The
Puritans
The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life
by J. I. Packer
Why We Need the Puritans
Horse Racing is said to be the sport of kings. The sport of
slinging mud has, however, a wider following. Pillorying the Puritans, in particular, has
long been a popular pastime both sides of the Atlantic, and most people's image of
Puritanism still has on it much disfiguring dirt that needs to be scraped off. 'Puritan'
as a name was, in fact, mud from the start. Coined in the early 1560's, it was always a
satirical smear word implying peevishness, censoriousness, conceit, and a measure of
hypocrisy, over and above its basic implication of religiously motivated discontent with
what was seen as Elizabeth's Laodicean and compromising Church of England.
Later, the word gained the further, political connotation of being against the Stuart
monarchy and for some sort of republicanism; its primary reference, however, was still to
what was seen as an odd, furious, and ugly form of Protestant religion. In England,
anti-Puritan feeling was let loose at the time of the Restoration and has flowed freely
ever since. In North America it built up slowly after the days of Jonathan Edwards to
reach its zenith a hundred years ago in post-Puritan New England.
For the past half-century, however, scholars have been meticulously wiping away the mud,
and as Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel have unfamiliar colours today now
that restorers have removed the dark varnish, so the conventional image of the Puritans
has been radically revamped, at least for those in the know. (Knowledge, alas, travels
slowly in some quarters.) Taught by Perry Miller, William Haller, Marshall Knappen, Percy
Scholes, Edmund Morgan, and a host of more recent researchers, informed folk now
acknowledge that the typical Puritans were not wild men, fierce and freaky, religious
fanatics and social extremists, but sober, conscientious, and cultured citizens: persons
of principle, devoted, determined, and disciplined, excelling in the domestic virtues, and
with no obvious shortcomings save a tendency to run to works when saying anything
important, whether to God or to man.
At last the record has been put straight. But even so, the suggestion that we 'need' the
Puritans - we late twentieth-century Westerners, with all our sophistication and mastery
of technique in both secular and sacred fields - may prompt some lifting of eyebrows. The
belief that the Puritans, even if they were in fact responsible citizens, were comic and
pathetic in equal degree, being naive and superstitious, primitive and gullible,
superserious, overscrupulous, majoring in minors, and unable or unwilling to relax, dies
hard. What could these zealots give us that we need, it is asked. The answer, in one word,
is maturity. Maturity is a compound of wisdom, goodwill, resilience, and creativity. The
Puritans exemplified maturity; we don't. We are spiritual dwarfs. A much-traveled leader,
a native American (be it said), has declared that he finds North American Protestantism,
man-centered, manipulative, success-oriented, self-indulgent and sentimental, as it
blatantly is, to be 3,000 miles wide and half an inch deep.
The Puritans, by contrast, as a body were giants. They were great souls serving a great
God. In them clear-headed passion and warm-hearted compassion combined. Visionary and
practical, idealistic and realistic too, goal-oriented and methodical, they were great
believers, great hopers, great doers, and great sufferers. But their sufferings, both
sides of the ocean (in old England from the authorities and in New England from the
elements), seasoned and ripened them till they gained a stature that was nothing short of
heroic. Ease and luxury, such as our affluence brings us today, do not make for maturity;
hardship and struggle however do, and the Puritans' battles against the spiritual and
climatic wildernesses in which God set them produced a virility of character, undaunted
and unsinkable, rising above discouragement and fears, for which the true precedents and
models are men like Moses, and Nehemiah, and Peter after Pentecost, and the apostle Paul.
Spiritual warfare made the Puritans what they were. They accepted conflict as their
calling, seeing themselves as their Lord's soldier-pilgrims, just as in Bunyan's allegory,
and not expecting to be able to advance a single step without opposition of one sort or
another.
Wrote John Geree, in his tract 'The Character of an Old English Puritane or Noncomformist
(1646)': 'His whole life he accounted a warfare, wherein Christ was his captain, his arms,
praiers and tears. The Crosse his Banner and his word [motto] Vincit qui patitur [he who
suffers conquers].' The Puritans lost, more or less, every public battle that they fought.
