The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Puritans & Pietists
Thomas Goodwin
1600–1679EnglishPuritan
The Oxford president who wrote a whole book on how Christ feels about sinners now, in heaven.
Summary
- Lived 1600–1679, English.
- Stood in The Puritans & Pietists (1600–1730).
- Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists.
- Tradition: Puritan / Independent (Congregational).
The life
Thomas Goodwin spent seven years, by his own account, unsettled about his own soul before he found peace, and it marked everything he later wrote. He gave up his Cambridge lectureship rather than conform, spent time among English exiles in Holland, and returned to become one of the small group of Independents at the Westminster Assembly who argued that each local congregation governs itself, a minority position that they published rather than bury.
Cromwell made him president of Magdalen College, Oxford, and he was at Cromwell's bedside when he died. Ejected at the Restoration, he pastored a congregation in London and kept writing; his collected works run to twelve volumes, much of it careful exposition of Ephesians. The book people still reach for is The Heart of Christ in Heaven Towards Sinners on Earth, which asks a simple question, what is Christ feeling toward failing believers right now, and answers it from Scripture at length.
What was happening while he lived8 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).
- 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.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Thomas Goodwin at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Asked what Christ feels toward struggling believers right now, and wrote a whole book answering from Scripture.
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.
Listed the exact lies that talk a believer into sin, and gave the exact answer to each one.