Puritan

Puritan, or Puritanism, names the movement of English Protestants, spanning roughly the mid-sixteenth through the late seventeenth centuries, who sought to complete the Reformation begun in the Church of England by purging it of remaining Roman Catholic ceremony and by reordering personal and church life according to Scripture alone.¹ It began as a reform movement within the established church and later divided into Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Baptist streams as some adherents concluded that further reform required separating from it.²

Historical Development

Origins and the vestments controversy

Francis Bremer describes the earliest Puritans as those who wanted to purify the Church of England’s worship “of the remnants of Roman Catholic teachings and practice then found in post-Reformation England during the mid-sixteenth century, such as using clerical vestments and kneeling to receive the Lord’s Supper.”¹ Opponents who saw nothing wrong with those practices coined “Puritan” as a term of reproach in the 1560s. Most of the people it named did not adopt it for themselves, preferring to be known simply as “the godly” or by their particular church or movement.

From reform movement to dissenting streams

John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim describe Puritanism as “a distinctive and particularly intense variety of early modern Reformed Protestantism which originated within the unique context of the Church of England but spilled out beyond it, branching off into divergent dissenting streams, and overflowing into other lands and foreign churches.”² Matthew Bingham traces a genealogy across several generations: “Baptistic congregationalists began as congregationalists; congregationalists began as puritans; and puritans began as Protestants.” At each stage, a group modified its inherited faith and practice until those modifications became a new identity in their own right, all driven by “the desire for further ‘reformation,’” understood as “a happy reversion to the purer pattern of doctrine and worship established by Christ and his apostles.”³ By the mid-seventeenth century the movement had split into several ecclesiastical streams, chiefly Presbyterians, Congregationalists (or Independents), and Particular Baptists, who shared a common Reformed theological heritage while disagreeing over church government and, in the Baptists’ case, the subjects of baptism.⁴

The Westminster Assembly and the Great Ejection

The Westminster Assembly (1643-1649) produced the confessional statement that “laid out the doctrinal standard of all who could be reasonably labeled Puritans”: the Westminster Confession of Faith.⁴ Congregationalists modified it as the Savoy Declaration (1658), and Particular Baptists modified it again as the 1677 London Baptist Confession, reaffirmed by a General Assembly in 1689 as the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith.⁵ The Restoration of the English monarchy ended the movement’s institutional life within the established church: the Act of Uniformity of 1662 required ministers to conform to the re-established Church of England’s worship and orders, and those who would not, among them the Congregationalist minister Samuel Petto, were ejected from their pulpits in what became known as the Great Ejection.⁶ Even a Parliament Packer calls “violently anti-Puritan” passed a Sunday Observance Act in 1677 confirming the practice Puritan conviction had established, that Sunday be kept free of ordinary work for “the duties of piety and true religion, publicly and privately.”⁷

Theological Character

Reformed and confessional

Puritan theology was the English expression of Reformed Protestant orthodoxy, distinct from Lutheran and Roman Catholic theology and set out in confessions shared across its Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Baptist streams.⁸

The regulative principle of worship

Puritan worship practice rested on the regulative principle: that public worship should include only what Scripture commands.⁷ Puritan writers applied this principle to the Lord’s Day specifically, teaching that the Fourth Commandment’s Sabbath requirement continued under the New Covenant as part of the moral law rather than the ceremonial law that had passed away, rooted in creation rather than merely in Israel’s national life.⁹ Nicholas Bownd’s treatise on the Sabbath, an early and influential statement of this conviction, argued that without first establishing that the Sabbath still bound Christians, “all doctrine or exhortation tending to the true manner of sanctifying it, falls to the ground and is unfruitful.”¹⁰

Experiential religion

Puritan writers gave sustained attention to the believer’s personal, felt communion with God. Packer describes this as reaching “the very heart of Puritan theology and religion”: Puritans held that humanity was created for fellowship with the triune God, that the fall disrupted it, and that redemption exists to restore it.¹¹ They grounded this communion in union with Christ. William Perkins wrote that “in the conversion of a sinner, there is a real union, whereby every believer is made one with Christ. And by vertue of this union, the crosse and passion of Christ is as verily made ours, as if we had been crucified in our own persons.”¹² Thomas Goodwin likewise held that “being in Christ, and united to him, is the fundamental constitution of a Christian.”¹³

Confessional Legacy

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689) descends directly from this movement. Particular Baptists, including Benjamin Keach, shared “the confessional standard of the Puritans,” the Westminster Confession of Faith, modifying it to state both their points of difference (chiefly on church government and baptism) and their substantial agreement with the Westminster divines.⁴ Keach himself helped call the 1689 General Assembly that reaffirmed that modification as the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith.⁵ Historians differ over whether Particular Baptists are best counted among the Puritans or as a related but distinct movement,¹⁴ but the confession they produced stands in direct continuity with the Puritans’ own Westminster Confession and the Congregationalists’ Savoy Declaration.

Related Doctrines

Regulative principle
Calvinism
Presbyterian
Congregationalism
Baptist
Westminster Confession
Savoy Declaration
Puritans, for a list of notable Puritans and their biographical articles

References

Daniel David Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach: Baptist Expositor of Puritan Doctrine,” in “Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), 21n3, quoting Francis J. Bremer, Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2. ↩ ↩²
Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach: Baptist Expositor of Puritan Doctrine,” 20-21n3, quoting John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, ed. John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1-2. ↩ ↩²
Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach: Baptist Expositor of Puritan Doctrine,” 22n7, quoting Matthew C. Bingham, Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 130. ↩
Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach: Baptist Expositor of Puritan Doctrine,” 20. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach: Baptist Expositor of Puritan Doctrine,” 21, citing James M. Renihan, ed., Faith and Life for Baptists: The Documents of the London Particular Baptist General Assemblies, 1689-1694 (Palmdale, CA: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2016), 19-21. ↩ ↩²
Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach: Baptist Expositor of Puritan Doctrine,” 41, quoting Mark Jones, introduction to The Great Mystery of the Covenant of Grace, by Samuel Petto (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire: Tentmaker, 2007), 10. ↩
Jacob Boyd, “John Owen’s Theology of Public Worship,” Themelios 49, no. 2 (2024): 346-60, at 354. ↩ ↩²
Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach: Baptist Expositor of Puritan Doctrine,” 20-21. ↩
Boyd, “John Owen’s Theology of Public Worship,” 354-55. ↩
Boyd, “John Owen’s Theology of Public Worship,” 355. ↩
Carol Man Fen Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 174, quoting J. I. Packer, “The Puritan Idea of Communion with God,” 108. ↩
Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 174-75, quoting William Perkins. ↩
Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 175, quoting Thomas Goodwin. ↩
Scheiderer, “Benjamin Keach: Baptist Expositor of Puritan Doctrine,” 21-22. ↩