Those who stayed in England did not change the Church of England as they hoped to do, nor
did they revive more than a minority of its adherents, and eventually they were driven out
of Anglicanism by calculated pressure on their consciences. Those who crossed the Atlantic
failed to establish new Jerusalem in New England; for the first fifty years their little
colonies barely survived. They hung on by the skin of their teeth. But the moral and
spiritual victories that the Puritans won by keeping sweet, peaceful, patient, obedient,
and hopeful under sustained and seemingly intolerable pressures and frustrations give them
a place of high honor in the believers' hall of fame, where Hebrews 11 is the first
gallery.
It was out of this constant furnace-experience that their maturity was wrought and their
wisdom concerning discipleship was refined. George Whitefield, the evangelist, wrote of
them as follows: " Ministers never write or preach so well as when under the cross;
the Spirit of Christ and of glory then rests upon them. was this, no doubt, that made the
Puritans... such burning lights and shining lights. When cast out by the black
Bartholomew-act [the 1662 Act of Uniformity] and driven from their respective charges to
preach in barns and fields, in the highways and hedges, they in an especial manner wrote
and preached as men having authority. Though dead, by their writings they yet speak; a
peculiar unction attends them to this very hour...." Those words come from a preface
to a reprint of Bunyan's works that appeared in 1767; but the unction continues, the
authority is still felt, and the mature wisdom still remains breathtaking, as all modern
Puritan-readers soon discover for themselves. Through the legacy of this literature the
Puritans can help us today towards the maturity that they knew, and that we need
In what ways can they do this? Let me suggest some specifics. First, there are lessons for
us in the integration of their daily lives. As their Christianity was all-embracing, so
their living was all of a piece. Nowadays we would call their lifestyle holistic: all
awareness, activity, and enjoyment, all 'use of the creatures' and development of personal
powers and creativity, was integrated in the single purpose of honoring God by
appreciating all his gifts and making everything 'holiness to the Lord'. There was for
them no disjunction between sacred and secular; all creation, so far as they were
concerned, was sacred, and all activities, of whatever kind, must be sanctified, that is,
done to the glory of God. So, in their heavenly-minded ardour, the Puritans became men and
women of order, matter-of-fact and down-to-earth, prayerful, purposeful, practical. Seeing
life whole, they integrated contemplation with action, worship with work, labour with
rest, love of God with love of neighb our and of self, personal with social rest, love of
God with love of neighbour and of self, personal with social identity, and the wide
spectrum of relational responsibilities with each other, in a thoroughly conscientious and
thought-out way.
In this thoroughness they were extreme, that is to say far more thorough than we are, but
in their blending of the whole wide range of Christian duties set forth in Scripture they
were eminently balanced. They lived by 'method' (we would say, by a rule of life),
planning and proportioning their time with care, not so much to keep bad things out as to
make sure that they got all good and important things in - necessary wisdom, then as now,
for busy people! We today, who tend to live unplanned lives at random in a series of
non-communicating compartments and who hence feel swamped and distracted most of the time,
could learn much from the Puritans at this point.
Second, there are lessons for us in the quality of their spiritual experience. In the
Puritans' communion with God, as Jesus Christ was central, so Holy Scripture was supreme.
By Scripture, as God's word of instruction about divine-human relationships, they sought
to live, and here, too, they were conscientiously methodical. Knowing themselves to be
creatures of thought, affection, and will, and knowing that God's way to the human heart
(the will) is via the human head (the mind), the Puritans practised meditation, discursive
and systematic, on the whole range of biblical truth as they saw it applying to
themselves. Puritan meditation on Scripture was modeled on the Puritan sermon; in
meditation the Puritan would seek to search and challenge his heart, stir his affections
to hate sin and love righteousness, and encourage himself with God's promises, just as
Puritan preachers would do from the pulpit.
