If you choose to resist evil and you choose it firmly, then ways of carrying out that resistance will open up around you.

In the 1979 book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, Philip Hallie writes, “During the four years of the German occupation of France, the village of Le Chambon, with a population of about three thousand impoverished people, saved the lives of about five thousand [Jewish] refugees (most of them children)” (xiii).

“This village, as a whole community, worked to save the innocent.”

Hallie’s book is more than a historical retelling of a rescue effort. I would describe it as an ethical forensic analysis, looking for the root causes that explain why this village, as a whole community, worked to save the innocent. What amazes me most is how three thousand people together agreed to give themselves to the rescue.

Rescue the Perishing

It’s inspiring, to be sure, to read of individuals who answered the call to “rescue those who are being taken away to death” (Proverbs 24:11). German Christian Fritz Graebe, for example, delivered hundreds of Jews to safety during the same time period. He came to be known as “the Moses of Rovno.” The work broke him physically, depleted his resources, and forced him to cut himself off from his family lest they be endangered by his actions. He said it was the Golden Rule that guided him. Graebe’s life testifies to the truth of Isaiah 32:8: “He who is noble plans noble things, and on noble things he stands.”

It’s a further wonder to me, beyond the heroics of individuals, how families risked their lives during this time. Exposure multiplies as the number of people involved increases — and the blow falls not just on any group, but on their family.

My admiration for Casper (Papa) Ten Boom and his family starts here. Proverbs 24:10 says, “If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small.” The day of adversity in view in this passage is not the day you lose your job, or even the day you find out your loved one has cancer, painful as those experiences are. No, the day of adversity is when you witness the intentional killing of innocent human beings. On that day, if you shrink back in fearful self-preservation, your faith is weak and God-belittling. The opposite is expected. “Rescue those who are being taken away to death” (Proverbs 24:11).

Casper was in his eighties when the Germans seized the Netherlands. His daughter Betsy was exceedingly frail her whole life. Corrie, the youngest, was in her fifties and was a watchmaker. Yet they ran to the point of the spear and rescued over five hundred Jews from death before being betrayed and imprisoned. Only Corrie survived.

Wonder of Le Chambon

The stories of individuals and families risking their lives are truly remarkable. How much more wondrous, then, that a whole village — with its spectrum of personalities and beliefs and its wide range of maturity, spiritual and otherwise — should agree to risk their lives and coordinate their efforts to rescue five thousand Jewish refugees.

Le Chambon’s residents were descendants of Huguenots (French Protestants of the Reformed tradition). “During hundreds of years of persecution, her pastors and her people were arrested by the dragoons of the king and then hanged or burned either in Le Chambon itself or in Montpellier to the south” (25). When the Jews were marked for slaughter, the village, led by the biblically reflective pastor André Trocmé and his pragmatic, action-oriented wife, Magda, held a proud identity and template for resistance.

I came across Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed around 1987. I was a pastor of a small inner-city church in Boston. Five years later, I was leading a citywide effort to organize churches in setting up the first of six ultrasound-equipped medical clinics dedicated to rescuing the innocent, one mother and baby at a time. My wife, Kristen, and several other women provided the original workforce. They met with women and couples in a pregnancy-related crisis and labored to help each one discover God’s provision as a parent or through adoption.

“Rescuing the innocent is not new; it’s just our turn.”

By 2002, I was writing a brief book for my fellow pastors on leading well in this sensitive but preeminent moral crisis. I wanted to examine from Scripture how defending the innocent is an outworking of the gospel itself. I also wanted to provide historical examples to show that rescuing the innocent is not new; it’s just our turn. After I went back to the midwives in Egypt and gathered examples through the ages, I suddenly remembered Le Chambon.

I pulled Hallie’s book from my shelf and was stunned. It was full of scribbled side comments and observations on André Trocmé. His motives, methods, setbacks, and sufferings were heavily underlined. I read several invocations from my past self: “Do this to respond to the SOIB!” (shorthand for “shedding of innocent blood”). Though I had forgotten the source, here were the prompts that explained my own efforts to rescue the perishing. Thirty-five years later, they still do.

