Iain
H. Murray states that the Puritan movement
in England believed so firmly in revivals of
religion as the great means by which the
Church advances in the world. It was
through the influence of the movement which
changed the spiritual direction of England
and Scotland so rapidly from hundred years
ago, making them Bible-reading nations and
witnesses to a creed so unflattering to
human nature (1971:3).
The Influence of the Puritan Preaching
on Mission and Revival Movements
The Puritans in their preaching,
devotional writings, and theology at once
gave a significant influence on the rise of
Great Awakenings and provide a launching pad
for modern mission movement. Charles E.
Hambrick-Stoue discusses:
Richard Baxter (1615-1691), known for
his irenic temperament, nevertheless,
brought a message of immediacy and
ultimacy, and both warning and promise.
The very title of one of his devotional
works reprinted (the 32nd edition!) in
Boston has a distinctively Great
Awakening tone: A Call to the
Unconverted to turn and live. The
Words on the page can be imagined from a
new England pulpit: “I beseech thee, I
charge thee, to hear and obey the Call
of God, and resolvedly to turn, that
thou must live. But if thou will not…I
summon thee answer for it before the
Lord” (1993:285-86).
D. M. Lloyd-Jones reveals that
Spurgeon, the greatest preacher of the
nineteenth century, literally lived upon the
Puritans. He says, “No man knew the works
of these people better than Charles Haddon
Spurgeon” (1962:9).
Missions by the beginning of the eighteenth
century were being directed more and more to
the non-church goer and to the heathen. As
in seventeenth century Puritanism, the
urgency and necessity of personal conversion
was thrust into the foreground. No
unconverted man enters heaven or escapes
hell. Thousands of unconverted,
indifferent, and uncertain people became
converted (Rooy 1965:316).
Paul Pierson (1997) states that Puritanism
had significant impact in its devotional and
theological writings on Pietism in Germany.
Again, Moravianism was developed out of
Pietism. Here he observes that Puritanism
initiated a chain mission movement in that
the first Western missionaries came from
Puritanism, Pietism as well as Moravianism.
These movements again had a major impact on
Evangelical revival.[1]
Murray indicates the influence of Puritan
mission theology on George Whitefield, the
great preacher in America from England. In
the transmission of the Puritan inheritance
from the seventeenth century to the pioneers
of the new missionary age which dawned at
the end of the eighteenth, the connecting
links were, supremely, George Whitefield and
Jonathan Edwards. In the late 1730’s it was
from such Puritan as Matthew Henry’s
Commentary that Whitefield learned much of
his theology; his subsequent thirteen
crossings of the Atlantic, his preachings to
Negroes and to all classes of hearers
witnessed to his contemporaries and to
following generation what that theology
could inspire (1991:135).
Murray also discusses the impact of the
influence of Puritan preaching upon William
Carey, the Father of modern mission
movement. William Carey was by upbringing a
latitudinarian Anglican who, after his
conversion, became a dissenter. Yet it was
Thomas Scott, an Anglican of Whitefield’s
school, who did much to mould his
convictions in the early years of his
Christian life. He was the author of
several books, including a History of the
Synod of Dort. This was the
international Synod convened in the
Netherlands in 618 to counter the rise of
Arminianism, and the five ‘heads’ of
doctrine affirming the effectual redemption
and find salvation of final salvation of all
whom God has chosen become known to history
as the Canons of Dort (:144-45).
Richard Baxter’s Influence on Mission
Richard Baxter had several direct contacts
with the mission worker for the Indians in
New England. From 1656 to at least 1682,
Baxter corresponded with John Eliot who
worked among the Indians, showing his great
interest in his work. He was also eager to
assist in securing of the new chapter of the
Corporation for the Propagation of the
Gospel in New England in 1666-1662. Again,
his Call to the Unconverted was
translated by Eliot and printed at the cost
of the organization (Rooy 1965:69).
Baxter’s preaching and writings influenced
many other key leaders and missionaries.
