The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Puritans & Pietists
Samuel Rutherford
1600–1661ScottishScottish Covenanter
A banished Scottish minister whose prison letters read like love letters to Christ.
Summary
- Lived 1600–1661, Scottish.
- Stood in The Puritans & Pietists (1600–1730).
- Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists.
- Tradition: Scottish Covenanter / Presbyterian.
The life
Samuel Rutherford pastored the country parish of Anwoth in Galloway until the bishops silenced him in 1636 and confined him to Aberdeen, forbidden to preach. Cut off from his people, he wrote to them instead. The letters that came out of those two years, later collected and printed as Joshua Redivivus, are the reason he is remembered: unguarded, homesick, and burning with affection for Christ. He came back to serve as a commissioner to the Westminster Assembly in London and later as principal of St Mary's College at St Andrews.
His book Lex, Rex argued that a king holds power under law rather than above it, which the returning royal government considered treason; the hangman burned it publicly and Rutherford was summoned to answer for his life. He was already dying when the summons came, and by his own report he answered that he had a prior summons before a higher court. He died before the state could try him.
What was happening while he lived5 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.
- 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).
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Samuel Rutherford at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Banned from preaching, he wrote his congregation letters so full of Christ that people still read them.
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.
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.