Move Toward Rescue

Hallie summarizes a theme in Trocmé’s sermons like this: “If you choose to resist evil and you choose it firmly, then ways of carrying out that resistance will open up around you” (92). Was this not the case with the Samaritan? He drew near to an innocent man about to die, and then figured out how to save him. Fritz Graebe did not look for a book on how to rescue the innocent from slaughter. He resolved to do for others what he would want others to do for him if he was marked for death. He figured it out from there.

Nor did Corrie Ten Boom take a class in crisis-intervention strategies. She and her family felt compelled by the law of love to resist a preeminent injustice whatever the cost. Once resolved, opportunities presented themselves. Similarly, villagers in Le Chambon were mostly poor shopkeepers and farmers. Yet their resolve catalyzed an organizational effort worthy of scholarly analysis.

In God’s kindness, he has given me my own story of moving toward rescue. In 2006, after discovering that Miami had over thirty abortion businesses, almost all of which targeted minority neighborhoods, I felt burdened to go to Miami. I did not know a single person in that city. I sat in a local Panera, mapping out the plague by neighborhoods, and prayed, “Lord, I am here. Now what?” Soon after, a friend from Boston called me. He said, “Call my friend, Pastor Al Pino, in Miami Springs.” A year later, we stood together as we dedicated Heartbeat of Miami, a minority-led, ultrasound-equipped, church-supported pregnancy help clinic. It later expanded into four clinics, and since then, they’ve rescued over 55,000 mothers and babies from abortion.

In 2010, God brought me to China, where abortion, infanticide, and gendercide (the killing of baby girls mostly) is especially concentrated. The infamous one-child policy was in full force. I was able to meet with 75 house church pastors in the unregistered (underground) church in Beijing and present them with the four questions that have proved most helpful to me in “answering the crisis of abortion with the gospel of life.”

Now, after 29 trips to China, I can testify that the Christian leaders there used those four questions to train up an army of good Samaritans (over three million to date) committed to treasuring human life, rejecting abortion, experiencing God’s forgiveness, and rescuing the innocent, one mother and baby at a time.

God Meets Us to Save

We often experience those “it just so happened” moments, when our obedience meets God’s providence. Trocmé was saying, “Count on this happening!”

Let me offer a final example of the wisdom of his advice. Last September, in Bogota, Colombia, I handed out fetal models to 160 Christian leaders who were determined to lead well in resisting abortion.

After lunch, one pastor said that on his way to the restaurant, he met a woman who was clearly pregnant and in distress. He learned that her father was an acquaintance of his and was coercing his daughter into abortion by kicking her out of his home. He went to see her father straightaway and handed him the fetal model just received. The father choked up at the sight. The two then pledged to find God’s provision for his daughter and grandchild. And they did. Baby Violet was born December 15, 2021.

“If you choose to resist evil and you choose it firmly, then ways of carrying out that resistance will open up around you.”

Many people know C.S. Lewis as the author and creator of Narnia. A slightly smaller group know him as a remarkably effective Christian apologist. An even smaller group appreciate him as a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature. Fewer recognize him as a prophet of civilizational doom. But he was.

In a number of essays, in his lectures on The Abolition of Man, and then in his novel That Hideous Strength, Lewis clearly, patiently, and methodically identifies and warns his readers about an existential threat to Western civilization, and indeed to humanity as a whole.

This threat is a pernicious error that enables tyrannical power and totalitarianism. It’s a fatal superstition that slowly erodes and destroys a civilization. It’s a disease that can end our species and damn our souls. Lewis calls it “the poison of subjectivism.”

Doctrine of Objective Value

Until modern times, nearly all men believed that truth and goodness were objective realities and that human beings can apprehend them. Through reason, we examine and study and wonder at reality. When our thoughts correspond to the objective order of reality, we speak of truth. When our emotional reactions correspond to the objective order of reality, we speak of goodness.

Lewis refers to this as the doctrine of objective value, or, in shorter form, “the Tao.” The doctrine of objective value, Lewis writes, is

the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. . . . And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). (Abolition of Man, 18–19)

Poison of Subjectivism

The poison of subjectivism upends this ancient and humane way of viewing the world. Reason itself is debunked — or we might say today that reason is deconstructed. Instead of the human capacity to participate in the eternal Logos, reason is simply an epiphenomenon that accompanies certain chemical and electrical events in the cortex, which is itself the product of blind evolutionary processes. Put more simply, reason is simply an accidental and illusory brain secretion.