This rational, resolute, passionate piety was conscientious without becoming obsessive,
law-oriented without lapsing into legalism, and expressive of Christian liberty without
any shameful lurches into license. The Puritans knew that Scripture is the unalterable
rule of holiness, and never allowed themselves to forget it. Knowing also the dishonesty
and deceitfulness of fallen human hearts, they cultivated humility and self-suspicion as
abiding attitudes, and examined themselves regularly for spiritual blind spots and lurking
inward evils. They may not be called morbid or introspective on this account, however; on
the contrary, they found the discipline of self-examination by Scripture (not the same
thing as introspection, let us note), followed by the discipline of confessing and
forsaking sin and renewing one's gratitude to Christ for his pardoning mercy, to be a
source of great inner peace and joy.
We today, who know to our cost that we have unclear minds, uncontrolled affections, and
unstable wills when it comes to serving God, and who again and again find ourselv es being
imposed on by irrational, emotional romanticism disguised as super-spirituality, could
profit much from the Puritans' example at this point too.
Third, there are lessons for us in their passion for effective action. Though the
Puritans, like the rest of the human race, had their dreams of what could and should be,
they were decidedly not the kind of people that we could call 'dreamy'! They had no time
for the idleness of the lazy or passive person who leaves it to others to change the
world! They were men of action in he pure Reformed mould - crusading activists without a
jot of self-reliance; workers for God who depended utterly on God to work in and through
them, and who always gave God the praise for anything they did that in retrospect seemed
to them to have been right; gifted men who prayed earnestly that God would enable them to
use their powers, not for self-display, but for his praise.
None of them wanted to be revolutionaries in church or state, though some of them
reluctantly became such; all of them, however, longed to be effective change agents for
God wherever shifts from sin to sanctity were called for. So Cromwell and his army made
long, strong prayers before each battle, and preachers made long, strong prayers privately
before ever venturing into the pulpit, and laymen made long, strong prayers before
tackling any matter of importance (marriage, business deals, major purchases, or
whatever). Today, however, Christians in the West are found to be on the whole
passionless, passive, and, one fears, prayerless; cultivating an ethos which encloses
personal piety in a pietistic cocoon, they leave public affairs to go their own way and
neither expect nor for the most part seek influence beyond their own Christian circle.
Where the Puritans prayed and laboured for a holy England and New England, sensing that
where privilege is neglected and unfaithfulness reigns national judgement threatens,
modern Christians gladly settle for conventional social respectability and, having done
so, look no further. Surely it is obvious that at this point also the Puritans have a
great deal to teach us. Fourth, there are lessons for us in their program for family
stability. It is hardly too much to say that the Puritans created the Christian family in
the English-speaking world. The Puritan ethic of marriage was to look not for a partner
whom you do love passionately at this moment, but rather for one whom you can love
steadily as your best friend for life, and then to proceed with God's help to do just
that. The Puritan ethic of nurture was to train up children in the way they should go, to
care for their bodies and souls together, and to educate them for sober, godly, socially
useful adult living. The Puritan ethic of home life was based on maintaining order,
courtesy, and family worship. Goodwill, patience, consistency, and an encouraging attitude
were seen as the essential domestic virtues. In an age of routine discomforts, rudimentary
medicine without pain-killers, frequent bereavements (most families lost at least as many
children as they reared), an average life expectancy of just under thirty years, and
economic hardship for almost all save merchant princes and landed gentry, family life was
a school for character in every sense, and the fortitude with which Puritans resisted the
all-too-familiar temptation to relieve pressure from the world by brutality at home, and
laboured to honor God in their families despite all, merits supreme praise.
At home the Puritans showed themselves (to use my overworked term) mature, accepting
hardships and disappointments realistically as from God and refusing to be daunted or
soured by any of them. Also, it was at home in the first instance that the Puritan layman
practised evangelism and ministry. 'His family he endeavoured to make a Church,' wrote
Geree, '...labouring that those that were born in it, might be born again to God.' In an
era in which family life has become brittle even among Christians, with chicken-hearted
spouses taking the easy course of separation rather than working at their relationship,
and narcissistic parents spoiling their children materially while neglecting them
spiritually, there is once more much to be learned from the Puritans' very different ways.
