Writing like the Puritans
An experiment.
Nobody writes like the Puritans anymore.
I don’t mean in King James English. And I don’t mean the long run-on sentences that John Owen is famous (infamous?) for. I mean the Puritans habit of taking a verse or small passage of Scripture and writing a small book on it, breaking it apart and sucking out the marrow. Think John Bunyan’s Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ. Or Owen’s On the Mortification of Sin in Believers. Or Richard Sibbes’ The Bruised Reed. There are countless other examples.
Where are such books today? The only modern work that comes close to this that I’m aware of is Gavin Ortlund’s Gentle and Lowly. Is it that the Puritans had such a high view of Scripture that the thought of writing a whole treatise on a single verse didn’t seem like a fool’s errand?
Well, I am that fool.
As an exercise in doing theological writing in public, I’m going to attempt to do sustained, in-depth writing on a single portion of Scripture. It probably won’t be book-worthy, but then again, who knows? And by publishing it here first, you all can give me feedback as I go.
My text is Luke 12:32: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”