The Puritans had no patience for theology that didn’t break the heart or heal it. For them, doctrines weren’t just true. Doctrines were soul-shaping. A theological proposition that left the reader unchanged, unmoved, unbroken or uncomforted had failed its essential purpose. Truth about God was meant to do something, not merely to inform.

The word of God is “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12). Divine truth wounds and binds up. It kills and makes alive. The Puritans understood that if theology bypassed the affections, if it never stirred love, exposed sin, kindled hope, or brought grief, it had not yet become the Christianity of the New Testament.

I want to write theology that way. And I suspect you do too. Not because we’re nostalgic for seventeenth-century prose, but because we’ve tasted enough bloodless doctrine to know it’s not enough. We’ve read enough careful exegesis that never touches the soul, enough systematic theology that maps the territory without making us love the land. We want theology that does what the Puritans believed it should do: confront us with the living God in such a way that we cannot remain the same.

But wanting it and knowing how to produce it are different things. So what follows is an attempt to map the method and show what soul-shaping theology looks like, but how to begin writing it yourself.

Start with God, Not with Pastoral Usefulness

The first move is counterintuitive. When we want theology to help people, our instinct is to start with human need. What are they struggling with? What will comfort them, convict them, guide them? We shape the doctrine to fit the perceived need.

The Puritans did the opposite. They started with God’s nature and reasoned downward. When John Owen writes on communion with God, he doesn’t begin with our loneliness or longing for intimacy. He begins with the Trinity—who God is in himself, the eternal relations of Father, Son, and Spirit—and only then shows how believers enter into that divine life through union with Christ. When Thomas Goodwin writes, he starts with God’s eternal blessedness and sovereign freedom, not with whether the doctrine will comfort or trouble his readers. 

If you begin with “how can I make this doctrine help people,” it will be tempting to manipulate the doctrine to fit what you think people need. But if you start with what is true about God, and then ask what it means for creatures like us to stand before a God like this, the pastoral power follows naturally. Truth about God has its own gravity. It pulls on the soul without you forcing it.

So when you sit down to write on any doctrine, begin by asking: What does this reveal about God himself? Stay there longer than feels pastorally efficient. Let the truth about God settle in your own mind and heart first. The Puritans believed that if you saw God clearly, the implications for the soul would be unavoidable.

Write From Scripture, Not About It

The Puritans shaped souls with doctrine because their doctrine came soaked in biblical language, imagery, and cadence. They didn’t just cite texts. They thought in Scripture. When you read Owen or Sibbes or Flavel, you’re reading men who had internalized massive portions of the Bible and whose theological grammar was formed by years of slow, repeated reading.

This can’t be manufactured, but it can be cultivated. Read whole books of Scripture in a sitting. Read them in Hebrew and Greek when you can, in translation when you can’t, but read them as books, not as verse quarries for systematic theology. Let the flow and structure and repeated phrases work on you. Pray through psalms until the language becomes your language. Meditate on single texts for days, turning them over, asking what they assume about God, about us, about redemption.

When you write, let Scripture supply not just your proof texts but your metaphors, your emotional register, your sense of what matters. If you’re writing on adoption, don’t just cite Galatians 4 or Romans 8. let the warmth and wonder of “Abba, Father” set the tone of the entire piece. If you’re writing on judgment, let the prophets’ grief and severity shape how you say it. The Bible knows how to break hearts and heal them. Learn its emotional repertoire and write in it.

And exegete slowly in front of your readers. Don’t just assert what a text means. Walk them through it. Show them the grammar, the context, the canonical connections. Let them see you reasoning from the text to the doctrine, not importing the doctrine onto the text. The Puritans trusted that careful exegesis was itself spiritually formative, because it taught people to submit their thoughts to God’s Word.

Make the Doctrine’s Consequences Visible

The Puritans asked of every doctrine: What does this do? What happens in the life of a believer if this is true? What happens if it’s denied or distorted?  I like to ask what every passage and every doctrine teaches about God, humanity, and salvation. 

Take divine immutability. You could present it as a metaphysical attribute affirming God does not change, he has no potentiality, he is pure act and leave it there. That’s true, but it won’t break or heal a heart.

