Biographies
5 authors · 11 books
English pastors of the late 1500s and 1600s who wanted a church reformed by Scripture and a life lived before God's face. Many were ejected from their pulpits in 1662, and wrote instead — books on sin and grace, the pastor's calling and the Christian's pilgrimage that are still read today.
Richard Sibbes (1577–1635) was an English Puritan preacher known in his own day as “the heavenly Doctor”. Where much Puritan preaching pressed hard on the conscience, Sibbes was famous for gentleness toward people who had already given up on themselves; his best-known book takes its title from Isaiah's promise that the bruised reed will not be broken.
English Puritan church leader and pastor at Kidderminster, ejected from the Church of England in 1662. A prolific author of practical divinity whose pastoral and devotional works became enduring Christian classics.
John Owen (1616–1683) was the foremost theologian of English Puritanism — chaplain to Cromwell, Dean of Christ Church and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, and after 1662 a dissenting minister barred from the universities he had led. He is famous for the density of his prose and for an unusually exact understanding of how sin actually works on a person, which is why The Mortification of Sin has outlived almost everything else written in its century on the subject.
English Nonconformist Puritan preacher and rector of St Stephen Walbrook in London, ejected from his living in 1662. He is remembered for warm, vivid, and remarkably accessible devotional writing.
English writer and Puritan preacher, a Bedford tinker by trade who was imprisoned for more than a decade for preaching without a licence. During that confinement he wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, one of the most published allegories in the English language.
The Puritans were English Protestants who pressed for a church and a daily life shaped wholly by Scripture. Their pastors are remembered for searching, practical preaching on the heart, conversion and assurance.
John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is the most-read Puritan book and the easiest way in. Richard Sibbes' The Bruised Reed is short and especially tender towards believers who feel weak.
The Act of Uniformity of 1662 required every minister of the Church of England to accept the whole Book of Common Prayer and episcopal ordination. Around two thousand ministers, Richard Baxter and Thomas Watson among them, would not conform and lost their livings.
