Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 67 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
For ten remarkable years the Puritans actually held power in England, and this lecture tells what they built, the Westminster Confession and catechisms, and how quickly a returning king deleted it all. Dr. Busenitz draws a pointed lesson for modern evangelicals about the limits of political power, then follows the Puritans across the Atlantic to Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, and closes with two Puritans worth knowing well: Richard Baxter, who called himself a pen in God's hand, and John Bunyan, who wrote Pilgrim's Progress from a jail cell.
The lecture opens by insisting the Reformation is not the foundation of our faith but a recovery of foundational truths that reach back to Christ and the apostles. The Puritans are the link in the chain from that recovery to English, then American, Christianity, and figures like J. I. Packer and John Stott are named as their modern Anglican descendants.
Charles I married the Roman Catholic Henrietta Maria, England's first Romanist queen since Bloody Mary, and elevated the Arminian William Laud, who prosecuted deviation from the Book of Common Prayer and outlawed preaching on predestination. Repressed at home, roughly thirty thousand Puritans sailed for Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s, while those who stayed edged toward revolt.
A Puritan-controlled Parliament went to war with the royalists from 1641 to 1651. Archbishop Laud was executed in 1645, King Charles was tried and beheaded in 1649, and the young Charles II fled to a decade of exile in the Netherlands. Whether the Puritans were right to rebel, the lecture leaves for another day; that they did, and won, reshaped the church.
From 1645 the Calvinistic divines met in London to write a new charter for the Church of England, the culminating act of a century-long struggle between the Anglican and Puritan parties. The famous painting of the assembly reconstructs the actual faces of those present. The Westminster standards became the premier reformed confession in the English-speaking world, adopted lastingly by Scotland, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, and adapted by Baptists as the London Confession, even after the Church of England itself walked away.
The lecture reads key paragraphs: Scripture is authoritative and sufficient because it is God's word, with nothing to be added by new revelations or traditions; the Trinity is confessed in the language of Nicaea; predestination flows from God's free grace without foresight of faith or works, a paragraph its authors surely relished after Laud's gag order; and justification comes not by infusing righteousness but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ, received by faith that is itself God's gift. All the solas of the Reformation sound again a century and a half later.
The Shorter Catechism's one hundred seven questions begin with the chief end of man: to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. The assembly did not write children's curriculum; it wrote a program to educate an entire, partly illiterate nation. The lecture commends catechisms today as one helpful tool among many for teaching children, connecting them to what Christians have confessed across generations.
Oliver Cromwell ruled the Commonwealth for a decade as Lord Protector, declining the crown. Historians agree his driving force was a deep belief in an all-powerful God directing the nation. His legacy is genuinely mixed: he massacred thousands of Irish Catholics while dealing more gently with Presbyterian Scots, and he dismissed the very Parliament that raised him. He famously insisted his portrait show his warts, an apt emblem, the lecture notes, of how his own record must be painted.
Cromwell's son could not hold power, and Charles II returned in 1660 with no love for the movement that killed his father. The 1662 Act of Uniformity reversed the Puritan reforms overnight, and about twenty-four hundred Puritan pastors were forced from their churches, losing their licenses to preach. As dissenters and nonconformists they preached on illegally for nearly thirty years until toleration came with William and Mary in 1689, by which time English Puritanism was nearly spent.
The lecture pauses on the moral: the conservative Christians of England actually won the government, reformed the church, and watched it all deleted the moment power changed hands. Political change can be overturned overnight; the gospel's work of regeneration endures. Kings and Chronicles, the church in China under fallen dynasties, and Constantine's mixed legacy all echo the same warning about hitching the church to a throne.
John Owen, Cromwell's former chaplain and the era's towering theologian, was too honored in London to be imprisoned; his close friend John Bunyan, an uneducated tinker turned beloved preacher, spent nearly twelve years in jail for preaching without a license. Owen repeatedly tried and failed to win Bunyan's release. From that cell came Pilgrim's Progress, historically the most influential English book after the Bible itself, with Foxe's Book of Martyrs third.
The separatist pilgrims of the Mayflower founded Plymouth in 1620 under the Mayflower Compact, with William Bradford governing some thirty years and recording the first Thanksgiving. John Winthrop's Great Migration planted Massachusetts Bay a decade later under a royal charter sold to the king on economic grounds. Roger Williams, coming to Baptist convictions, left for Providence and founded Rhode Island. Through these colonies the Reformation crossed to North America, seeding the Presbyterian and Congregational stream that, with Baptists and Methodists, would define early American Christianity.
Richard Baxter served faithfully, suffered imprisonment as a nonconformist, and left two enduring works: The Reformed Pastor, with its searching charge that preachers take heed to themselves lest they proclaim a Savior their own hearts neglect, and The Saints' Everlasting Rest, written when he expected to die, on the perfect endless enjoyment of God. Comforted on his deathbed with the good his books had done, he answered that he was only a pen in God's hand, and what praise is due to a pen. Bunyan's Apollyon scene, read in class, presses the same perseverance: the pilgrim who has sworn allegiance to the King of princes will not turn back.
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. The lecture prefers to call the Reformation a recovery rather than a foundation because
2. The English Civil War pitted
3. The Westminster Assembly was convened to
4. On justification, the Westminster Confession teaches that God
5. The first question of the Shorter Catechism answers that man's chief end is
6. The Westminster catechisms were originally written to
7. Rather than take the crown, Oliver Cromwell ruled under the title
8. The darkest stain the lecture names on Cromwell's legacy is
9. The 1662 Act of Uniformity resulted in
10. The lecture's lesson from the Puritans' decade in power is that
11. John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress
12. Roger Williams left Massachusetts Bay and founded
13. On his deathbed, Richard Baxter deflected praise for his books by saying
14. In the Apollyon scene from Pilgrim's Progress read in class, Christian refuses to turn back because
All fourteen correct. Lecture 13 is complete.
The Puritans won political power and lost everything they built with it within two years of losing it. Where should a church invest its energy when the culture around it feels hostile?
Baxter charged preachers to take heed to themselves lest they proclaim a Savior their own hearts neglect. How does a believer, ordained or not, keep watch over that gap between profession and possession?
Owen the scholar and Bunyan the tinker were close friends across an enormous educational divide. What does their friendship model for churches that mix very different kinds of people?
Paul charges the Corinthians to examine themselves, to test whether they are in the faith.
The lecture commends Baxter's The Reformed Pastor and The Saints' Everlasting Rest, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and Joel Beeke's guides to the Puritans for those who want to meet more of them.