Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 48 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The Puritans are the children of the Reformation in England: conservative Christians who wanted the Anglican church purified of everything that still smelled of Rome, and who never fully got their wish. This lecture frames a century and a half of their struggle in three words, disappointment under Elizabeth, disillusionment under James, despair under Charles, and along the way tells the story of the English Bible from Tyndale to the King James, and why tens of thousands of Puritans finally boarded ships for New England.
Puritans were Anglicans who wanted the English Reformation completed: they loved the church's Calvinistic soteriology, disliked the high liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer as a throwback to Rome, and rejected a monarch as head of the church. The name began as their opponents' mockery in the early 1560s and was adopted. Leland Ryken's Worldly Saints argues no group has been more unjustly maligned: they were not enemies of fun, sport, or the arts, and their black clothing was simply the fashion of the age. To be a Puritan then was roughly what being a conservative evangelical is now.
From the Ninety-five Theses, Zurich, Geneva, and the 1534 Act of Supremacy flow the great Protestant streams. Edward's reforms, Mary's persecutions and the Genevan exile, Elizabeth's middle way, James and Charles, the Great Migration of the 1630s, the English Civil War, Cromwell's Commonwealth, the Restoration under Charles II, and finally the Glorious Revolution of 1688, after which Puritanism, worn thin, faded until its ideals resurfaced in the Great Awakening.
The exiles returned from Geneva expecting full reform and met the Elizabethan settlement instead, a via media of episcopal government, high liturgy, and reformed theology. Separatist Puritans who abandoned Anglicanism, the dissenters, were targeted by acts of conformity and even an act against the Puritans, though Elizabeth enforced these loosely.
When Elizabeth died in 1603 the Tudor line ended and James VI of Presbyterian Scotland became James I of England. Surely, the Puritans reasoned, a king raised under Knox's church would finish the Reformation. A thousand Puritan pastors signed the Millenary Petition asking for reform and presented it as his procession traveled south.
At the Hampton Court conference James sided with the moderate bishops and ignored nearly every Puritan request. He granted exactly one: a new authorized translation of the Bible. The Puritans wanted it because they despised the Bishops Bible; James wanted it because the popular Geneva Bible carried study notes that undercut royal headship of the church.
Wycliffe translated from the Vulgate; Tyndale from the Greek in the 1520s; Coverdale and John Rogers carried his work into the Matthews Bible; and the Great Bible of 1538 became the first authorized English Bible. The exiles produced the superior Geneva Bible, England's first study Bible, and the rushed Bishops Bible of 1568, the second authorized version, pleased no one. The King James Version, authorized in 1604 and published in 1611, drew roughly eighty percent of its New Testament from Tyndale.
Archbishop Richard Bancroft oversaw companies of translators at Cambridge, Oxford, and Westminster, with each rendering checked by committee, company, and then the other companies. The lecture is frank that King James himself was no pious patron, the Puritans quipped that the translation's reliability began only after its flattering dedication, yet the rigor of the process produced a translation that eclipsed the Geneva Bible and endures to this day.
After Hampton Court, persecution sharpened, especially against separatists: spies infiltrated meetings, unlicensed preachers were jailed, and some three hundred ministers were turned out of their livings. Separatists fled to the Netherlands, and in 1620, fearing their children would grow up Dutch, one congregation boarded the Mayflower and founded Plymouth. Another separatist in the Netherlands, John Smyth, influenced by Anabaptists there, began the English Baptist movement around 1609.
Charles I took the throne in 1625, married the Roman Catholic princess Henrietta Maria, echoes of Bloody Mary for anxious Puritans, and kept lists marking clergy O for orthodox and P for Puritan. In 1633 he made William Laud Archbishop of Canterbury. As Arminianism spread from the Netherlands into the English church, the one leg of Anglicanism the Puritans loved, its Calvinistic soteriology, was pulled away: Laud persecuted any deviation from the Book of Common Prayer and outlawed preaching on predestination.
Forbidding Calvinists to preach election was a recipe for rupture. In the 1630s tens of thousands of Puritans left England for New England, founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony, not to establish broad religious tolerance but to build the purified Puritan church they had been denied at home. Here English church history becomes American church history, the road this course will now follow.
The lecture previews the wider post-Reformation map: dead orthodoxy settling over Lutheran Germany and the pietist response that produced the Moravians, the Huguenots' bloody struggle in France, Calvinistic Netherlands and the rise of Arminianism, and the Synod of Dort that answered it, threads the coming lectures will take up.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twelve are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. The lecture defines the Puritans as
2. Leland Ryken's Worldly Saints is cited to show that the Puritans
3. The lecture's three-word arc for the Puritans under Elizabeth, James, and Charles is
4. The Millenary Petition was
5. At Hampton Court in 1604, James granted the Puritans
6. James disliked the Geneva Bible chiefly because
7. The first authorized English Bible was
8. Roughly what share of the King James New Testament derives from Tyndale?
9. The King James translation process involved
10. The English Baptist movement began when the separatist John Smyth
11. William Laud pressed the Puritans to despair by
12. The Great Migration of the 1630s aimed to
All twelve correct. Lecture 12 is complete.
The Puritans stayed inside a compromised church for generations, pressing for reform from within, while separatists left. What wisdom and what risks do you see in each path?
James granted one Puritan request, a new Bible translation, for motives of his own, and God used it for centuries of good. Where else in this course has God bent mixed motives to serve his church?
The lecture says the Puritans crossed the ocean not for broad tolerance but to build the church they believed Scripture required. How should conviction and liberty of conscience live together in a church, or a nation?
The lecture commends Leland Ryken's Worldly Saints for a fair portrait of the Puritans, and the course readings by Olson and Nichols continue to frame this period.