Fifth, there are lessons to be learned from their sense of human worth. Through believing
in a great God (the God of Scripture, undiminished and undomesticated), they gained a
vivid awareness of the greatness of moral issues, of eternity, and of the human soul.
Hamlet's 'What a piece of work is man!' is a very Puritan sentiment; the wonder of human
individuality was something that they felt keenly. Though, under the influence of their
medieval heritage, which told them that error has no rights, they did not in every case
manage to respect those who differed publicly from them, their appreciation of man's
dignity as the creature made to be God's friend was strong, and so in particular was their
sense of the beauty and nobility of human holiness.
In the collectivised urban anthill where most of us live nowadays the sense of each
individual's eternal significance is much eroded, and the Puritan spirit is at this point
a corrective from which we can profit greatly.
Sixth, there are lessons to be learned from the Puritans' ideal of church renewal. To be
sure, 'renewal' was not a word that they used; they spoke only of 'reformation' and
'reform', which words suggest to our twentieth-century minds a concern that is limited to
the externals of the church's orthodoxy, order, worship forms and disciplinary code. But
when the Puritans preached, published, and prayed for 'reformation' they had in mind, not
indeed less than this, but far more. On the title page of the original edition of Richard
Baxter's 'The Reformed Pastor', the word 'reformed' was printed in much larger type than
any other, and one does not have to read far before discovering that for Baxter a
'reformed' pastor was not one who campaigned for Calvinism but one whose ministry to his
people as preacher, teacher, catechist and role-model showed him to be, as we would say,
'revived' or 'renewed'. The essence of this kind of 'reformation' was enrichment of
understanding of God's truth, arousal of affections God-ward, increase of ardour in one's
devotions, and more love, joy, and firmness of Christian purpose in one's calling and
personal life.
In line with this, the ideal for the church was that through 'reformed' clergy all the
members of each congregation should be 'reformed' - brought, that is, by God's grace
without disorder into a state of what we would call revival, so as to be truly and
thoroughly converted, theologically orthodox and sound, spiritually alert and expectant,
in character terms wise and steady, ethically enterprising and obedient, and humbly but
joyously sure of their salvation. This was the goal at which Puritan pastoral ministry
aimed throughout, both in English parishes and in the 'gathered' churches of
congregational type that multiplied in the mid-seventeenth century. The Puritans' concern
for spiritual awakening in communities is to some extent hidden from us by their
institutionalism; recalling the upheavals of English Methodism and the Great Awakening, we
think of revival ardour as always putting a strain on established order, whereas the
Puritans envisaged 'reform' at congregational level coming in disciplined style through
faithful preaching, catechising, and spiritual service on the pastor's part.
Clericalism, with its damming up of lay initiative, was doubtless a Puritan limitation,
and one which boomeranged when lay zeal finally boiled over in Cromwell's army, in
Quakerism, and in the vast sectarian underworld of Commonwealth times; but the other side
of that coin was the nobility of the pastor's profile that the Puritans evolved - gospel
preacher and Bible teacher, shepherd and physician of souls, catechist and counselor,
trainer and disciplinarian, all in one. From the Puritans' ideals and goals for church
life, which were unquestionably and abidingly right, and from their standards for clergy,
which were challengingly and searchingly high, there is yet again a great deal that modern
Christians can and should take to heart. These are just a few of the most obvious areas in
which the Puritans can help us in these days.
The foregoing celebration of Puritan greatness may leave some readers skeptical. It is,
however, as was hinted earlier, wholly in line with the major reassessment of Puritanism
that has taken place in historical scholarship. Fifty years ago the academic study of
Puritanism went over a watershed with the discovery that there was such a thing as Puritan
culture, and a rich culture at that, over and above Puritan reactions against certain
facets of medieval and Renaissance culture. The common assumption of earlier days, that
Puritans both sides of the Atlantic were characteristically morbid, obsessive, uncouth and
unintelligent, was left behind. Satirical aloofness towards Puritan thought-life gave way
to sympathetic attentiveness, and the exploring of Puritan beliefs and ideals became an
academic cottage industry of impressive vigour, as it still is. North America led the way
with four books published over two years which between them ensured that Puritan studies
could never be the same again. These were: William Haller, 'The Rise of Puritanism'
(Columbia University Press: New York, 1938); A.S.P. Woodhouse, 'Puritanism and Liberty'
(Macmillan: London, 1938; Woodhouse taught at Toronto); M.M. Knappen, 'Tudor Puritanism'
(Chicago University Press: Chicago, 1939); and Perry Miller, 'The New England Mind Vol I;
The Seventeenth Century' (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1939).
