Glen Segger offers a fascinating and insightful view into a liturgy which otherwise remains more or less unknown and under-discussed in modern academic circles: Richard Baxter’s Reformed Liturgy, privately produced over two weeks during the Savoy conference of 1661. The conference had been convened by the newly restored King Charles II to consider revisions to the Book of Common Prayer. As one of the twelve Presbyterian representatives at the conference, Baxter’s Reformed Liturgy went far beyond the King’s orders and so was denied attention by the episcopal bishops also present. While the Reformed Liturgy was published anyway later that year, it never garnered the complete support of Presbyterian sympathizers either, who practised a broad variety of different worship forms and styles. Segger’s book establishes how Baxter’s Reformed Liturgy nevertheless represents the type of set liturgy used by many ‘godly’ clergy in a ‘tumultuous time in which the very future of the Church of England was being defined’ (p. 3). Segger’s major contribution comes from his thesis that the true significance of Baxter’s Reformed Liturgy remains its theological and ecclesiological content, which shows both immense ecumenical creativity and also an eye-opening view into Reformed thought, practice, and hope in the early Restoration period.

Segger’s book divides into six main chapters which aim to uncover the theological foundations of Baxter’s Reformed Liturgy ‘through comparative liturgical and theological analysis’ (p. 4), especially with the Book of Common Prayer and the Westminster Directory, as well as with Baxter’s autobiographical descriptions of his pastoral ministry. The first chapter gives an overview of Baxter’s life and work, allowing the reader to understand the place of the Reformed Liturgy within its proper historical context. The chapters which follow examine particular liturgical, theological and ecclesiological aspects of Baxter’s Reformed Liturgy. The second chapter considers Baxter’s principal liturgy for the Lord’s Day. The third chapter turns to the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, and the fourth to baptism. The fifth chapter surveys how Baxter provided various pastoral offices, including catechesis, matrimony, the visitation of the sick, burial, penitential rites, and acts of thanksgiving. The sixth chapter unpacks Baxter’s forms for pastoral discipline, perhaps ‘his most daring liturgical proposals’ (p. 6) which, while they appeared to advocate the discipline of Calvin’s Geneva as normative, flexibly took into account the chequered history in England of ecclesiastical discipline. Throughout the book, the key interpretive paradigm for Segger is that, even given the liturgical axiom lex orandi—lex credendi, theology nevertheless remains primary in Baxter’s work and profoundly influences prayer, rather than the other way around.

Segger writes with consummate expertise and sensitivity, expertly setting the historical and theological contexts of Baxter’s Reformed Liturgy, and skilfully unpacking Baxter’s considerable liturgical and theological creativity. Segger constructs a sympathetic image of Baxter as a kind of ecumenist avant la lettre, even if, ‘given the tumultuous events that had taken place during the preceding two decades, however, the bishops were not willing to settle on an episcopacy that might compromise their authority in any way’ (p. 211). Baxter, we are told and shown, ‘envisioned the Reformed Liturgy as part of a comprehensive reform of pastoral ministry in which a reduced episcopacy could finally bring forth an effective discipline that, in turn, would foster a spirit of godliness’ (p. 7). As such, Baxter’s Reformed Liturgy, produced after the devastation of the two decades before the Restoration, ‘intended to function as a compromise between Episcopalians and Presbyterians’ (p. 213), bringing together elements from the Westminster Directory and the Book of Common Prayer. Yet, as Segger shows, the Reformed Liturgy was also more than the sum of its influences and remained creative and constructive in its own right. Segger explores, for example, Baxter’s structural inventiveness in his eucharistic, baptismal and marriage rites. More centrally, throughout his work, Segger evidences three ways in which the ultimate significance of Baxter’s Reformed Liturgy was theological: namely, in the areas of ecclesiology, covenantal/sacramental theology, and pastoral or practical theology. Given the scant academic attention paid to date to Baxter’s Reformed Liturgy, Segger provides a salutary service in arguing for how ‘the Reformed Liturgy reflects the theology and creativity of those who fought for their puritan convictions…and lost’ (p. 220).

Perhaps one of the most valuable things about Segger’s book is the appendix, which reproduces the Reformed Liturgy and, for easy reference, maintains the original pagination. With this appendix, Segger ensures that Baxter’s Reformed Liturgy has become easy for future scholars to read, which might in turn encourage more scholarship on Baxter’s liturgy, theology and ecclesiology. Overall, the only quibbles with Segger’s book are occasionally ambiguous turns of phrase or errors which a proofreader should have caught, such as ‘posthumous autobiography’ (p. 4). I assume this means posthumously published rather than posthumously authored, but perhaps this is a quiet claim for a saintly miracle. On the same page, a typographical error creeps into the title of Jeremy Taylor’s eucharistic order of 1658, which should read ‘An Office or Order for the Administration [not ‘Sacrament’] of the Holy Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper’. The merits of Segger’s work far outstrip, however, such pedantic distractions.

Glen Segger’s Richard Baxter’s Reformed Liturgy will prove of interest, then, to historical theologians, cultural historians and liturgists in particular. Segger attends carefully to Baxter’s historical context and leaves the reader with an appreciation for Baxter’s ingenuity and subtlety. Segger’s work allows the Reformed Liturgy to be heard as one more significant voice in the panoply of liturgical creativity in the period. Segger has opened up a new avenue for study of a long-neglected text, and the textures of his nuanced argument should set the standard against which future scholarship will be judged.