Puritanism and the Christian Life

Historical Theology

Historical Setting

The word “Puritan” began as an insult. In Elizabethan England it was hurled at those who thought the half-reformed national church had not gone far enough — who wanted to “purify” it of remaining ceremonies, vestments, and prelacy, and to bring its worship and life fully under the Word of God. The Puritans were never a denomination. They were a movement of the heart and conscience that ran across Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and (later) Baptist lines, united by a passion for experiential godliness rooted in Reformed doctrine.

The movement reached its zenith in the seventeenth century — the age of the Westminster Assembly, the Commonwealth, and then, after the Restoration of 1660, the Great Ejection of 1662, when some two thousand Puritan ministers were driven from their pulpits for refusing to conform. Out of that suffering came some of the richest devotional literature the church has ever known.

What Was at Stake

At stake was the difference between a faith merely professed and a faith truly possessed. The Puritans feared above all a dead orthodoxy — sound doctrine held in an unchanged heart. Their watchword was experimental (we would say experiential) religion: the truth of the gospel not only believed in the head but experienced in the affections, applied to the conscience, and worked out in daily life. The question they pressed relentlessly was: do you have not merely the notion of grace, but the life of grace within you?

Key Players

The Puritan firmament is crowded with stars. John Owen (1616–1683), the “Calvin of England,” combined massive theological learning with profound spiritual depth in works like The Mortification of Sin and Communion with God. Richard Baxter (1615–1691), the pastor of Kidderminster, wrote The Reformed Pastor and The Saints’ Everlasting Rest — though his theology of justification would prove controversial. Thomas Goodwin plumbed the heart of Christ toward sinners; Richard Sibbes, “the heavenly Doctor,” wrote The Bruised Reed, a balm for wounded consciences. John Bunyan (1628–1688), a tinker imprisoned for preaching, gave the church The Pilgrim’s Progress, the great allegory of the Christian life. Thomas Watson, Jeremiah Burroughs, John Flavel, and Stephen Charnock belong in the same company.

The Outcome

The Puritans developed a whole spiritual theology — a practical divinity unmatched in detail and warmth. Several themes stand out.

The heart and the affections. The Puritans were anatomists of the soul. They mapped the conscience, traced the workings of sin and grace, and insisted that true religion engages the affections, not merely the intellect.

Assurance. They wrestled deeply with the question of how a believer may know he is truly saved — grounding assurance in the promises of Christ, the witness of the Spirit, and the evidence of grace at work, while warning against both presumption and despair.

Mortification of sin. Owen’s famous maxim — “be killing sin or it will be killing you” — captured their relentless, Spirit-empowered war against indwelling corruption.

The Sabbath, family worship, and plain preaching. They prized the Lord’s Day as a delight and a means of grace; they built godliness into the household through family worship and catechizing; and they preached plainly — doctrine, then use, then application — aiming at the conscience rather than the applause of the learned.

Scriptural Grounding

The Puritan vision is saturated in Scripture. On the inward reality of religion:

For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly… But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit. (Romans 2:28–29)

On mortification:

If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. (Romans 8:13)

On the tenderness of Christ that Sibbes so loved:

A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench. (Isaiah 42:3)

On assurance and the Spirit’s witness:

The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. (Romans 8:16)

Doctrinal Significance

The Puritans show that Reformed doctrine is not the enemy of vital piety but its very engine. The same sovereign grace confessed at Dort and Westminster fueled their fervent pursuit of holiness. They proved that predestination, far from breeding fatalism, drives the elect to greater diligence, humility, and assurance. They wedded the head and the heart, the confession and the closet, in a way the church desperately needs to recover.

A Reformed Assessment — Wheat and Chaff

The Puritans are our spiritual fathers, and we receive their labors with gratitude. The wheat is rich: their searching self-examination, their God-centered worship, their pastoral tenderness toward the bruised, and their relentless pursuit of holiness.

Yet honesty requires naming the chaff and the internal tensions. Richard Baxter’s neonomianism is the clearest example: in seeking to guard against antinomian abuse of free grace, Baxter so redefined faith as the believer’s “new law” obedience that he blurred the Reformation’s hard-won doctrine of justification by faith alone, in which faith merely receives Christ’s imputed righteousness. Owen and others rightly opposed him. Baxter’s error reminds us that even great and godly men can, in reaction against one danger, drift toward its opposite.

More broadly, the Puritan emphasis on examining one’s heart for evidence of grace could, in less skilled hands, tip into a morbid introspection that looked inward for assurance rather than outward to Christ. The best Puritans guarded against this; lesser imitators did not always.

But we must also counter the caricatures. The Puritans were not joyless, repressive, or world-hating killjoys — that is a slander invented by their cultured despisers. They wrote of marital love, the goodness of creation, and the “everlasting rest” of heaven with a warmth their critics rarely matched. They were, as one historian put it, “the spiritual athletes” of their age — and we are the poorer for forgetting them.

Connections

Systematic loci: sanctification, assurance, the doctrine of the Christian life, ecclesiology, worship.
WCF 13 on sanctification; WCF 18 on the assurance of grace and salvation; WCF 16 on good works; WCF 21 on worship and the Sabbath.
The Baxter controversy connects directly to WCF 11 on justification by faith alone — the very doctrine he endangered.
Back to Augustine (02_06), whose Confessions pioneered the searching self-examination the Puritans perfected.
Back to Calvin (04_05) on the Christian life, unio cum Christo, and self-denial — the Puritans are his heirs in piety.
Forward to the modern era (06_xx): the Evangelical revival under Whitefield and Edwards drew deeply on the Puritan well, even as later pietism sometimes severed experience from doctrine.

Lessons for Today

The Puritans rebuke our age of shallow, entertainment-driven religion. They call us to take sin seriously, to take the heart seriously, and to take holiness seriously — and to do so not by gritted-teeth moralism but by communion with the triune God. They teach us that doctrine is meant to be experienced, not merely affirmed. And Baxter’s misstep teaches us to guard the doctrine of free justification jealously, even when reacting against real abuses. Read the Puritans; they will search you, humble you, and warm your heart toward Christ.