“Under the influence of this poison, moral value judgments are simply projections of irrational emotions.”

Under the influence of this poison, moral value judgments are simply projections of irrational emotions onto an indifferent cosmos. Truth and goodness are merely words we apply to our own subjective psychological states, states that we have been socially conditioned to have. And if we have been socially conditioned in one way, we might be socially conditioned in another.

Education Old and New

Lewis thus refers to the apostles of subjectivism as “conditioners” rather than teachers. Under the old vision of reality, the task of education was to “train in the pupil those responses which are themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists” (22). Teachers accomplished this through initiation; they invited students into the same experience of reality in which they lived.

The new education merely conditions. Having removed all objective value and consideration from reality, they are “free” to shape and mold future generations into whatever they want. Having seized the reins of social conditioning, they will condition for their own purposes (wherever those happen to come from) and with little or no regard for the constraints of custom, tradition, truth, or goodness. Lewis concisely describes the difference in the old and new education:

The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds — making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation — men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda. (24)

How Subjectivism Conditions

Lewis shrewdly demonstrates the subtlety of conditioning in his fiction. In Orwell’s 1984, O’Brien forces Winston to confess that 2+2=5 under the threat of having his face eaten by rats. In Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, Mark Studdock is conditioned with both carrots and sticks, lures and threats. He is enticed chiefly by social pressure, as his conditioners work on his desire to be “on the inside,” his “lust for the Inner Ring.” Accordingly, they work on his fear of being left out, cast out, and ostracized. Social pressure, more so than direct threats of physical violence, are the tools of Lewis’s conditioners.

In this, Lewis was remarkably prescient. Who among us can’t recognize the impression-shaping propaganda in social-media algorithms, in Twitter bans, in the cancellation of YouTube channels? What we hear and say daily, what we scroll past and click through, what we see and come to assume — all of these are meant to condition us by detaching us from the Straight, the True, the Good, even the Normal. Such conditioning is meant to aid the sinful human tendency to suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

Richard Hooker, the English Reformer and a hero of Lewis, once wrote of the destructive effect of ungodly customs.

Perverted and wicked customs — perhaps beginning with a few and spreading to the multitude, and then continuing for a long time — may be so strong that they smother the light of our natural understanding, because men refuse to make an effort to consider whether their customs are good or evil. (Divine Law and Human Nature, 43)

The poison of subjectivism removes the ordinary checks to such error and evil by denying that good and evil objectively exist at all. And yet, because we live in God’s world and not the world of our fevered imaginations, we can’t escape the pressure of the objective moral order, pressing upon us both from our conscience and from the Scriptures.

Our Cultural Insanity

The result, as Lewis again so ably highlights, is a kind of absurd tragi-comedy. It would be funny if it were not so sad. In Lewis’s memorable words, “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful” (27).

As prophetic as Lewis was in his warnings, not even he seemed to have imagined the insanity that subjectivism would lead to. While he clearly saw that such poison would infect our sexuality, the most twisted form that he portrayed was the grotesque femininity of Fairy Hardcastle. But compared to the demented debauchery of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, Miss Hardcastle seems almost quaint.

What’s more, Lewis thought that the practical need for results in the hard sciences would limit the infection of subjectivism when it comes to research. But in the twenty-first century, we are witnessing technological and scientific advances employed in the service of subjectivism. Some of the latest “advances” in medicine are used not to heal, but to maim; not to restore the body to its proper function, but to mutilate the body and render it impotent or barren. In a literal fulfillment of Lewis’s warning, “We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Readiness Is All

What then can be done to stave off civilizational doom, the end of our species, and the damnation of souls? Books could be written (and have been written) in answer to that question. But a simple answer runs like this: we can cultivate communities that, by the grace of God, love God and the objective order that he has made, and are ready to act in a world poisoned by subjectivism.

“We can cultivate communities that, by the grace of God, love God and the objective order that he has made.”

