The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Puritans & Pietists
John Flavel
1628–1691EnglishPuritan
The seaport preacher who met his flock on a tidal rock when the pulpit was taken from him.
Summary
- Lived 1628–1691, English.
- Stood in The Puritans & Pietists (1600–1730).
- Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists.
- Tradition: Puritan / Nonconformist.
The life
John Flavel spent his ministry in Dartmouth, a Devon port town of sailors and merchants, and he preached like a man who knew his congregation's work. Navigation Spiritualized took the compass, the chart and the storm and turned each into a lesson; Husbandry Spiritualized did the same with the farm.
Ejected in 1662 and then driven out of town altogether by the Five Mile Act, he kept meeting his people anyway, famously on Salstone Rock in the Salcombe estuary, an island that surfaces at low tide and belongs to no parish, where they gathered between tides. His best-known book, The Mystery of Providence, works through Psalm 57:2 and argues that a believer should keep a record of God's dealings and read it back in dark seasons.
Flavel had dark seasons to read back: he was widowed three times, hunted by the authorities for years, and only saw his church legally reopened near the end of his life.
What was happening while he lived7 moments · 1600–1730
- 1628John Bunyan is born at ElstowA tinker's son in a Bedfordshire village, baptized that November. He will have almost no formal schooling and will write the most-read book in English after the Bible.
- 1636Harvard is founded to train ministersThe Massachusetts Bay colony votes money for a college because, as an early account put it, they dreaded leaving an unlearned ministry to the churches once the first pastors were in the dust. It is named in 1639 for John Harvard, who willed it his library.
- 1643–1646The Westminster Assembly meetsCalled by Parliament, some 120 ministers and 30 laymen sit in Westminster Abbey through the English Civil War. They produce the Westminster Confession (1646) and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms (1647).
- 1675Spener's *Pia Desideria*Philipp Jakob Spener, a pastor in Frankfurt, publishes six plain proposals: more Bible in laypeople's hands, believers meeting in small groups, faith that shows up in life, gentler argument, ministers trained for godliness, preaching aimed at the heart. The book names a movement: Pietism.
- 1678*The Pilgrim's Progress* is publishedBunyan had spent twelve years (1660–1672) in Bedford jail rather than promise to stop preaching, making shoelace tags to feed his family, including a blind daughter. Out of those years came the dream of a man with a burden on his back, running toward a distant light.
- 1679–1688Scotland's Killing TimeCovenanters who kept preaching in open fields after outdoor worship was outlawed are hunted across the moors of the southwest. Richard Cameron falls at Airds Moss in 1680; James Renwick, the last of them executed, dies in 1688.
- Oct 1685The Edict of Nantes is revokedLouis XIV cancels the protection French Protestants had held since 1598. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 150,000 to 200,000 Huguenots flee France for England, Holland, Prussia, Switzerland, the American colonies, and the Cape.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search John Flavel at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Locked out of his church, he gathered his people on a rock that the tide uncovers, and preached there.
Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists: The examined heart: the century that asked whether the opened Bible had opened you.
Standing beside himThe Puritans & Pietists · 17 on this stretch of wall
Gave refugees his estate and got back a hundred-year prayer meeting and the first Protestant missionary wave.
Wrote Pilgrim's Progress in the Bedford jail rather than promise the court he would stop preaching.
The Puritans' deepest thinker, who warned that you must be killing sin or it will be killing you.
Preached Christ's tenderness toward weak believers, in a small book that changed Richard Baxter's life.
Banned from preaching, he wrote his congregation letters so full of Christ that people still read them.
Asked what Christ feels toward struggling believers right now, and wrote a whole book answering from Scripture.