Pardoning Puritanism - Community, character, and forgiveness in the work of Richard Baxter

The English Puritan Richard Baxter (1615-1691) developed an account of forg iveness that resonates with twentieth-century virtue ethics. He understood forgiveness as one component of a larger disposition of character developed in community as human beings recognize themselves as sinful creatures enga ged in complex relationships of dependency and responsibility, with both Go d and one another. In the midst of these relationships, persons experience divine and human forgiveness and discover opportunities to practice forgive ness in return. Baxter thus negotiated a distinctive relationship between C hristian hope for reconciliation and more stereotypical Puritan emphases on punishment, civil order, and justice. At the same time that recent moral r eflection allows us to raise questions about some features of Baxter's argu ment (such as his treatment of anger), his work provides important resource s for correlating dispositions with concrete obligations, establishing a pl ace for forgiveness in the public realm, and counterbalancing the modern em phasis on individual rights.