Such communities include churches where the good news of Jesus is faithfully proclaimed in word and deed, where refugees from the world are welcomed in the name of Jesus, and where apostles of the world are refuted by the word of God. These communities include families that glory in God’s goodness in manhood and womanhood, that seek to live fruitfully on God’s mission in the world, and that raise children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

These communities include schools that love the truth and do the good, that explain reality without explaining it away, that seek to form students into mature Christians who live with resilient joy in the midst of this broken world.

Such is the need, and the hour is late. But the readiness is all, and our God is still in heavens, and he does all that he pleases.

ABSTRACT: When the Act of Uniformity (1662) mandated that all English clergy must adhere to the Book of Common Prayer, controversy ensued among the Puritans. Some Puritans, like John Owen and John Bunyan, argued that written prayers in corporate worship violated Scripture and could quench the Spirit. Others, like Richard Baxter, resisted the Act of Uniformity, but still maintained that written prayers could aid Christians’ corporate worship and prevent disorder. Their disagreement reveals how greatly the Puritans prized biblical worship; it also calls Christians today to pray from sincere and engaged hearts, with words shaped by Scripture.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors, leaders, and teachers, we asked Dr. Greg Salazar, Assistant Professor of Historical Theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, to explore the disagreement among the Puritans on the use of written prayers in corporate worship.

The last seventy years have witnessed a resurgence in interest in the Puritans. Two events in particular have catapulted the Puritans from the dusty pages of history into the center of mainstream Calvinism. The first was the establishing Banner of Truth Trust in 1957 in order to republish the classics of Puritan literature. Then, recent decades have witnessed the emergence of the New Calvinist movement, which finds its historical and theological roots within the Puritan movement. The result is that there are many (myself included) who are zealous to put down the often-repeated stereotype that the Puritans were those who had “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”1

Some observers of Christianity also have noted how some evangelicals (including those who identify as Reformed) have drifted toward a more liturgical approach to worship.2 In recent years, Christians have desired to understand the Puritans’ view of the use of written prayers in both corporate and private worship. Although many Puritans argued against the Book of Common Prayer’s prescription to use written prayers in corporate worship, some Puritans believed that such a practice was consistent with biblical worship. Moreover, most Puritans — even those who were opposed to the use of written prayers in public worship — believed that it was perfectly legitimate to use written prayers in one’s own private or even family worship.

This article will examine the most important arguments put forward by some of the most influential Puritans — particularly John Owen, John Bunyan, Richard Baxter, and Matthew Henry. It will survey their arguments for and against the use of written prayers in both public and private worship. It will end by exploring four lessons we can learn from studying the Puritans’ perspectives on these important issues.

Persecuted Puritans

In order to grasp why many Puritan divines opposed the use of any set prayers in public worship, it is important to remember the historical context in which the Puritans lived and ministered.3 The Puritan movement began in the early 1560s, when the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I ascended to the throne, following the death of her Catholic sister, Queen Mary I. As a result of this transition, English Puritans were able to return home from Continental Europe (particularly John Calvin’s Geneva), where they had been living in exile to avoid Catholic persecution.

They brought with them newly forged convictions about the nature of biblical — and, in their mind, truly reformed — doctrine, worship, and church polity. They believed the Church of England — with its commitment doctrinally to the Thirty-nine Articles, liturgical set forms of prayer (outlined in the Book of Common Prayer), and episcopal polity — was a “half-reformed” church in need of further reformation along the lines of Calvin’s Geneva. Thus, for the next century, they sought to reform the Church of England. Some pursued these ideals as somewhat-loyal members of the Church of England, while others remained outside the established church and attempted (and often failed) to set up structures alongside it.

While the first eighty years of the Puritan movement saw little success, the 1640s and 1650s were the golden age — insofar as the Puritans’ aspiration of forming a national church on Puritan principles was now within their grasp. However, when Puritanism’s political leader, Oliver Cromwell, died in 1658 and his son Richard took his place as Lord Protector of England, Oliver’s son lacked the charismatic leadership and giftedness of his father. Within two years, Puritans concluded that their vision of a national church would be better executed in the stable soil of a restored monarchy rather than a failing republic. Consequently, the Puritans invited Charles II — son of Charles I, whom they executed in 1649 — out of exile to reinstate the monarchy.