However, If God does not change, then his love for his people is not subject to moods or second thoughts. The intensity of his delight in Christ, and in those united to Christ, is today what it was before the foundation of the world and will be forever. He is not growing weary of you. He is not discovering reasons to regret his choice. His purposes don’t shift with circumstances. When he says “I will never leave you or forsake you,” immutability is the metaphysical ground that makes that promise something you can stake your life on.

Now the doctrine has weight. Now it touches the actual anxieties and hopes of a human soul.

But also press the other direction. What if someone denies immutability? What if they say God changes his mind, learns new things, adjusts his plans based on what we do? Then every promise is provisional. Then you never know if his love today will be his love tomorrow. Then assurance becomes impossible, because the ground keeps shifting under you. The pastoral consequence of the error clarifies why the truth matters.

Do this with every doctrine. Show what it secures, what it costs to lose it, how it shapes prayer and obedience and hope. The Puritans didn’t treat doctrines as isolated propositions. They saw them as load-bearing beams in the structure of the Christian life. Pull one out and something collapses.

Write to the Conscience, Not Just the Intellect

The Puritans knew that the mind can affirm truths the heart doesn’t feel and the will doesn’t obey. So they wrote to the whole person: intellect, affections, conscience, will.

This means you can’t stay abstract. You have to name the specific sins the doctrine exposes and the specific graces it offers. You have to ask questions that search the reader: Do you live as though this is true? Where does your life deny what your mouth confesses? What would change if you really believed this?

When Owen writes on indwelling sin, he doesn’t just describe the doctrine of remaining corruption. He walks you through how sin works in your own soul: how it deceives, how it uses good desires for evil ends, how it hides from you while accusing others. He makes you see yourself. That’s what breaks the heart.

And when he writes on the gospel, he doesn’t just explain substitutionary atonement. He shows you Christ bearing the specific sins you just recognized in yourself, absorbing the wrath you deserve, clothing you in his righteousness. He makes the doctrine personal, immediate, applicable. That’s what heals.

So when you write, don’t let the reader stay at a safe distance. Bring the doctrine close. Make them feel its weight, its comfort, its demand. Use second person when appropriate. Ask questions. Describe the soul’s real experience of guilt, fear, hope, joy. The Puritans weren’t afraid of intensity, because they believed the gospel was the most intense reality in the universe.

Ground Every Doctrine in Christ

The Puritans were relentlessly Christocentric, not as a slogan but as a method. Every doctrine was connected to Christ and interpreted through him.

Election? It’s in Christ, and we know we’re elect by union with him. Sanctification? It’s the Spirit applying Christ’s death and resurrection to us. The law? It drives us to Christ and then shapes our gratitude in him. Even God’s attributes, for example, his justice is satisfied in Christ, his mercy is shown in Christ, his wisdom is displayed in the cross.

This keeps theology from becoming speculative or abstract. If you’re writing on any doctrine and you can’t show how it’s grounded in or leads to Christ, you’re not done yet. The Puritans would say you’re still working at the level of natural theology, not Christian doctrine.

So discipline yourself to ask: How does Christ bear this truth? How does union with him bring me into it? How does this doctrine make me treasure him more? If those questions don’t have clear answers, revise until they do.

Let Doctrine Test You Before You Teach It

The Puritans wrote soul-shaping theology because they let the doctrines shape their own souls first. They didn’t write about prayer without praying, or about mortification without mortifying sin, or about assurance without wrestling for it themselves.

This is the hardest part, and the most necessary.

Before you write on any doctrine, live with it. Pray through it. Let it examine you. Ask yourself: Do I believe this? Not notionally, but actually—does this govern my life, my decisions, my affections? Where does my life contradict what I’m about to say? Confess that. Deal with it, or at least acknowledge it honestly before God.

Richard Sibbes, in The Bruised Reed, explains that bruising precedes healing. The Spirit levels proud thoughts, joins affliction to conviction, and makes the heart pliable so grace can take impression. He writes that Christ “is a Physician good at all diseases, especially at the binding up of a broken heart.” The plaster for the wound is Christ’s own blood. But the wound must be felt before the plaster can heal.

Be willing to be broken by what you study. If you’re writing on God’s holiness and you don’t feel the weight of your own sin, stop writing and pray until you do. If you’re writing on adoption and you don’t feel wonder, stop and ask God to give you the spirit of sonship. Don’t manufacture emotion, but don’t ignore its absence either. The affections are part of knowing God, not a distraction from it.

