Beeke and Reeves’s Following God Fully was not written to create fresh interest in the Puritans: that interest has already existed since the 1950s when evangelical leaders such as D. M. Lloyd Jones (d. 1981) and his then-collaborator, J. I. Packer (d. 2020), began to draw attention to the neglected resources the Puritans had left us. There had been a similar Puritan resurgence in the first half of the nineteenth century. Even though that wave of renewed interest crested around 1870, it left as its legacy many of the editions which today appear in reprint. Avid readers in Southeast Asia and Africa are now hurrying to collect the Puritans just as British and American readers have been doing for decades. This now trans-national movement needs sober guidance and direction.

Beeke and Reeves aim to provide both a justification for this continuing attention to the Puritan movement and a kind of topography that introduces readers to Puritan leaders (spread across a century and a half) and the themes they preached. They are aware that other Puritan enthusiasts (Leland Ryken, J. I. Packer, Peter Lewis, and Errol Hulse) have attempted something like Following God Fully within recent memory. How distinctive is their new attempt? We can note a strength as well as a weakness.

The strength of Following God Fully is the sure-footedness of its theological summary, which is based on very extensive use of the Puritans’ own writings. In part 2, we find helpful sketches of nine Puritan leaders (from William Perkins to Jonathan Edwards). In the following parts 3 through 6, we find succinct summaries of Puritan theological thought on all the main topics of Christian doctrine, Christian ethics, and Christian living. The book closes with part 7, which asks some worthwhile questions about a few possible extremes found in the Puritan movement and the proper application of Puritan teaching today. Regarding all this, we can commend the authors for achieving so much and so compactly.

But there is also a weakness in Following God Fully. It is an introduction to the theology of the Puritan era but can hardly claim to be an introduction to Puritanism as a movement. This shortcoming is evident especially in introductory part 1, “Who Were the Puritans?,” which shows a lack of familiarity with the ongoing historical study of Puritanism. The reader will find occasional use of historians William Haller and Edmund S. Morgan, yet both writers (Americans) wrote pre-1950. The reviewer found one reference to Alan Carden (1990). The analysis provided is, therefore, dated when it need not have been.

Patrick Collinson, David D. Hall, Christopher Hill, Peter Lake, D. G. Mullan, and Dewey Wallace are just some of the major academic historians who have specialized in Puritan research in recent decades. None are mentioned in Following God Fully. Similarly, contemporary historians of Puritanism such as Chad Van Dixhoorn, John Coffey, Stephen Hampton, Kelly Kapic, Paul Lim, David P. Field, Graham Beynon, Crawford Gribben, and Robert Strivens— known for their openly Christian stance—are just as invisible. No writer of either type is included in the list of recommended authors provided at volume-end. Thus, in consequence, the historical section of Following God Fully represents a reiteration of what might be called “conventional wisdom” about Puritanism. But conventional wisdom frequently needs revision, and that is the reason for the ongoing research of the past half-century.

This book is a helpful introduction to Puritan theology and piety. But how can a curious reader begin to investigate the complex historical setting in which Puritanism arose and the conflicts in state and church that shaped and eventually fragmented it? The reviewer can think of no better doorway into that parallel field of inquiry than the readily-available Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), edited by John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim. The reader who will take up these two books in tandem will gain a valuable introduction both to Puritan theology and the movement which—having produced it—suffered fragmentation and eclipse.

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