The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Puritans & Pietists
Richard Sibbes
1577–1635EnglishPuritan
The gentle preacher whose little book on a bruised reed converted Richard Baxter as a boy.
Summary
- Lived 1577–1635, English.
- Stood in The Puritans & Pietists (1600–1730).
- Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists.
- Tradition: Puritan / Church of England.
The life
Richard Sibbes was a wheelwright's son who went up to Cambridge, and he never really left that world: he was a lecturer at Holy Trinity, master of St Catharine's Hall, and preacher to the lawyers of Gray's Inn in London, which put him in front of the men who ran England. His contemporaries called him the heavenly doctor, and his preaching was warm where much Puritan preaching was severe, he was known for pressing the tenderness of Christ toward weak and failing believers.
His short book The Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax, built on Isaiah 42:3 as Matthew quotes it, is the one that traveled: a young Richard Baxter read a battered copy his father had been given by a peddler, and dated his conversion to it. Baxter in turn shaped generations of pastors, so a great deal of later English Christianity traces back through a cheap book handed to a boy at a door.
What was happening while he lived4 moments · 1600–1730
- 1611The King James Bible is finishedAbout four dozen scholars, working in six companies at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge, complete a translation built largely on Tyndale's English. Its rhythms will shape how English speakers hear Scripture for the next three hundred years.
- 1620The Mayflower sailsRoughly a hundred passengers, about half of them from a separatist congregation that had already fled to Holland, cross to a cold New England coast in November. Close to half die before spring.
- 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.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Richard Sibbes at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Preached Christ's tenderness toward weak believers, in a small book that changed Richard Baxter's life.
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.
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.
Listed the exact lies that talk a believer into sin, and gave the exact answer to each one.