Why the Puritans Still Matter
Why read the Puritans?
It’s easy to treat these saints of yesterday simply as figures from a rather distant seventeenth-century world: men in black gowns arguing about predestination, church government, and things which happened nearly four hundred years ago.
But the questions they wrestled with are often surprisingly familiar. How do you reform a church which seems only half reformed? What should Christians do when political power interferes with faithful ministry? When should we stay in a compromised church, and when might conscience require us to leave? How should ministers preach? What happens when the desire for godly influence becomes an ungodly desire for power?
Those are historical questions.
They don’t feel entirely historical.
That’s one reason I’m delighted that the Latimer Trust has published Pioneers, Contenders, and Reformers: Exploring Puritan History, Theology, and Practice.
The St Antholin Lectures
The chapters come from the annual St Antholin Lectures over the last few years—more precisely, the lectures from 2011–2020. This is the third collection in the series, following Pilgrims, Warriors, and Servants and Preachers, Pastors, and Ambassadors, which collected the lectures from 1991–2000 and 2001–2010 respectively.
St Antholin’s is itself an appropriate name to attach to a series about Puritanism. The church stood in the City of London for many centuries and became an important centre for Puritan preaching and ministry. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it developed a reputation as a “grand nursery of Puritanism”. The lectureship there helped satisfy London’s appetite for biblical preaching, while St Antholin’s also became part of a much wider strategy for putting good preachers into pulpits across the country.
The modern St Antholin Lectures continue something of that concern: serious engagement with the history and theology of the Reformed tradition, not merely out of antiquarian interest, but because history can help us think more clearly about the church today.
Pioneers, contenders, and reformers
There’s a great deal of variety in this latest collection.
Andrew Cinnamond looks at Puritan grievances under Elizabeth I and asks what really mattered to those who wanted further reform of the Church of England. Peter Adam takes us into the crisis of 1662 and the agonising question of whether ministers should stay in the Church of England or leave.
I have a chapter on Edmund Grindal, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was prepared to sacrifice royal favour and ultimately his own ministry rather than suppress the preaching exercises which he believed were essential to the conversion and edification of England. He reached the very top of the ecclesiastical tree, but cared more about sound biblical preaching than the prestige and power of Edmund Grindal.
Elsewhere we encounter Whitefield, Toplady, Simeon and Wesley in the controversies over Arminianism; the Countess of Huntingdon and her remarkable Connexion; and John Owen as a preacher.
Kirsten Birkett takes us into Reformation debates about faith, reason and knowledge. Donald John MacLean examines William Perkins and the Reformed doctrine of the church. Matthew Rowley asks an especially uncomfortable question about Puritan theology and the thirst for power. And John Coffey examines those who actually did leave the Church of England in the age of the Mayflower—reminding us that formal separation was rarer, more complicated, and often more reluctant than some popular accounts might suggest.
That is quite a range: preaching and ecclesiology, politics and power, conformity and separation, revival and controversy, reason and revelation.
And something new
But there’s also a new chapter which I’ve written on George Whitefield (1714-1770), about when he actually preached at St Antholin’s church in London, and the way the eighteenth-century evangelical revival drew upon the Puritan legacy.
Whitefield preached there in 1737, when he was just 22 years old and newly ordained. St Antholin’s had been rebuilt by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London, and it remained a natural place for a young preacher attracting crowds hungry for the word of God, to visit.
We even know what Whitefield preached at St Antholin’s. His sermon, Of Justification by Christ, was published soon afterwards as a 26-page pamphlet. It took as its text 1 Corinthians 6:11 and attacked the tendency of Anglican preachers to offer their congregations mere morality rather than “the glad tidings of salvation by Jesus Christ”. Whitefield wanted instead to be “continually sounding forth the word of truth”.
There is a lovely historical continuity here. The old St Antholin’s had been a centre of Puritan preaching. Then, more than a century later, a young George Whitefield stood in its pulpit preaching justification by Christ and helping to launch a new evangelical awakening.
Whitefield’s preparation itself tells the story. His powerful public ministry emerged from hours spent on his knees with his Bible, Greek New Testament, and “some rich Puritan volume” open before him.
Puritanism had not simply disappeared. Something of its theological and spiritual inheritance was being reborn in eighteenth-century evangelicalism. I’m not sure it has ever really died out.
History for the church
What I particularly like about this collection is that it doesn’t require us to pretend the Puritans were always right. They weren’t. They disagreed among themselves. Some made serious mistakes. Their battles over church order and conformity could be bitter. Political power could complicate their motives, just as it complicates ours. The decision to stay or leave the established church was not always straightforward.
That is precisely what makes studying them useful. Church history is most helpful when we resist turning it into hagiography. We can admire courage without pretending there were no misjudgements. We can learn from theological clarity without reproducing every seventeenth-century conclusion. And we can recognise remarkable gospel achievements while remaining alert to human frailty.
Taken together, the chapters in Pioneers, Contenders, and Reformers offer what I describe in the book as a gallery of lives and moments in which truth was contended for, the gospel proclaimed, and the church reformed, in large ways and small. The settings range from Elizabethan controversy and Restoration crisis to eighteenth-century revival and missionary endeavour.
Which brings us back to the title.
The Puritans were pioneers, who broke new ground for the gospel.
They were contenders, who stood firm when truth was opposed.
And they were reformers, who sought to bring the church and Christian life under the lordship of Christ.
Their world was not ours. But many of their questions are. And that is a very good reason to keep reading and studying them.
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Lee Gatiss is the Director of Church Society and a Trustee of the annual St Antholin Lecture.
Pioneers, Contenders, and Reformers: Exploring Puritan History, Theology, and Practice, edited by Lee Gatiss, is published by the Latimer Trust as the third collection of the St Antholin Lectures.
