lord. God made us to fulfill simultaneously two great commandments: to love God himself in his triune being, which part 1 of the Directory teaches us to do, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, which parts 2–4, on role responsibilities in the home, the church, and the community, lead us into. Note, by the way, that neighbor love, which after all is a form of charity, must begin at home; this is the biblical and Reformational emphasis. The family is mankind's primary society, and those who do not learn to love and serve their neighbors in the home — spouse, children, servants — remain hypocrites and failed disciples, however hard they may labor to serve others in the church and beyond. First things first!

The third perspective is the centrality of eternity. Heaven and hell are realities, and the greatness of the human soul consists partly, at least, in the fact that we will never cease to be, but must inhabit one or the other of these destinations forever. The purpose of life is to find out and follow the road to heaven, through conversion and sanctification in faith, hope, and love. In begging his hearers and readers to take eternity seriously, to think of it often, and so to run as to obtain heaven's glory, Baxter surely spoke a word that today's Christians, materially minded andthis-worldly to a fault, badly need to hear. The sprawling, soaring devotional best seller mentioned above, which shot Baxter to prominence in 1650 and has been linked with his name ever since, The Saints' Everlasting Rest, hammers away at this theme with great emphasis, and his evangelistic and pastoral writing thereafter never lost sight of it.

Counselor to Christians in Depression

For Puritans as a body, the good life was the godly life, and the godly life was a product of thought: thought about the framework of obligations (duties) that God has established in his Word, thought about the blood-bought forgiveness and acceptance by which Christians live, thought about God's gracious promises, thought about means to ends, and thought about the glory of God as the true goal of all created life. Puritan instruction in behavior and relationships was thus first and foremost a matter of teaching people to think (or, to use their regular word for this, to consider): to reflect, that is, on how to serve and please God in response to the truth and grace he has made known in creation, and in and through Christ. Here, however, as the Puritans clearly saw, problems arose. They knew, of course, as did and does just about everyone in the Western world, that each human being is a psychophysical unit, in which the body and the mind, though distinct, are currently inseparable, and either may make its mark functionally on the other, for better and for worse. One problem here, whereby physical factors led to a measure of mental unbalance, was what the Puritans labeled melancholy. Differently diagnosed, it remains with us today.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Depression, Anxiety, and the Christian Life"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Michael S. Lundy and James I. Packer.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface J. I. Packer 9

Part 1 Introducing Richard Baxter

1 Richard Baxter, Spiritual Physician J. I. Packer 17

2 Richard Baxter: Perspective and Retrospective Michael S. Lundy, MD 35

Part 2 Baxter's Counsel on Depression

3 Advice to Depressed and Anxious Christians Richard Baxter 73

4 The Resolution of Depression and Overwhelming Grief through Faith Richard Baxter 103

Appendix: The Duty of Physicians Richard Baxter 169

General Index 177

Scripture Index 181

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Richard Baxter was a skilled psychologist as well as a theologian. In this book are some of his writings on depression. J. I. Packer is a modern theologian and lifelong student of Baxter. Michael Lundy is a clinical psychiatrist who has modernized the texts of Baxter. The result is an unusually instructive book of practical wisdom that will be a great help to pastors and others who are called to give counsel to the downcast.”
—Paul Helm, Former Professor of the History and Philosophy of Religion, King’s College London

“Here you will find two treasures for the price of one: consultations with a practicing psychiatrist (Michael Lundy—who, by definition, is a ‘healer of the soul’) and a distinguished theologian (J. I. Packer—who especially loves authors whose theology engages what used to be called ‘the cure of souls’). But, in fact, it turns out to be three treasures for the price of one, as a doctor of medicine and a doctor of philosophy together highlight the wisdom of the remarkable pastor-theologian Richard Baxter. Depression, Anxiety, and the Christian Life is simultaneously a manual for pastors and counselors, a resource for study groups, and a thesaurus of wise spiritual counsel for those who struggle and for those who care about them. A few consultations with the soul-physician group of Packer, Lundy, and Baxter will be medicine for your soul!”
—Sinclair B. Ferguson, Chancellor’s Professor of Systematic Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary; Teaching Fellow, Ligonier Ministries

“A threefold cord is not quickly broken. In this book, J. I. Packer and Michael Lundy team up with the great Puritan Richard Baxter, who was truly a physician of souls, to offer Christians much-needed help on the thorny spiritual realities of depression and anxiety. Few, if any, Christians are unfamiliar with the pain of anxiety and depression. Few, if any, will fail to be immensely helped by the guidance offered in these pages.”
—Mark Jones, Senior Minister, Faith Presbyterian Church, Vancouver, Canada