The initial negotiations between parliament and Charles II for a “broadly inclusive” national church that would grant liberty to Puritan consciences around polity and worship looked promising. However, following the failure to reach a consensus on the particular scope and structures of the newly forming church and the election of a new slate of young “Cavalier” Anglicans to parliament in 1661, the political and ecclesiastical tide turned wholly in favor of the Anglicans and against the now-marginalized Puritans.

Now, not only were the Puritans’ hopes for a broadly inclusive national church dashed, but the likelihood of persecution was imminent as the established church handed down a mandate known as the Act of Uniformity (1662). The Act of Uniformity required all ordained English clergy to repudiate their former presbyterian ordination and political allegiances and to submit themselves to reordination by a bishop and to adherence to the liturgical ideals outlined in the Book of Common Prayer, which had had just been revised in a more Anglican direction. Those ministers who failed to conform in writing would lose both their ministerial posts and the livings tied to those posts.4 In the end, over two thousand clergymen in England and Wales failed to conform and were ejected from their pulpits and livings. It was the most significant and systematic persecution of Puritans in their over one-hundred-year history.5

Against Written Prayers in Corporate Worship

Given their conviction that the Church of England was a “half-reformed” church and their experience of persecution by the church they sought to reform, it is not surprising that many Puritan divines opposed the use of any written prayers in public worship. Consider some of the arguments Puritans like John Owen and John Bunyan raised against the practice.

Written prayers violate the regulative principle.

The clearest reason Puritans opposed such prayers is because they believed their use violated the regulative principle for worship — namely, that nothing should be done in corporate worship unless it is prescribed by God’s word.

In one of the most formidable defenses of the regulative principle and his most extended critique on the Church of England, John Owen (1616–1683) argued that his commitment to the regulative principle of worship, and particularly the second commandment, necessitated his opposition to the use of written prayers in public worship.6 Owen argued that they were “a human invention” and an idolatrous violation of the second commandment.7 He even contended that though the apostles were inspired by the Holy Spirit to write Scripture, they were never inspired to write “prescribe[d] forms of prayer, either for the whole church or single persons.”8 Thus, he concludes, if the very apostles were never tasked with this duty, “there is no such especial promise given unto any, this work of composing prayer.”9 Owen’s explanation for why written prayers existed in corporate worship was simple: throughout human history since the fall, man has devised other ways to “worship” God than those prescribed by the Lord himself as “revealed in the Word of God.”10

“The Puritans possessed a vital zeal to worship God according to the prescriptions of Scripture.”

John Bunyan (1628–1688) likewise defended the regulative principle of worship, specifically opposing written prayers because he “did not find” them “commanded in the word of God.”11 Simply put, these Puritans forbade the use of written prayers in corporate worship because the practice was not prescribed in Scripture.

Written prayers are a Catholic and even Old Testament practice.

Second, Puritans believed the use of written prayers in corporate worship was a Catholic and Old Testament practice. For example, both Owen and Bunyan argued that the Church of England’s use of written prayers rendered it guilty of the Catholic Church’s error of worshiping according to human invention.12 Owen went even further to argue that it reduced worship “to the very state and condition wherein they were in Judaism” and therefore was antithetical to Christ’s saving work. For Christ “delivered his disciples from the yoke of Mosaical institutions,” and the very destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70 was a providential indication that a transition had taken place in the worship of God. In short, the Old Testament pattern was literally “buried in the ruins of the city and temple,” making it impossible to worship God in that way.13

Prayer is chiefly inward.

Third, Puritans argued that the Book of Common Prayer could not facilitate what was chiefly an inward, spiritual, sincere engagement of the affections expressed in external words. Following the Act of Uniformity, John Bunyan was imprisoned for his nonconformity and was denied the opportunity to be released from prison because he would not promise to cease preaching according to Puritan principles. Bunyan’s opposition to the use of written prayers in corporate worship was a central point of his trial discussion with authorities, especially Sir John Keeling, which took place seven weeks after his initial imprisonment.

