The Puritans

Those who wanted a fuller reformation

Under Elizabeth I, the settlement of 1559 gave the Church of England Protestant doctrine while keeping bishops, vestments and many of the old ceremonies. Some thought this a church only half reformed and pressed for worship, church government and life to be purified by Scripture; from the 1560s their opponents mocked them as ‘Puritans’. Most stayed within the national church and worked for reform from inside; some argued for presbyterian government; others, the Separatists, left it. The Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620, and the larger migration to New England in the 1630s, belong to the same stream.

Their central conviction was that worship must follow God's word, not human invention. It found classic form in the Westminster Confession (see the regulative principle):

But the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited to his own revealed will, that he may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representations or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.

Westminster Confession 21.1

A theology for living to God

For the Puritans theology was never only for the head. William Ames defined it as the teaching of living to God, and their theology is often called ‘practical divinity’. They preached plain sermons that opened a text, drew out its doctrine and applied it to life; they kept the Lord's Day for worship and rest; and they made a habit of household worship, reading Scripture and praying together daily. Moses' charge described their homes: "you shall teach them diligently to your children and speak of them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road" (Deuteronomy 6:7). Matthew Henry, son of an ejected Puritan minister, wrote on the passage, "Here are means for maintaining and keeping up religion in our hearts and houses" Matthew Henry.

In 1643, amid civil war, Parliament summoned the Westminster Assembly, which produced the Confession and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms. In this era John Owen wrote deeply on the death of Christ and on putting sin to death John Owen, The Death of Death; Richard Baxter urged pastors to teach their people household by household Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor; and John Bunyan conceived The Pilgrim's Progress in prison John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress. After the monarchy returned in 1660, the Act of Uniformity of 1662 drove some two thousand ministers from their pulpits, and the Puritans' heirs lived on as Nonconformists.

A disputed inheritance

Anglicans held that what Scripture does not forbid the church may order for decency and edification, and so defended the worship of the Book of Common Prayer and the rule of bishops as a reformation faithful to Scripture; Lutherans generally take the same view. The regulative principle is still debated between Reformed and other churches, and among the Reformed over how it applies.

The Puritans had their shadows. When they held power in the 1640s and 1650s, many ministers loyal to the Prayer Book lost their livings, and rules for the Sabbath and daily life could become harsh. Yet their catechisms and devotional books were read for generations; translated into German, some of them fed Pietism; and Korean Presbyterians learned their faith from the Westminster Standards. The story continues in the lesson Protestant orthodoxy and the Puritans.