Quoting Rooy:
The father of John and Charles Wesley
heard Baxter preach and
said that his sermons seemed to glow
with ‘a strange fire and pathos.’ Young
John Wesley asked Philip Dodderidge for
advice on reading. Dodderidge pointed
to Baxter as the ‘highest in his esteem’
and his ‘particular favorite.’ Wesley
later thanked God for the discovery of
Baxter’s Aphorisms of Justification,
of which he published an extract in
1745. Both John and Charles Wesley as
well as Spurgeon, were influenced by
Baxter's Reformed Pastor
(:69).
Baxter’s missionary influence extended
beyond the bounds of his life and that
influence touched at many points the great
missionary movements of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries (:70).
Puritan Hope and Missionary Endeavor
Murray argues that Puritan belief on
Christ’s work and kingdom gave rise to the
first major missionary endeavor of English
Protestantism in the period prior to the
Civil War led to the emigration of some
15,000 persons to the shores of New England
between 1627 and 1640. Among the number
were many ministers who had been at
Cambridge in the time Sibbs and they were
not slow to see their spiritual
responsibility toward the heathen in the New
World. The seal of the colonists of
Massachusetts Bay, who arrived and settled
in 1628, had on at a North American Indian
with the words proceeding from his mouth,
“Come over and help us.” Murray quotes
Nehemiah Adams, saying: “This device on the
seal of their colony published to the world
the fact that they regarded themselves as
foreign missionaries to North America. This
was also the case with their brethren of the
Plymouth Colony who arrived eight years
before” (1991:92-93).
When the Pilgrim Fathers came to
Plymouth, New England of North America, they
arrived cherishing an instrumental vision of
God’s mission. Marshall and Manual describe
it in their work, The Light and the Glory:
“The Puritans had cherished a “great hope
and inward zeal” of at least playing a part,
if only as a stepping stone of others, in
carrying forth of the Light of Christ t o
remote parts of the world (1977:109).
Murray observes that the Puritan hope
was so influential in the origins of what
was to become a hundred and fifty years
later, worldwide missionary endeavor. The
hope is prominent throughout the missionary
tracts published in the 1640’s and 1650’s.
It is expressed in characteristic terms in
the preface to Thomas Shephard’s The
Clear Sunshine of the Gospel Breaking Forth
upon the Indians in New England, 1648,
where twelve prominent English Puritans
address their words ‘To the Right Honorable
the Lords and Commons, Assembled in High
Court of Parliament.’ The initial blessing
upon the work among the Indians, they
write, is only a pointer toward what is yet
to come:
The utmost ends of the earth are
designed and promised to be in time the
possessions of Christ…. This little we
see is something in hand, to earnest to
us those things which are in hope;
something in possession, to assure us of
the rest in promise, when the ends of
the earth shall see his glory, and the
kingdoms of the world shall become the
kingdom of the Lord and his Christ, when
he shall have dominion from sea to sea,
and they that dwell in the wilderness
shall bow before him (Ps. 22:27; Rev.
11:15; Ps.72:8-11). And if the dawn of
the morning be so delightful, what will
the clear day be? If the first fruits
be so precious, what will the whole
harvest be? If some beginnings be so
full of joy, what will it be when God
shall perform his whole work, when the
whole earth shall be full of the
knowledge of the Lord, as the waters
cover the sea (Isa.11:9, 10) and east
and west shall sing together the song of
the Lamb? (1991:144-45).
The Puritan’s Missionary Thrust in
America
The seventeenth century Puritans saw the
planting of the church in America as a great
step forward. This was God’s work. Their
calling was to claim the land and possess it
for God. Their sense of the oneness of life
and the Lordship of Christ made them sure
that this was a sacred calling (Rooy
1965:322).[2]
Best known of the Puritan missionaries to
the Indians was John Eliot (1604-1690),
whose biography, written, by Cotton Mather,
was to have far-reaching influence. Eliot
crossed the Atlantic in 1631 to minister to
English settlers. He was more than forty
when he began to study Algonquib—the
difficult language of the Indians of
Massachusetts (1991:93). Cotton Mather
comments, ‘Being by his prayers and
Pains thus furnished, he set himself
in the year 1646 to preach the gospel of our
Lord Jesus Christ among these desolate
outcasts’ (1852, 1967:562).