Many books from the thirties and later have confirmed the view of Puritanism which these
four volumes yielded, and the overall picture that has emerged is as follows.
Puritanism was at heart a spiritual movement, passionately concerned with God and
godliness. It began in England with William Tyndale the Bible translator, Luther's
contemporary, a generation before the word 'Puritan' was coined, and it continued till the
latter years of the seventeenth century, some decades after 'Puritan' had fallen out of
use. Into its making went Tyndale's reforming biblicism; John Bradford's piety of the
heart and conscience; John Knox's zeal for God's honor in national churches; the passion
for evangelical pastoral competence that is seen in John Hooper, Edward Dering and Richard
Greenham; the view of Holy Scripture as the 'regulative principle' of church worship and
order that fired Thomas Cartwright; the anti-Roman, anti-Arminian, anti-Socinian,
anti-Antinomian Calvinism that John Owen and the Westminster standards set forth; the
comprehensive ethical interest that reached its apogee in Richard Baxter's monumental
'Christian Directory'; and the purpose of popularising and making practical the teaching
of the Bible that gripped Perkins and Bunyan, with many more.
Puritanism was essentially a movement for church reform, pastoral renewal and evangelism,
and spiritual revival; and in addition - indeed, as a direct expression of its zeal for
God's honor - it was a world-view, a total Christian philosophy, in intellectual terms a
Protestantised and updated medievalism, and in terms of spirituality a reformed
monasticism outside the cloister and away from monkish vows. The Puritan goal was to
complete what England's Reformation began: to finish reshaping Anglican worship, to
introduce effective church discipline into Anglican parishes, to establish righteousness
in the political, domestic, and socio-economic fields, and to convert all Englishmen to a
vigorous evangelical faith. Through the preaching and teaching of the gospel, and the
sanctifying of all arts, sciences, and skills, England was to become a land of saints, a
model and paragon of corporate godliness, and as such a means of blessing to the world.
Such was the Puritan dream as it developed under Elizabeth, James, and Charles, and
blossomed in the Interregnum, before it withered in the dark tunnel of persecution between
1660 (Restoration) and 1689 (Toleration). This dream bred the giants with whom this book
is concerned.
The present chapter is, I confess, advocacy, barefaced and unashamed. I am seeking to make
good the claim that the Puritans can teach us lessons that we badly need to learn. Let me
pursue my line of argument a little further. I must by now be apparent that the great
Puritan pastor-theologians - Owen, Baxter, Goodwin, Howe, Perkins, Sibbes, Brooks, Watson,
Gurnall, Flavel, Bunyan, Manton, and others like them - were men of outstanding
intellectual power, as well as spiritual insight. In them mental habits fostered by sober
scholarship were linked with a flaming zeal for God and a minute acquaintance with the
human heart. All their work displays this unique fusion of gifts and graces. In thought
and outlook they were radically God-centered. Their appreciation of God's sovereign
majesty was profound, and their reverence in handling his written word was deep and
constant. They were patient, thorough, and methodical in searching the Scriptures, and
their grasp of the various threads and linkages in the web of revealed truth was firm and
clear. They understood most richly the ways of God with men, the glory of Christ the
Mediator, and the work of the Spirit in the believer and the church.
And their knowledge was no mere theoretical orthodoxy. They sought to 'reduce to practice'
(their own phrase) all that God taught them. They yoked their consciences to his word,
disciplining themselves to bring all activities under the scrutiny of Scripture, and to
demand a theological, as distinct from a merely pragmatic, justification for everything
that they did. They applied their understanding of the mind of God to every branch of
life, seeing the church, the family, the state, the arts and sciences, the world of
commerce and industry, no less than the devotions of the individual, as so many spheres in
which God must be served and honored. They saw life whole, for they saw its Creator as
Lord of each department of it, and their purpose was that 'holiness to the Lord' might be
written over it in its entirety. Nor as this all. Knowing God, the Puritans also knew man.
