While Rome had held the clergy above the common people, declaring that only they could interpret the Scriptures, the Puritans followed the Reformers in insisting

that the Holy Spirit illumines the mind of any Christian as he or she reads the Bible. “Every godly man hath in him a spiritual light,” declared John White, “by which he is directed in the understanding of God’s mind revealed in His word.” Thomas Goodwin said with equal confidence that

The same Spirit that guided the holy apostles and prophets to write it must guide the people of God to know the meaning of it; and as he first delivered it, so must he help men to understand it.

What are we to make of this confidence that the Holy Spirit guides us in understanding the Bible? We must realize that Catholic allegorizing of the Bible had obscured Scripture, in effect making “the Pope the doorkeeper of Scripture, not the Holy Spirit.” Set in the context of ingenious Catholic allegorizing in which the Bible’s message was decipherable only by the clergy, the Puritan belief in the illumination of the Holy Spirit put the Bible back within the grasp of every reader. Thus John Ball could write:

We are not necessarily tied to the exposition of Fathers or Councils for the finding out of the sense of Scripture. Who is the faithful interpreter of Scripture? The Holy Ghost speaking in the Scripture is the only faithful interpreter of the Scripture.

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 146–147.

Six hundred years ago, Jan Hus wrote that “neither is the pope the head nor are the cardinals the whole body of the holy, universal, catholic church. For Christ alone is the head of that church, and his predestinate are the body and each one is a member, because his bride is one person with Jesus Christ” [The Church, ed. David S. Schaff (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 66.]. One hundred years later, Luther echoed those words. That Reformation tradition was carried forward by the Puritans. Leland Ryken writes:

   The greatest of all Puritan legacies in regard to ecclesiastical theory was also the most revolutionary in its time. It was the notion that the church is a spiritual reality. It is not impressive buildings or fancy clerical vestments. It is instead the company of the redeemed.
   The Puritans repeatedly showed their acceptance of Luther’s dictum that “The church is a spiritual assembly of souls. . . . The true, real, right, essential church is a matter of the spirit and not of anything external.” For William Gouge the church consists of those who “inwardly and effectively by the spirit . . . believe in Christ.’’ John Hooper denied that the church consists of “bishops, priests and such other,” affirming rather that it is “the company of all men hearing God’s Word and obeying unto the same.” Richard Baxter agreed: the church is “a holy Christian society for ordinary holy communion and mutual help in God’s public worship and holy living.”
   Implicit in these definitions of the church is a Puritan preference for the invisible church over a type of institutional structure. The church is emphatically not the professional clergy and their rituals. “What understand you by the church?” asked John Ball’s Catechism. The answer: “by the church, we understand not the pope. . . ; nor his bishops and cardinals met in general council. . . ; but the whole company of believers.” If the church is essentially invisible rather than institutional, its head is obviously not a pope or church council, but Christ. The Puritans reiterated this again and again, as when Gouge spoke of “that church whereof Christ is properly head.”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 115.