All up these five volumes contain 76 excellent papers covering quite a wide range of topics and issues. But to further tempt you into considering getting one or more of these valuable books, let me just share a short quote from one piece: Packer on Puritan Worship from vol. 3. He writes: What is worship? It is, says John Owen, an activity designed to “raise unto God a revenue of glory out of the creation”. In the broadest sense of the word, all true piety is worship.

If you love the Puritans, if you love J. I. Packer, and if you love short, meaty addresses and essays on Puritan and Reformed themes, then you will love the five-volume set Puritan Papers, edited by J. I. Packer and released by P&R Publishing.

Although they first appeared 25 years ago, the volumes can still be found and are certainly well worth adding to your library. They contain some of the great Puritan and Reformed scholars and pastors of recent times speaking about some of the great Puritan and Reformed figures and teachings of earlier times.

In the Foreword to each volume W. Robert Godfrey gives us the rationale for the books and how they came into being:

[I]t is truly remarkable that about fifty years ago two young scholars conceived the idea of holding a conference on Puritanism as a practical help for pastors and Christians generally. Surely a modern conference largely devoted to the study of Puritan thought as a vital resource for the contemporary church would not commend itself to many. But O. Raymond Johnston and James I. Packer had an advantage over many: they had actually read the Puritans. They had so profited spiritually from their own study of the Puritans that they wanted others to share in the rich spiritual blessing that had been theirs. In the late 1940s they consulted with D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, minister at Westminster Chapel, London, who enthusiastically embraced the idea and offered the chapel as a meeting place for what became known as “The Puritan Conference.”

The first conference took place in December 1950. Six papers, each about an hour in length, were read over the course of two days, one in the morning and two in the afternoon. After each paper a discussion followed of about one hour, often a very vigorous exchange of ideas. The basic form of the conference has remained the same over the years. For nearly thirty years Dr. Lloyd-Jones chaired the sessions of the conference and from 1959 contributed an annual paper and led the discussions. His commitment to the conference reflected his conviction: “As I see things, it is of supreme importance for the future of the Christian faith in this country that we should experience a revival of interest in the literature of the great Puritans of the seventeenth century.”

James I. Packer organized the conference for many years and contributed regularly for the first twenty years. His keen study and analysis helped set a very high standard for the papers. His presentations, along with those of Dr. Lloyd-Jones, ensure that the volumes of the conference papers from those years are of great value.

No conference was held in 1970. Dr. Lloyd-Jones objected strongly to some of the ecumenical positions taken by Dr. Packer. Dr. Lloyd-Jones was approached by several men who asked him to chair a reconvened conference of the same character as the earlier ones. He agreed to do this, and so the Westminster Conference was held in 1971 and has continued to operate under that name. 

The basic purpose of the conference has remained the same for the fifty years of its existence. As Dr. Packer wrote in a foreword to the 1958 conference papers,

“[the conference] exists because its organisers believe that historic Reformed theology in general, and the teaching of the great Puritans in 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 the problems which face Christians of the twentieth century is to teach them to walk and talk as if they were living in the seventeenth.

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