Primary Authors & Sources
Students read the classic English Puritan and Restoration church historians Daniel Neal, Benjamin Brook, and John Stoughton—Neal’s History of the Puritans, Brook’s Lives of the Puritans, and Stoughton’s Ecclesiastical History of England from the Civil Wars through the Restoration. Daniel Neal’s History of the Puritans; or, Protestant Nonconformists remains the standard narrative of Elizabethan to Stuart nonconformity—suffering, parties, and the long contest with the establishment. Benjamin Brook’s Lives of the Puritans supplies the biographical companion: ministers, confessors, and local churches remembered by name. John Stoughton’s Ecclesiastical History of England then carries the story through the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth, and the Restoration church—how Puritanism became denomination and how episcopacy returned. Together they serve Reformed ministry that knows its English nonconformist inheritance.
What You Will Study
Students examine post-Reformation developments including Puritanism, Pietism, confessional orthodoxy, denominational formation, and the global spread of Protestant missions from the seventeenth through eighteenth centuries. The course covers Westminster Assembly, English Civil War religion, New England Puritan experiment, Reformed scholasticism, and early evangelical awakenings that prepared modern missionary movement. Readings include Puritan devotional and polemical works alongside historical studies of how Reformed churches organized worship, discipline, and education in diverse national contexts. Students analyze tensions between confessional precision and experiential piety, church establishment and dissent, and Old World inheritance with New World adaptation. Attention falls on how Puritan theology shaped American Protestant culture and its continuing influence on Reformed house churches.
Course Objectives
Objectives include tracing Puritan theology and practice from England to New England, explaining post-Reformation confessional development in Reformed and Lutheran churches, evaluating Pietism's influence on evangelical spirituality, and identifying origins of modern denominational identities. Students will write essays on Sabbath observance, covenant theology in church life, and Puritan preaching with primary source engagement. The course aims to connect historical Puritanism with contemporary Reformed piety without uncritical nostalgia. Students will compare scholastic Reformed orthodoxy with later liberal and evangelical trajectories. Assessments require fair treatment of both achievements and failures in post-Reformation Protestant history.
Ministry & Life Application
Post-Reformation history shows how gospel doctrine produces communities of worship, discipline, and mission when embraced with sincerity and intellectual rigor. Ministers influenced by Puritan heritage preach with earnest application and congregational accountability that house church settings can adapt wisely. Pastoral leaders across the Florida Keys learn from both Puritan strengths in family religion and their errors in civil magistrate theology. This course equips elders to appreciate confessional Protestant inheritance while avoiding historical idealization. Congregations benefit when shepherds understand the lineage of faith that produced their Bibles, catechisms, and hymn traditions.