In Bunyan’s Discourse Touching Prayer (1662), published during his imprisonment, he argued that the use of written prayers opposed the very essence of true prayer that was to be “with the spirit and with understanding” (see 1 Corinthians 14:15).14 Citing texts like Jeremiah 29:12–13 and echoing John Calvin and Matthew Henry, Bunyan said, “Prayer is a sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the heart or soul to God . . . for such things as God hath promised, or, according to the Word.”15 When he was asked by Keeling at his imprisonment trial if one could “pray with the spirit, and with understanding” using “the Common Prayer-book,” Bunyan replied that he was convinced “that it is impossible that all the Prayer-Books that men have made in the world should lift up or prepare the heart,” for “it is not the mouth that is the main thing to be looked at in prayer, but whether the heart be so full of affection and earnestness in Prayer with God.” When authorities defended the use of written prayers by arguing that “prayers made by men” “are good to teach, and help men to pray,” Bunyan replied that while “one man may tell another how he should pray,” neither he nor the prayer book could help that man “make his condition known to God” or “stirreth up in our hearts desires to come to God,” since that was the Spirit’s work to assist the believer in prayer (Romans 8:26).16

Indeed, Puritans believed that there was nothing distinctly spiritual about the utterance of specific familiar forms, for true spirituality involved engaging the affections in prayer, for only “then the whole man is engaged.”17 Since an emphasis on the importance of heart religion was a major theme laced throughout all of Puritan theology, it is not surprising that it would be central to their understanding of prayer.

Written prayers quench the Spirit.

Fourth, Bunyan and Owen argued that written prayers not only failed to facilitate true prayer, but quenched the Holy Spirit.18 Owen called written prayers “a stinted form of prayers,” whose “constant and unvaried use . . . may become a great occasion of quenching the Spirit.”19 Likewise, the Welsh Independent preacher Walter Cradock (c. 1606–1659) said that those who require using written prayers in public worship “restrain the Spirit of God in the Saints” as well as in the minister himself. For although a minister would come to the Lord in public prayer burdened to pour “out his soul to the Lord” for his congregation, he was “tied to an old Service Book” requiring him to “read” it until they “grieved the Spirit of God, and dried up” their “spirit[s] as a chip.”20

Ministers lead using Spirit-empowered public prayers.

Finally, Puritans argued that ministers were empowered to lead God’s people in corporate worship by the Spirit, rather than by the written words of man. Owen argued that the use of written prayers actually “render[ed] useless” Christ’s true means for leading in public prayer — namely, his “sending the holy Spirit . . . to enable” the minister to lead the congregation in “Divine Worship.”21 In Owen’s mind, there were two kinds of ministers: those who rightly administered the “holy things in his assemblies” by aid of the Holy Spirit, and those who ministered “by the prescription of a form of words” of men.22 Similarly, Bunyan said that even if ministers “had a thousand Common-Prayer-Books” but lacked the “Spirit,” they would “know not what [they] should pray for as [they] ought,” but would be “like the Sons of Aaron, offering with strange fire” (Levitcus 10:1–2).23 Owen and Bunyan likewise argued that since the Spirit must equip ministers with the ability to pray extemporaneously in public prayer, by extension those who relied on the prayer-book liturgy for public prayer lacked the necessary spiritual gifting from God for ministry.24 Puritans sought to even provide less-competent ministers with tools — like Nathaniel Vincent’s “Directions how to attain unto the gift of prayer and readiness of expression in that duty” — to help them grow in extemporaneous prayer.25

For Written Prayers in Corporate Worship

However, while the above arguments were pervasive throughout the Puritan movement, there were other Puritans — most notably, Richard Baxter (1615–1691) — who were open to using written prayers in corporate worship. While Baxter extolled extemporaneous prayer, understood these arguments against written prayers, and had significant concerns about (and desired to reform) the Book of Common Prayer, he nevertheless believed there were some advantages to using written prayers and, like John Calvin, composed set prayers for use in public worship.26 He even went so far as to compose a Puritan alternative to the Book of Common Prayer, complete with liturgical forms and written prayers drawn principally from Scripture and especially the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments.27 He drafted it in only two weeks and claimed that he only used the Bible, his biblical concordance, and the Westminster “Assemblies Directory.”28 He hoped that his Reformed Liturgy (as it would be called) might be a substitite prayer book that his fellow moderate Presbyterians and Anglican opponents could both support.29 What follows are some of Baxter’s arguments in favor of the use of written prayers in corporate worship.

