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-travelled leader, a native American (be it said), has declared
that he finds North American Protestantism, man-centred, 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 honour 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 honouring 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, 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.
Thirdly, 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 anything
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.
Fourthly, there
are lessons for us in their programme 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 honour 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.
Fifthly, 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.
Sixthly, 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, 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 counsellor, 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 honour 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 honour - 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-centred. 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 honoured. 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 is 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 the 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 Saviour'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 experientialists 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 their 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-centred, 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-centredness 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 administers 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 correctness 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 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'
Secondly, 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.
Thirdly,
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.
Fourthly, 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.
Fifthly, the Spirit is given to lead us into close companionship
with others in Christ.
Sixthly, the discipline of discursive
meditation is meant to keep us ardent and adoring in our love affair with God.
Seventhly, 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 naivety 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 be 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.