We Need To Read The Puritans

[the conference] exists because its organisers believe that historic Reformed theology ill general, and the teaching of the great Puritans ill particular, does justice to certain neglected Biblical truths and emphases which the church today urgently needs to re-learn. This is not, of course, to imply that Puritan expositions of Scripture are infallible and final, or that the Puritans always succeeded in balancing truth in exactly the right proportions; nor is it suggested (forsooth!) that the way to solve problems which face Christians of the twentieth century is to teach them to walk and talk as if they were living in the seventeenth. What is meant is simply that the Puritans were strongest just where Protestants today are weakest, and their writings can give us more real help than those of any other body of Christian teachers, past or present, since the days of the apostles (J.I. Packer, in the forward to the 1958 Puritan Conference Papers, quoted in the forward to Puritan Papers Volume Two, 1960-1962, p. xi).