They saw him as in origin a noble being, made in God's image to rule God's earth, but now
tragically brutified and brutalised by sin. They viewed sin in he triple light of God's
law, Lordship, and holiness, and so saw it as transgression and guilt, as rebellion and
usurpation, and as uncleanness, corruption, and inability for good. Seeing this, and
knowing the ways whereby the Spirit brings sinners to faith and new life in Christ, and
leads saints, on the one hand to grow into their Savior's image, and, on the other, to
learn their total dependence on grace, the great Puritans became superb pastors.
The depth and unction of the 'practical and experimental' expositions in the pulpit was no
more outstanding than was their skill in the study of applying spiritual physic to sick
souls. From Scripture they mapped the often bewildering terrain of the life of faith and
fellowship with God with great thoroughness (see 'Pilgrim's Progress' for a pictorial
gazetteer), and their acuteness and wisdom in diagnosing spiritual malaise and setting out
the appropriate biblical remedies was outstanding. They remain the classic pastors of
Protestantism, just as men like Whitefield and Spurgeon stand as its classic evangelists.
Now it is here, on the pastoral front, that today's evangelical Christians most need help.
Our numbers, it seems, have increased in recent years, and a new interest in the old paths
of evangelical theology has grown. For this we should thank God. But not all evangelical
zeal is according to knowledge, nor do the virtues and values of the biblical Christian
life always come together as they should, and three groups in particular in today's
evangelical world seem very obviously to need help of a kind that Puritans, as we meet
them in their writings, are uniquely qualified to give.
These I call restless experientialists, entrenched intellectualists, and disaffected
deviationists. They are not, of course, organised bodies of opinion, but individual
persons with characteristic mentalities that one meets over and over again. Take them,
now, in order.
Those whom I call restless experientialsts are a familiar breed, so much so that observers
are sometimes tempted to define evangelicalism in terms of them. Their outlook is one of
casual haphazardness and fretful impatience, of grasping after novelties, entertainments,
and 'highs', and of valuing strong feelings above deep thoughts. They have little taste
for solid study, humble self-examination, disciplined meditation, and unspectacular hard
work in their callings and their prayers. They conceive the Christian life as one of
exciting extraordinary experiences rather than of resolute rational righteousness. They
well continually on the themes of joy, peace, happiness, satisfaction and rest of souls
with no balancing reference to the divine discontent of Romans 7, the fight of faith of
Psalm 73, or the 'lows' of Psalms 42, 88, and 102. Through their influence the spontaneous
jollity of the simple extrovert comes to be equated with healthy Christian living, while
saints of less sanguine and more complex temperament get driven almost to distraction
because they cannot bubble over in the prescribed manner. In her restlessness these
exuberant ones become uncritically credulous, reasoning that the more odd and striking an
experience the more divine, supernatural, and spiritual it must be, and they scarcely give
the scriptural virtue of steadiness a thought. It is no counter to these defects to appeal
to the specialised counselling techniques that extrovert evangelicals have developed for
pastoral purposes in recent years; for spiritual life is fostered, and spiritual maturity
engendered, no by techniques but by truth, and if our techniques have been formed in terms
of a defective notion of the truth to be conveyed and the goal to be aimed at they cannot
make us better pastors or better believers than we were before. The reason why the
restless experientialists are lopsided is that they have fallen victim to a form of
worldliness, a man-centered, anti-rational individualism, which turns Christian life into
a thrill-seeking ego-trip. Such saints need the sort of maturing ministry in which the
Puritan tradition has specialised. What Puritan emphases can establish and settle restless
experientialists? These, to start with.
First, the stress on God-centeredness as a divine requirement that is central to the
discipline of self-denial.
Second, the insistence on the primacy of the mind, and on the impossibility of obeying
biblical truth that one has not yet understood.
