Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 04:1 (Spring 2022)
Article: Living In The Family: Thoughts From William Gouge
Author: Joel R. Beeke

Eikon 4.1 (Spring 2022) p. 8

Living In The Family: Thoughts From William Gouge

Joel R. Beeke

Joel R. Beeke (Ph.D.) a minister of the Heritage Reformed Congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and President of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, where he is also the professor of Systematic Theology and Homiletics.

“A Family is a little church and a little nation.”

— William Gouge1

There are few better examples of the beauty and glory of Christian living and of Reformed Christianity in action than the lives of the Puritans at home. Their views on marriage and family life were biblical, positive, and lavish. J. I. Packer writes that the Puritans were “the creators of the English Christian marriage, the English Christian family and the English Christian home.”2 For the Puritans, marriage was sacred because it was a covenant instituted by God himself (Mal. 2:14). Edmund Morgan summarizes their view:

Every proper marriage since the first was founded on a covenant to which the free and voluntary consent of both parties was necessary… . Since time began no man and woman had ever been allowed to fix the terms upon which they would agree to be husband and wife. God had established the rules of marriage when he solemnized the first one, and he had made no changes in

Eikon 4.1 (Spring 2022) p. 9

them since then. The covenant of marriage was a promise to obey those rules without conditions and without reservations.3

The Puritans have bequeathed to us the biblical concept of a well-ordered, happy Christian home, where love abounds between husband and wife, and parents and children. Their writings4 reveal this outlook, and many scholars have confirmed it through the years.5 Their biblical vision for the home is sorely needed in our day of self-gratification and disrespect for authority, a day in which every man does that which is right in his own eyes.

No Puritan was more important for fostering a well-ordered Christian home than William Gouge (1575–1653). Among the scores of books written on marriage and family

Eikon 4.1 (Spring 2022) p. 10

living by the Puritans, Gouge’s popular Of Domestical Duties was the most common gift that a Puritan pastor gave to couples whose marriages he was privileged to officiate. This work has recently been edited for the modern reader by ...