Eliot’s work—its thoroughness, hardships and
Christ-centerdness became an epic story. Of
his preaching, Mather says, ‘there was
evermore much of Christ in it.’ He became
also a pioneer Bible translator, completing
Genesis in 1661 (Murray 1991:93).
Eliot even prepared an apology or a
statement, advocating the ordination of the
Indians. He was far-sighted missiologically
in that he stated that Englishmen, law, and
language can be a hindrance to the Indian
church. Also the Mayhew family—four
generations—walked on Martha’s Vineyard
among “Indians.”
The Puritan Heritage in the Great
Awakening
Lloyd-Jones maintains that the history of
1662 was the mainspring behind the
Evangelical Awakening of the eighteenth
century or, at least, it helped to sustain
it. He discusses the influence of the
Puritan preaching on the rise of the Great
Evangelical Awakening:
Look at the next century, the
eighteenth century, and the great
Revival, the great Evangelical
Awakening, associated in the country
with people like Whitefield and the
Wesleys, Daniel Rowland and Howell
Harries, and others, and in America with
Jonathan Edwards….They read them (the
works and writings of the Puritans),
they studied them; and, sometimes, it is
rather amusing to notice in some of
their journals, they record not only
that they read the works of those
Puritans, but even charged one another
with actually preaching sermons of the
Puritans without acknowledgment!
(1962:9).
Proponents of the revival in New
England drew upon long established English
and seventeenth century American Puritan
devotional practices and patterns of
spiritual experience both to fuel and guide
the Great Awakening in their region. These
efforts took place locally in the pulpit and
in the context of personal work
(Hambrick-Stowe 1993:280-281).
Among the books published during the
period of the Great Awakening are found an
astonishing number of reprints of
seventeenth century devotional tracts and
manuals. Many of these were old favorites
by English Non-conformist giants, such as
John Owen, John Flavel, John Bunyan, James
Janeway, Benjamin Keach, Thomas Gonge,
Thomas Doalittle, Willians Burnitt, Richard
Baxter, and many others, all of whom died
before 1710 (281).
Reprinted seventeenth century books
gave voice to the central theme of the Great
Awakening, the rebirth of the soul from
sin. Thomas Gong (1609-1681) whose The
Young Man’s Guide was republished in
1742, argued: “It is necessary to be
converted, that so thou mayst live. Thou
dyest without Remedy, thou dyest without
Money, if thou turn not.” The directness
associated with New Light preaching could
readly be found in the classics (285-286).
The Publication of the
English Puritan Writings
During the Great Awakening
Hambrick-Stowe
depicts Puritan Devotional Practices in New
England.
Proponents of the revival in the New
England similarly drew upon long
established English and seventeenth
century American Puritan devotional
practices and patterns of spiritual
experience both to fuel and to guide
the Great Awakening in their region.
These efforts took place locally in the
pulpit and in the context of pastoral
work. On and broader, regional scale,
New Light leaders specifically promoted
the revivals of the 1730's and 1740's
through their use of print media
(1993:281).
Hambrick-Stowe again observes that Puritan
preaching has influences on the Great
Awakening Preachers in many ways. Puritans
seeking to promote the revival through their
own revival of evangelistic preaching with
renewed emphasis on the “use of terror” and
the immediate call for repentance and faith,
found support for their “innovations” in the
writings of their Puritan forebears (:286).
Jonathan Edward’s Puritan
Approach to Preaching
According to Packer, Jonathan Edwards was a
true Puritan in his approach to preaching.
Like his seventeenth century predecessors,
he preached with a threefold aim: to make
men understand, feel, and respond to gospel
truth. Like them, he set out the matter of
his sermons according to the threefold
‘method’ of proposition, proof, and
application—‘doctrine, reason, and use’, as
the Puritans called it. Like them he
studied plainness of style, concealing his
learning beneath a deliberately bold clarity
of statement.
Jonathan Edward’s Concert of Prayer is also
the reflection of his Puritan conviction
that not human methods but only sovereign
grace could reach the sinner. With this
conviction, he made urgent prayer necessary
for the progress of the gospel. His
Concert of Prayer proved to be one of
the greatest factors in awakening the
Protestant churches to their mission calling
(Rooy 1965:321).