Written prayers can prevent disorder and unnecessary repetition.

First, Baxter argued that the use of written prayers in worship could prevent disorder and unnecessary repetition in public prayer. He argued that the public “prayers of many a weak Christian” were so plagued by “disorder and repetitions and unfit expressions” that he preferred that they use written prayers.30 He claimed that other Puritans held the same position, saying that the Westminster Assembly divine Simeon Ashe (1595–1662) “hath often told us, that this was the Mind of the old Nonconformists, and that he hath often heard some weak Ministers so disorderly in Prayer, especially in Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, that he could have wish’d that they would rather use the Common-Prayer.”31

Written prayers can be a subordinate help to the Holy Spirit’s leading.

Second, Baxter argued that the use of written prayers could function as a “help” that was “subordinate to the Spirit’s help.”32 He said that written prayers could help Christians to pray in the same way as “spectacles” help others to see or even “sermon notes” help “weak memories” — even sharing candidly that set “forms are oft a help to me.”33 While he agreed with those who contended that true prayer is from the heart, he argued against those who opposed written prayers on this ground, saying that “it is a great error to think, that the gifts and graces of the holy spirit may not be exercised, if we use the same words, or if they be prescribed.”34

The Lord’s Prayer is a written prayer.

Third, the Puritans were perhaps most open to the use of the Lord’s Prayer in public worship since it was prescribed by Jesus himself as a pattern for how to pray. The Westminster Assembly differed over the issue of whether to include the Lord’s Prayer in the Directory of Public Worship. Some divines were happy to include it, while others were reticent to compel churches to use the Lord’s Prayer in worship. While the former divines believed it would serve as a model to train congregants how to pray, the later group believed, as Bunyan and Owen had argued, that not even the mere words of the Lord’s Prayer could incite true prayer from the heart, as this is the Spirit’s work.35 In the end, the Directory of Public Worship did not require ministers to use the Lord’s Prayer in worship, but rather “recommend[ed]” it, as the Westminster divine William Gouge stated, as “a pattern of prayer” and “a most comprehensive prayer . . . to be used in the prayers of the Church.’”36

Written prayers have historical precedent.

Finally, Puritans, particularly Richard Baxter and John Preston (1587–1628), argued that there was sufficient historical precedent throughout the history of the church of trusted Reformed divines using written prayers in corporate worship. For example, John Preston wrote, “There is no doubt that a set form [of prayer] may be used” in public worship, as Luther, Calvin, the early church, and “the Church at all times” had done.37 The diversity of views throughout the history of the church led Baxter to the conclusion that a minister’s conviction concerning written prayer was a secondary matter upon which he should be given liberty of conscience “at his discretion,” since written prayers are “neither in their nature, or by vertue of any promise of God” pertaining “to mens salvation.”38 Understanding this is key to understanding Baxter’s position. For although Baxter himself was affected by the Act of Uniformity, and he defended ministers ejected in 1662, before and after the great ejection he labored to cultivate unity through negotiating a mediating position that might be agreeable to Puritans and Anglicans alike.

Puritan Divines Closer Than Assumed

These disagreements between Puritans over the use of written prayers in public worship were often hidden from public view. One notable exception was a clash between Owen and Baxter that was a result of Baxter receiving a copy of Owen’s Twelve Arguments against any Conformity to Worship not of Divine Institution and Baxter’s responding with his own work.39

Geoffrey Nuttall has persuasively argued that, despite their expressed differences, “Baxter and Owen in fact were . . . close spiritually” on the issue.40 For example, despite all of his opposition to the use of written prayers in corporate worship, at one point Owen appears to soften, expressing that while he does not desire to express “any dissent about” or “to judge or condemn” either the practice of or those who used written prayers, he does argue that it is not necessary to use them.41 This led Nuttall to conclude that perhaps part of the reason Owen and Baxter differed over written prayer was because Owen never got over the fact that it was the Anglicans’ zeal for set prayers that lead to their “silencing, destroying, [and] banishing” his fellow Puritan brothers.42

Using Private Prayer Books

While Puritans were divided about the use of written prayers in public worship, they were, on the whole, quite sympathetic to using private prayer books in personal and family worship. Their reason was singular and simple: they believed these prayer books could be especially helpful in aiding individuals and families in learning how to pray according to Scripture. They said that just as inflatable floaties (what they called “bladders”) could be helpful in aiding a new swimmer to swim, so these private prayer books could aid Christians in learning how to pray in both private and family prayers.43 While dozens of Puritans published these prayer books, many of the most well-known ones — such as Henry Scudder’s The Christian’s Daily Walk, John Preston’s The Saint’s Daily Exercise, Nathaniel Vincent’s The Spirit of Prayer, and Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety — were reprinted continually throughout the seventeenth century in England.

