There is a new book on the site. It is called Lives That Shaped the Church, and it tells the stories of eight people God used to shape the faith we have today: Augustine, Martin Luther, William Tyndale, John Calvin, John Owen, John Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards and Charles Spurgeon.
Several of them will be familiar if you have read the Puritan Rewrites. This book is the other half of that work. The rewrites let you read what these people wrote. This book tells you who they were.
Eight lives, fifteen centuries
The stories run in order of date, from a professor weeping under a fig tree in Milan in 386 to a London preacher dying on the French Riviera in 1892. Each one leads into the next. Augustine's writing on grace is what Luther found when he was searching Paul's letters. Tyndale heard Luther's ideas and put the New Testament into English. Calvin gave the Reformation its clearest teacher. Owen helped get Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress published, and the two of them are buried in the same London burial ground. And a boy called Charles Spurgeon read that same book in his grandfather's attic, more than a hundred times by his own count.
Each chapter opens with a single scene, then tells the life from beginning to end. A monk standing before the emperor at Worms. A scholar asking from prison for a warmer coat, a lamp and his Hebrew Bible. A tinker stopped in mid-swing on a village green. A fifteen-year-old caught in a snowstorm who ducks into a tiny chapel where the preacher has not turned up.
"Young man, look to Jesus Christ. Look! Look! Look! You have nothing to do but to look and live."
That is what the stand-in preacher told Spurgeon that morning. Sixty thousand people later filed past his coffin, and his Bible lay on top of it, open at the verse that man had preached on.
Not plaster saints
These are not stories of heroes who never put a foot wrong. Luther wrote terrible things about the Jews. Calvin helped send a man to his death for heresy. Edwards owned slaves. The book tells those things plainly. Hiding them would be dishonest, and it would miss the point. The heroes of the faith were sinners saved by grace, like the rest of us.
The book is honest about their weakness too. Owen buried all eleven of his children. Bunyan spent two years sure he was damned, and then twelve years in Bedford gaol. Spurgeon told his congregation he suffered "depressions of spirit so fearful" that he hoped none of them would ever go so low. God used them anyway.
What else is in each chapter
At the end of each life there are a few of the person's best-known sayings in their own words, a table of key dates and two or three suggestions for further reading. There is also a short note on famous quotes that are often credited to them but are not theirs. For example, "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity" is not Augustine's. And Bunyan never wrote the line about doing something for someone who can never repay you, however often it turns up under his name online.
Older quotations are taken from public-domain translations wherever possible, and the sources are given.
Reading it
The chapters are short, about nine pages each, and you can read them in any order. The whole book is around 20,000 words, so you could read it in an evening, or one life a day for a week and a day. It is free.
If these lives send you to the writers' own books, the book will have done its work. Several of those books are already on the Puritan Rewrites page in plain modern English.