Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 50 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This lecture finishes the Puritan story with five men worth knowing by name, then widens the map to ask what was happening in the rest of Europe between the Reformation and the Great Awakening. In Lutheran lands a dead orthodoxy set in and Pietism rose to answer it, a chain that will eventually reach John Wesley through the Moravians. And beneath everything, a new age was dawning in which reason and science would displace Scripture and church as the authorities by which the West understands the world. Watch how each thread is quietly laying track for the revivals, and the battles, to come.
The Puritans connect the Reformation of the 1500s to the Great Awakening of the 1700s in the English-speaking world. Whatever quibbles we might have, their verbosity, their fifteen sub-points per sub-point, they were the conservative evangelicals of England for a century and a half, and our own spiritual heritage runs back through them.
Bunyan fought in the Civil War, and a man who took his place in battle was killed, leaving Bunyan feeling he lived on borrowed time. His conversion, like Jonathan Edwards' later, was a struggle of years, not a moment: the Puritans saw conversion as a long process from which the soul emerges fully transformed, nearly the opposite of the modern pray-a-prayer, sign-a-card decisionism. Henry Scougal's The Life of God in the Soul of Man, the book God used to convert George Whitefield, breathes the same understanding.
Born after the Restoration into a nonconformist minister's home, Matthew Henry grew up under the harassment Puritans endured in the 1660s through 1680s, then pastored in Chester and London. His exposition of the Old and New Testaments, assembled from 1704 to 1714, is quintessentially Puritan, focused on biblical spirituality and glorifying God in the whole of life. Like Calvin's commentaries, it stays with the text rather than the controversies of its day, which is why it remains timeless.
The lecture reads Henry's exposition of the opening of Romans 8: for those in Christ there is now no condemnation. Not no accusation, for there is one, but the indictment is quashed; not nothing in them deserving condemnation, for there is, and they mourn it; not no affliction, for they may be chastened, but never condemned. They are in Christ as in a city of refuge, and God is not only not against them but well pleased with them. Three centuries old, and preachable this Sunday.
Owen, widely regarded as Puritanism's greatest scholar, served as Cromwell's chaplain and as dean and chancellor at Oxford, then lived after the Restoration as a kind of fugitive pastor in London, never imprisoned but never safe. He loved to hear his friend the tinker preach and repeatedly sought Bunyan's release. His writing runs at such intellectual altitude that readers pause after every sentence, and the lecture commends guides like the modern retellings of his works for those starting out.
From Owen on justification: the faith that justifies is found only in those the Spirit has united to Christ, whose nature is renewed. Obedience does not give life to faith; faith gives life to all obedience. Against Rome's synergism, we are justified by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone: saving faith is always accompanied by a transformed life. Until Rome can show from Scripture that salvation rests on anything other than faith, Owen says, the reproach falls flat.
Watson, skilled even in Hebrew, was imprisoned in 1651, not by royalists but under Cromwell, for sympathy with the plot of Christopher Love and others to place Charles II on the throne, proof the Puritans were no monolith. Ejected with the rest in 1662, he ministered as a nonconformist into the 1680s. He is counted among the most readable of all Puritans.
From The Godly Man's Picture, where godly means saved: test yourself by whether you love the word. The martyrs paid fortunes for a few pages of it; some now find their eyes grow sore looking at a Bible, its two Testaments hung up like rusty armor. Do we attend preaching as a matter of life and death, and love the word for its holiness rather than coming to a sermon as to a garden to pick flowers? Watson's vivid pictures are classic Puritan craft.
Luther died in 1546, Melanchthon in 1560, and factions threatened to splinter the movement until 1580, the fiftieth anniversary of Augsburg, when the Book of Concord, assembled under Jacob Andreae and Martin Chemnitz, gathered Luther's and Melanchthon's writings with the Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds into one defining stream. What followed, in nationalized state churches, was Lutheran orthodoxy: right doctrine on paper that hardened into spiritual lethargy, a dead orthodoxy of creeds untouched by life.
Pietism rose as the corrective. Philip Jacob Spener, father of the movement, wrote Pia Desideria, pious desires, as an introduction to Johann Arndt's earlier work, and with his successor August Hermann Francke built a movement stressing lay Bible study, prayer, holy living, avoidance of doctrinal controversy, and fervent preaching. Most of those emphases still mark evangelicalism. The weakness was the pendulum: some Pietists undervalued doctrine, and some, like Zinzendorf, drifted toward mysticism. Zinzendorf leads to the Moravians, heirs of Hus, whom God would use to bring John Wesley to saving faith.
Two parallel developments frame the era: the Thirty Years War between Lutherans and Catholics, among the bloodiest European conflicts before World War I, and, more consequential still, the birth of the Enlightenment. Descartes' Discourse on Method made human reason the starting point, I think, therefore I am; Francis Bacon's empirical method and John Locke's championing of it made observable science the measure of reality. Naturalism began replacing supernaturalism.
Where the Reformation said biblical authority trumps church authority, the Enlightenment discarded both, enthroning reason and science as the West's governing authorities, an arrangement that still shapes the modern and postmodern mind. The lecture's verdict: the Reformation was a change from bad to good; the Enlightenment, for its architects, a change from bad to worse. Its implications for the church will occupy the lectures ahead.
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all thirteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. The Puritan understanding of conversion, seen in Bunyan, was
2. The book God used to convert George Whitefield was
3. Matthew Henry's commentaries remain timeless, the lecture argues, because they
4. In Henry's exposition of Romans 8, no condemnation means
5. After the Restoration, John Owen
6. Owen's formula on justification holds that we are justified
7. Thomas Watson was imprisoned in 1651 because
8. Watson's test in The Godly Man's Picture asks whether we
9. The Book of Concord of 1580
10. Pietism arose as a reaction against
11. The father of Pietism, author of Pia Desideria, was
12. The weakness the lecture names in Pietism was
13. The Enlightenment's decisive shift was to
All thirteen correct. Lecture 14 is complete.
The Puritans saw conversion as a long wrestling and modern evangelicalism often treats it as a moment. What are the pastoral strengths and dangers of each view?
Pietism corrected dead orthodoxy but sometimes undervalued doctrine in the process. How does a church keep truth and life bound together without letting the pendulum swing?
Watson asks whether the Bible in our home is a bosom friend or rusty armor. What would loving the word look like, concretely, in your week?
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
The lecture commends Matthew Henry's commentaries, Owen's works on mortification and The Death of Death, with modern guides for first-time readers, Watson's The Godly Man's Picture, and Scougal's The Life of God in the Soul of Man.