“Puritans were, on the whole, quite sympathetic to using private prayer books in personal and family worship.”

Probably the most well-known of these private prayer devotionals was A Method for Prayer (1710) by the Presbyterian minister Matthew Henry (1662–1714). One gets a sense of the importance Henry placed on prayer by the fact that he actually paused finishing his now-famous commentary on the entire Bible to write it. Henry intentionally composed his work using only scriptural language to demonstrate “the sufficiency of the Scripture to furnish us for us for every good work” and to teach Christians how to plead the promises of God. Nevertheless, he conceded that it was “often necessary to use other expressions in prayer besides those that are purely Scriptural.”44

Henry’s book is organized according to a rather familiar pattern — adoration, confession, petitions and supplications for ourselves, thanksgiving, intercession for others, and a conclusion — that followed the basic outline of the “public prayer before the sermon” in the Westminster Directory for Public Worship.45 His prayer book also contains written prayers for numerous occasions, including daily morning and evening prayers, prayers of parents for their children, shortened prayers children could use to learn to pray, a paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer for children and youth, and specific prayers for special blessings and challenges.46 There were also prayers one could pray privately (or presumably publicly) in a corporate worship service before the Lord’s Supper and during marriage or funeral services.

Learning from the Puritans

We can learn at least four lessons from studying the Puritans’ perspectives on written prayers. First, the Puritans possessed a vital zeal to worship God according to the prescriptions of Scripture rather than one’s own preferences. In a day in which many churches worship God according to the latest worldly or churchly trends in order to boost church attendance, appeal to unbelievers, or be relevant to the culture, the Puritans understood that God is honored by and will bless only scriptural worship.

“The chief instrument that must be engaged throughout the whole of corporate worship is the heart.”

Second, the Puritans urge us to pursue God with all our heart in corporate worship. Having worshiped in a variety of Reformed church settings over the years, I have noticed that sometimes those most zealous to preserve the regulative principle of worship appear most lacking in the Puritans’ central conviction — namely, that the chief instrument that must be engaged throughout the whole of corporate worship (praying, singing, hearing the sermon) is the heart. They understood that those who simply go through the motions of worship are no different from the Pharisees, of whom Jesus said, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Matthew 15:8).

Third, this study of the Puritans teaches us that it is possible for faithful Reformed people to differ over secondary matters — and that sometimes those variances are the result of either ignorance of the existence of similar practices within their own Reformed tradition or differing personal experiences. For example, in addition to Nuttall’s insight above about Owen’s and Baxter’s differing personal experiences of persecution, it is possible that some Puritans were not aware that influential Reformed divines like John Calvin composed written prayers for corporate worship.

Finally, the Puritans encourage us to use Scripture to shape our prayers and engage our hearts in prayer. Whether this insight is familiar or new to you, I would encourage you to use either the Psalms, Matthew Henry’s Method of Prayer, or the Valley of Vision collection of Puritan prayers as means to cultivate praying the Scriptures in your daily devotional times with God.47 One section of Matthew Henry’s Method for Prayer that I find particularly insightful is his exhortation to begin one’s Scripture reading and prayer time by meditation on Scripture so as to engage one’s affections toward vital communion with God.48 This practice encourages the believer to fix his “attention” wholly upon “the Lord” and to “set [himself] in his special presence.” Therein, the believer can “attend upon the Lord without Distraction” and without his heart being “far from him when” he draws dear God in prayer.49 Ultimately, the chief lesson the Puritans teach us is to seek the Lord in prayer with the full assurance that as we draw near to him, he will draw near to us (James 4:8).