Third, the demand for humility, patience, and steadiness at all times, and for an
acknowledgement that Holy Spirit's main ministry is not to give thrills but to create in
us Christlike character.
Fourth, the recognition that feelings go up and down, and that God frequently tries us by
leading us through wastes of emotional flatness.
Fifth, the singling out of worship as life's primary activity.
Sixth, the stress on our need of regular self-examination by Scripture, in terms set by
Psalm 139:23-24.
Seventh, the realisation that sanctified suffering bulks large in God's plan for his
children's growth in grace. No Christian tradition of teaching admin isters this purging
and strengthening medicine with more masterful authority than does that of the Puritans,
whose own dispensing of it nurtured a marvellously strong and resilient type of Christian
for a century and more, as we have seen.
Think now of entrenched intellectualists in the evangelical world: a second familiar
breed, though not so common as the previous type. Some of them seem to be victims of an
insecure temperament and inferiority feelings, others to be reacting out of pride or pain
against the zaniness of experientialism as they have perceived it, but whatever the source
of their syndrome the behaviour-pattern in which they express it is distinctive and
characteristic. Constantly they present themselves as rigid, argumentative, critical
Christians, champions of God's truth for whom orthodoxy is all. Upholding and defending
their own view of that truth, whether Calvinist or Arminian, dispensational or
Pentecostal, national church reformist or Free Church separatist, or whatever it might be,
is their leading interest, and they invest themselves unstintingly in this task. There is
little warmth about them; relationally they are remote; experiences do not mean much to
them; winning the battle for mental corr ectness is their one great purpose.
They see, truly enough, that in our anti-rational, feeling-oriented, instant-gratification
culture conceptual knowledge of divine things is undervalued, and they seek with passion
to right the balance at this point. They understand the priority of the intellect well;
the trouble is that intellectualism, expressing itself in endless campaigns for their own
brand of right thinking, is almost if not quite all that they can offer, for it is almost
if not quite all that they have. They too, so I urge, need exposure to the Puritan
heritage for their maturing. That last statement might sound paradoxical, since it will
not have escaped the reader that the above profile corresponds to what many still suppose
the typical Puritan to have been. But when we ask what emphases Puritan tradition contains
to counter arid intellectualism, a whole series of points springs to view.
First, true religion claims the affections as well as the intellect; it is essentially, in
Richard Baxter's phrase, 'heart-work'
Second, theological truth is for practice. William Perkins defined theology as the science
of living blessedly for ever; William Ames called it the science of living to God.
Third, conceptual knowledge kills if one does not move on from knowing notions to knowing
the realities to which they refer - in this case, from knowing about God to a relational
acquaintance with God himself.
Fourth, faith and repentance, issuing in a life of love and holiness, that is, of
gratitude expressed in goodwill and good works, are explicitly called for in the gospel.
Fifth, the Spirit is given to lead us into close companionship with others in Christ.
Sixth, the discipline of discursive meditation is meant to keep us ardent and adoring in
our love affair with God.
Seventh, it is ungodly and scandalous to become a firebrand and cause division in the
church, and it is ordinarily nothing more reputable than spiritual pride in its
intellectual form that leads men to create parties and splits. The great Puritans were as
humble-minded and warm-hearted they were clear-headed, as fully oriented to people as they
were to Scripture, and as passionate for peace as they were for truth. They would
certainly have diagnosed today's fixated Christian intellectualists as spiritually
stunted, not in their zeal for the form of sound words but in their lack of zeal for
anything else; and the thrust of Puritan teaching about God's truth in man's life is still
potent to ripen such souls into whole and mature human beings.
I turn finally to those whom I call disaffected deviationists, the casualties and dropouts
of the modern evangelical movement, many of whom have now turned against it to denounce it
as a neurotic perversion of Christianity. Here, too, is a breed that we know all too well.
It is distressing to think of these folk, both because their experience to date discredits
our evangelicalism so deeply and also because there are so many of them. Who are they?
