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Puritan Preaching

Puritan preaching was the bane of the Anglican establishment. Starved on a diet of liturgy and homilies prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer, parishioners would travel for miles to hear the genuine preaching of Puritan pastors. Congregations sat with pleasure through typically hour-long sermons, usually two per Sunday.

The Puritans favored “painful preaching.” By “painful” they meant painstaking, meticulous, prepared with diligence to rightly divide the Word.

   Despite their bent toward doctrine and theology, the Puritans overwhelmingly favored expository sermons that “opened” the meanings of a specific biblical passage. William Ames paid his disrespect to topical preaching that slighted the announced text from the Bible:
Ministers impose upon their hearers and altogether forget themselves when they propound a certain text in the beginning as the start of the sermon and then speak many things about or simply by occasion of the text but for the most part draw nothing out of the text itself.
   The physical opening of the Bible in the pulpit during the service symbolized the aim of expository preaching, which was to unfold the latent meanings of a specific biblical text.
   This aim, in turn, determined the methodology of Puritan preachers, which was to tie the entire sermon to the chosen text in the Bible. William Chappell defined a sermon as “a discourse on a text of scripture, disposing its parts according to the order of nature.” the Puritans were strong advocates of application in a sermon, as we will see, but it all started with the Bible itself. In the words of William Ames, “first the things in the text must be stated. . . . In setting forth the truth in the text the minister should first explain it and then indicate the good which flows from it.”
   Of the customary three parts of a Puritan sermon, two were closely tied to the Bible itself. According to the Dictionary of Public Worship adopted by the Westminster Assembly,
In raising doctrines from the text, his care ought to be, first, that the matter be the truth of God. Secondly, that it be a truth contained in, or grounded on, that text that the hearers may discern how God teaches it from thence.
This conviction about the centrality of the Bible in preaching was reinforced by the practice of largely or exclusively limiting the details of the sermon to biblical material. William Perkins, for example, encouraged the reading of patristic sources in sermon preparation, but also the concealment if his study in the citations made from the pulpit.
   The effect of this type of biblical preaching has been well summarized by a modern scholar who studied a century of the St. Paul’s Cross sermons preach in London:
For the Puritans, the sermon is not just hinged to Scripture; it quite literally exists inside the Word of God; the text is not in the sermon, but the sermon is in the text. . . . Put summarily, listening to a sermon is being in the Bible.

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 98–99.

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Posted in: Alexander Niccholes · Church History · Leland Ryken · William Ames · William Chappell · Worldly Saints
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Puritan Preaching

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