More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
continually be reformed to bring it more into line wit...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
It was not enough to reform how the church operated; the Reformation was about transforming individual lives, achieving not just an external Protestantism, but an internal, heart-felt evangelicalism.
Many began arguing that real reformation required that every part of the way the church worked must have direct biblical warrant.
In other words, they began to advocate Presbyterianism for the Church of England.
More than ever, Puritanism was now associated with sedition and anarchy.
1593 Parliamentary Act Against Puritans, the hanging of separatist leaders, and the placing of many major Puritan figures in dire peril.
such lampooning
Reared on a strict diet of haggis and Calvinism, James was the hope of every Puritan.
So, when Elizabeth died, before James even made it to London, he was presented with a petition from the Puritans, asking for a number of changes to be made to what they still saw as a slightly ‘popish’ prayer book.
Worse, James suspected that the Puritans were really angling for a Presbyterian church order, which, James said (in his thick Scottish burr) ‘agreeth as well with the monarch as God and the Devil.
The only significant Puritan idea that James did like was for a new version of the Bible to be prepared. James’ mind raced: at last he could be rid of those awkward marginal notes in the Geneva Bible that advocated such worrying things as disobedience to a bad king. And so King James’ authorized version of the Bible was commissioned.
Catholic Gunpowder Plot
Book of Sports,
To most Puritans, who by this time were generally strict Sabbatarians, this was nothing less than a direct challenge.
1620, meeting up with some eager émigrés in Plymouth, they set sail for the new world aboard the Mayflower.
It was a vision so attractive that soon tens of thousands were following it.
Richard Sibbes
Our discord is our enemy’s melody.’
The whole story of the Reformation in Britain shows how easily Protestantism could become a mere political party.
That is, the desire to have people respond to the gospel could lead to a focus on the response, not the gospel.
In other words, the danger for the Puritans was that they would be tempted to concentrate on holy living in response to the gospel at the expense of proclaiming the free, saving grace of God.
they were forced to a morbid introspection, attempting to see if their own hearts felt good enough, or if there was any faith there that they could trust in (and so trusting, not Christ, but their own faith for their salvation).
Sibbes then simultaneously held three of the most influential posts in England, using them to advance the message of a gracious God’s sweet gospel.
The verse Sibbes expounded refers, of course, to Jesus, and it is a striking feature of Sibbes’s preaching how strongly Christ-focused he is. And that is no accident: Sibbes sought to draw his audience’s eyes from their own hearts to the Saviour, for ‘there are heights, and depths, and breadths of mercy in him above all the depths of our sin and misery’. How so? Because, since ‘God’s love resteth on Christ, as well pleased in him, we may gather that he is as well pleased with us, if we be in Christ!’ Thus Christian confidence in our spiritual state rests not on our strength of faith or
...more
Sibbes believed that the solution to sin is not the attempt to live without sin, but the gospel of God’s free grace.
The Bruised Reed
Sibbes seems to suggest that, even in reforming the Reformation, the real spirit of reformation could be lost, and all the doubts and anxieties of medieval Catholicism come streaming back in through the back door of a zealous Christian moralism that had lost sight of the grace of God.
William Laud,
garbage. Instead, the crowd showed their support for the men. It was ominous, and yet it was not surprising: this was a generation reared on stories
of the martyrdoms under ‘Bloody’ Mary, all faithfully recorded by John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs, a work that had long been on display in every cathedral and many churches.
Unfortunately for Charles, while Knox had been dead for more than sixty years, his spirit was alive and kicking in Scotland.
The Scots gathered themselves together in a covenant (which many signed with their own blood), rejected Charles’ reforms, and, when two rather reluctant armies were sent north to deal with their impertinence, they beat them both.
Oliver Cromwell.
John Milton
1643 to 1649
One of the foremost and most prolific Puritan scholars was James Ussher, an old friend of Richard Sibbes’ and the Primate of All Ireland.
The Annals are a seminal attempt at a comprehensive history of the world up to AD 70, incorporating all available historical sources. Dated such scholarship may be today, but it was of the highest order of the time, and such mighty tomes as Ussher and his academic colleagues wrote were the ripe fruit of Puritanism’s ‘great period’.
It did mean, however, that England in the 1650s played host to a horde of radical groups.
Quakers
Mugglet...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Ranters
It was the Ranters in particular, with their defence of adultery and their public displays of nudity and ecstatic blasphemy, who were so useful to the critics of the Puritan enterprise of the Commonwealth.
The main thing, however, that began to turn people against the Puritan government was its attempt to enforce strict Christian behaviour on a nation.
Ordinary citizens, regardless of their spiritual state, were being made to live as if they were ‘the godly’, and they could not stomach it. It was an experience that would tar Puritanism ever after in the English mind, and people began to long for the easy ways of a ‘merry’ government.
1662
in 1664 the Conventicle Act outlawed
Five Mile Act
As a result of such direct flouting of the law, the persecution grew more intense, and some twenty thousand Puritans were sent to prison over the next twenty years.
John Bunyan,
Pilgrim’s Progress