When you write from a place of personal encounter with the truth, when the doctrine has actually done something to you, readers will sense it. Not because you talk about yourself, but because the weight and urgency will be real. You’ll write like someone who knows this matters, because it’s mattered for you.

Expect God to Use What You Write

The Puritans wrote with expectation. They believed the Spirit takes faithful teaching and applies it to hearts in ways the teacher can’t predict or control. So they wrote seriously, carefully, prayerfully, and then entrusted the results to God.

John Owen insisted that spiritual affections are the substance of being spiritually minded. Without them, no true religion exists. He contended that “the great contest of heaven and earth is about the affections of the poor worm which we call man.” Doctrine must engage this contest. Theology must be stirring holy love, grief over sin, and joy in redemption or it fails its purpose.

You need the same expectation. This changes how you write. You’re not just presenting information or making an academic contribution. You’re offering something you genuinely believe can change a life. So you take risks. You say hard things when they’re true. You linger on comforts when souls need them. You don’t hedge everything with qualifications meant to protect you from criticism.

And you pray over your writing. Before, during, after. You ask God to make it clear, to guard it from error, to apply it where it’s needed, to pass over it where it would do harm. The Puritans prayed over sermons and treatises the way they prayed over sick friends. They prayed with urgency, with dependence, with hope.

Where to Begin

If you want to start forming this habit now, here’s a concrete exercise:

Pick a doctrine you’re currently thinking about. Don’t pick something new. Pick what’s already occupying your mind.

Spend a week just in the biblical texts that establish it. Read them slowly, in the original languages if you can. Don’t rush to systematic formulation yet. Let the scriptural shape of the truth settle first.

Write a paragraph that explores the doctrine’s implications for understanding God’s nature. Focus on what this doctrine reveals about God himself, rather than its practical significance for us. Make sure your explanation is as precise and clear as possible. This paragraph will serve as your foundation.

Next, write a paragraph that delves into the consequences of a soul embracing this doctrine. Be specific and provide examples. Identify the fears it alleviates, the sins it exposes, and the hopes it grounds. Avoid generalizations and instead, aim to describe a real person’s genuine experiences.

Then write a paragraph on what’s lost if this doctrine is denied or minimized. What collapses? What becomes uncertain? What sins go unchecked, what comforts disappear?

Finally, show how Christ is the center. How does he embody this truth? How does union with him give us access to it?

You’ll have about four paragraphs. That’s enough to see whether the doctrine is doing soul work or just sitting on the page. If it feels flat or abstract, go back to Scripture and to the doctrine’s connection to Christ. If it feels manipulative or sentimental, go back to the truth about God and make sure you’re reasoning from his perfection, not from what you think will move people.

Do this with one doctrine a week for the next month. By the end you’ll have practiced the movement enough times that it’ll start to feel natural. You’ll be thinking instinctively from God to the soul, from truth to consequence, from doctrine to Christ.

Underneath the Method

All of this, the method, the exercises, the attention to Scripture, affections, and Christ, stems from a single posture: dependence on the Spirit to make doctrine resonate within the heart.

 The Puritans lived with an unwavering awareness that without grace, they would inevitably err and harm the people they were entrusted to serve. Consequently, they fervently sought grace before writing, before teaching, and before engaging in any significant conversation. They recognized their own vulnerabilities, their propensity for error and sin, and they wholeheartedly surrendered to God’s mercy.

That dependence is what made their theology break hearts and heal them. Not technique. Not eloquence. Not even exegetical precision, though they valued it highly. What made the difference was that they wrote as men who had been broken by the truths they taught and healed by the Christ they proclaimed.

You can learn the method. You should learn it. But the method will remain mechanical unless it rests on the same foundation: a deep awareness of your need for God to do what you cannot, to make truth penetrate where arguments can’t reach, to apply the gospel to hearts only he can open.

Study the Puritans and watch how they do it. But before all that, and underneath all that, pray. Ask God to give you a theology that breaks and heals, starting with your own heart.

Because in the end, that’s what the Puritans understood: the doctrines that change others are the doctrines that have first changed us. And the God who shapes souls through truth delights to begin with the soul of the one who teaches.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​