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.
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