They are people who once saw themselves as evangelicals, either from being evangelically
nurtured or from coming to profess conversion with the evangelical sphere of influence,
but who have become disillusioned about the evangelical point of view and have turned
their back on it, feeling that it let them down. Some leave it for intellectual reasons,
judging that what was taught them was so simplistic as to stifle their minds and so
unrealistic and out of touch with facts as to be really if unintentionally dishonest.
Others leave because they were led to expect that as Christians they would enjoy health,
wealth, trouble-free circumstances, immunity from relational hurts, betrayals, and
failures, and from making mistakes and bad decisions; in short, a flowery bed of ease on
which they would be carried happily to heaven - and these great expectations were in due
course refuted by events.
Hurt and angry, feeling themselves victims of a confidence trick, they now accuse the
evangelicalism they knew of having failed and fooled them, and resentfully give it up; it
is a mercy if they do not therewith similarly accuse and abandon God himself. Modern
evangelicalism has much to answer for in the number of casualties of this sort that it has
caused in recent years by its naivet of mind and unrealism of expectation. But here again
the soberer, profounder, wiser evangelicalism of the Puritan giants can fulfill a
corrective and therapeutic function in our midst, if only we will listen to its message.
What have the Puritans to say to us that might serve to heal the disaffected casualties of
modern evangelical goofiness? Anyone who reads the writings of the Puritan authors will
find in them much that helps in this way. Puritan authors regularly tell us,
first, of the 'mystery' of God: that our God is too small, that the real God cannot b put
without remainder into a man-made conceptual box so as to be fully understood; and that he
was, is, and always will be bewilderingly inscrutable in his dealing with those who trust
and love him, so that 'losses and crosses', that is, bafflement and disappointment in
relation to particular hopes one has entertained, must be accepted as a recurring element
in one's life of fellowship with him. Then they tell us,
second, of the 'love' of God: that it is a love that redeems, converts, sanctifies, and
ultimately glorifies sinners, and that Calvary was the one place in human history where it
was fully and unambiguously revealed, and that in relation to our own situation we may
know for certain that nothing can separate us from that love (Rom.8:38f), although no
situation in this world will ever be free from flies in the ointment and thorns in the
bed. Developing the theme of divine love the Puritans tell us,
third, of the 'salvation' of God: that the Christ who put away our sins
and brought us God's pardon is leading us through this world to a glory
for which we are even now being prepared by the instilling of desire for
it and capacity to enjoy it, and that holiness here, in the form of
consecrated service and loving obedience through thick and thin, is the
high road to happiness hereafter.
Following this they tell us,
fourth, about 'spiritual conflict,' the many ways in which the world, the flesh and the
devil seek to lay us low;
fifth, about the 'protection' of God, whereby he overrules and sanctifies the conflict,
often allowing one evil to touch our lives in order thereby to shield us from greater
evils; and, sixth, about the 'glory' of God, which it becomes our privilege to further by
our celebrating of his grace, by our proving of his power under perplexity and pressure,
by totally resigning ourselves to his good pleasure, and by making him our joy and delight
at all times. By ministering to us these precious biblical truths the Puritans give us the
resources we need to cope with 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune', and offer
the casualties an insight into what has happened to them that can raise them above
self-pitying resentment and reaction and restore their spiritual health completely.
Puritan sermons show that problems about providence are in now way new; the seventeenth
century had its own share of spiritual casualties, saints who had thought simplistically
and hoped unrealistically and were now disappointed, disaffected, despondent and
despairing, and the Puritans' ministry to us at this point is simply the spin-off of what
they were constantly saying to raise up and encourage wounded spirits among their own
people I think the answer to the question, why do we need the Puritans, is now pretty
clear, and I conclude my argument at this point. I, who owe more to the Puritans than to
any other theologians I have ever read, and who know that I need them still, have been
trying to persuade you that perhaps you need them too. To succeed in this would, I
confess, make me overjoyed, and that chiefly for your sake, and the Lord's. But there,
too, is something that I must leave in God's hands. Meantime, let us continue to explore
the Puritan heritage together. There is more gold to be mined here than I have mentioned
yet.
Back to top
