Meet the Puritans

This in the first in a multi-part series. Stay tuned over the next few months to read more on how the Puritans teach us to live in the world! Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and...

John Geere (c. 1601–1649) was an ordained minister in Church of England, serving on the western border of England and Wales. Though aligning himself with both England’s Crown and Church, Geere did not conform to all the ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer, and after 1624 he was silenced by the...

Philip McCosker and Denys Turner, eds., The Cambridge Companion to the Summa Theologiae , Cambridge Companions to Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 368pp. Paperback. $34.99. Regardless of one’s theological convictions, it is undeniable that the Summa Theologiae of Thomas...

A rticle 37 introduces the final topic of the 39 Articles, the relationship between the Christian and the commonwealth. It is customary for North Americans to dismiss these articles as being very specific to England, but the same principle we have observed throughout our study continues here: the...

Meet the Puritans readers! This book is an excellent primer on an important article of the Westminster Confession. When the Westminster Confession says, " The visible Church, which is also catholic or universal under the gospel...out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation," what...

His Theology of Justification Compared W e've considered William Tyndale’s doctrine of justification; now we'll compare him with Augustine and Luther. Particularly, we’ll view Luther’s prologue to Romans alongside Tyndale, since the latter depended much on the former for the flow and content of the...

I n a brief but hilarious reformation21 blog post , " Can You Speak Gospelese? ", Paul Levy noted that the word “gospel,” had become “an adjective which if you want people to think you’re kosher in conservative evangelicalism you add it, seemingly, to everything.” Thus, there are churches, and...

T he doctrine of Scripture has often been the battleground on which the fate of true and false religion is decided. In the seventeenth-century, Roman Catholics taught the authority of Scripture, while denying its sufficiency and clarity. Socinians taught the sufficiency and clarity of Scripture,...

His Theology of Justification Considered I n our last post, we looked at William Tyndale’s foundational theology of the Word of God. In this post, we make a start on his theology of justification. Next time, we will consider his dependence upon and departure from both Augustine and Luther on this...

Before she was twenty, Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) made a long and treacherous voyage to the New World with her husband and family. She would become America's first published poet; she would also endure a number of physical and spiritual harships. Through it all, her poetry showed a continual...