Review: Reformation of the Church by Iain Murray (part 1 of 12)

This post is the first of what will ultimately be twelve essays interacting with Iain Murray's book The Reformation of the Church.
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In his introduction to The Reformation of the Church: a collection of Reformed and Puritan documents on Church issues, Iain Murray lays out his reasons for publishing this volume of collected works. He outlines how questions of the internal life of the Church were being discussed widely in England at the time of the volume’s publication, driven largely by an ecumenical movement that raised these topics in an attempt to “burst the bands” of denominationalism (p. 7). Murray points out that the Reformers and Puritans wrote extensively on the Church, and that their works had virtually disappeared from the conversation by the early twentieth century. This volume is intended to remedy that deficiency, providing the perspective of the men who perhaps more than anyone else in history had to consider the nature of the Church as they dealt with the world-shaking implications of the recovery of the gospel of justification by faith alone.

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