Who Were the Puritans?

The Puritans were English Protestants, active roughly from 1560 to 1700, who believed the English Reformation had stopped halfway and longed to see the church and the whole of life reshaped by the Bible. They were united less by a single organization than by a shared conviction.

Because of this, Puritanism was never one denomination. It ran across Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and even some Baptists, holding them together by a common Reformed theology and a common seriousness about the Christian life. What made someone a Puritan was not a membership but a spirit: the conviction that Scripture, not tradition or convenience, should govern faith, worship, and daily living.

“Puritan” began in the 1560s as a term of contempt. It was hurled at those who wanted the Church of England purified of practices they could not find in Scripture, and critics also sneered at them as precisionists for their scruples about worship and conduct.

The people so labeled rarely used the word of themselves. They preferred to speak of the godly, or simply of serious Christians. What started as ridicule eventually became the settled name for one of the richest movements the church has known.

Puritanism was a child of the English Reformation. In 1534 Henry VIII broke with Rome and made the crown, not the pope, the head of the English church. Under his young son Edward VI the church moved in a firmly Protestant direction, but the accession of Mary I in 1553 reversed everything. Her reign drove many reformers into exile on the Continent, where they absorbed the fuller, more thoroughly Reformed Christianity they found in Calvin's Geneva.

When Elizabeth I came to the throne, the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 sought a middle way, a via media that made England Protestant in doctrine while keeping bishops, set forms of worship, and clerical vestments. To the returning exiles this looked like a Reformation left unfinished. The Puritan impulse was born in that gap between what the settlement allowed and what these reformers believed Scripture required.

It is worth distinguishing two responses to that gap. Most Puritans were reformers from within: they remained in the Church of England and worked, often at great cost, to purify it. A smaller group, the Separatists, concluded the church was past reforming and left it altogether. It was Separatists, not Puritans in the stricter sense, who became the Pilgrims of Plymouth.

The movement produced a remarkable array of pastors and writers. Its early shape owed much to William Perkins, the Cambridge preacher often called the father of Puritanism, whose teaching trained a generation. Among the figures still most widely read today:

• John Owen, the great theologian of the movement, prized for his depth on sin, grace, and communion with God.
• Thomas Watson, the most vivid and quotable of the Puritans.
• Richard Sibbes, known as the heavenly Doctor for the tenderness of his preaching.
• John Flavel, a pastor beloved for his warm, practical writing on providence.
• John Bunyan, the tinker of Bedford whose Pilgrim's Progress became one of the most widely read books in English.
• Richard Baxter, the tireless pastor of Kidderminster and one of the most prolific writers of his age.
• Thomas Brooks, a master of pointed, memorable pastoral counsel.
• Jeremiah Burroughs, remembered above all for his teaching on Christian contentment.

Others belong in any such list. Thomas Manton was one of the leading Westminster divines, and Jonathan Edwards, in colonial New England, would become the greatest heir of the whole tradition.

England was the birthplace and the center of the movement. There the great debates over worship and church order were fought, there the Westminster Assembly met, and there most of the classic Puritan books were written. The English story is the heart of Puritanism.

But Puritanism was also transplanted. The Great Migration of the 1630s carried thousands of Puritans across the Atlantic to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where they set out to build a church and society ordered by Scripture. Their influence on colonial New England was profound. They prized education and literacy so that ordinary people could read the Bible, founding Harvard College in 1636 and establishing schools across the colony. In Jonathan Edwards, New England produced the tradition's last and perhaps greatest heir.

New England Puritanism had its darker episodes as well; the Salem witch trials of 1692 were one such later aberration. Yet the enduring legacy of the New England Puritans lay in their churches, their schools, and the seriousness with which they took the life of faith.

The seventeenth century has often been called the golden age of English theology, and the Puritans are the chief reason why. What set their writing apart was the union of two things that are often divided: robust, carefully worked doctrine and deep pastoral warmth. They could reason like theologians and comfort like physicians of the soul, frequently in the same paragraph.

That legacy outlived the movement itself. The Puritans shaped the evangelical awakening through preachers like George Whitefield, and in the nineteenth century Charles Spurgeon so absorbed their spirit that he was called the last of the Puritans. Their books have gone on forming readers long after the world that produced them passed away.

For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Puritans fell out of print and out of fashion. Their recovery is one of the quiet stories of twentieth-century Christianity. Central to it was the Banner of Truth Trust, which grew out of a magazine begun in 1955 and was formally founded as a publishing house in 1957, with Iain Murray a driving force and the preaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones a powerful encouragement behind it.

The Banner's Puritan Paperbacks did something simple and decisive: they made the Puritans affordable and readable again, in modest editions with updated spelling that ordinary Christians could actually buy and finish. Lloyd-Jones also helped gather readers around the movement through the annual Puritan Conference, later the Westminster Conference, which kept study of these writers alive. What had been rare and expensive became, once more, common reading.