Why We Need the Puritans

"Pillorying the Puritans 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:

[b]First,[/b] 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.

[b]Second,[/b] 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.

[b]Thirdly,[/b] 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.

[b]Fourthly,[/b] 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.

[b]Fifthly,[/b] 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.

[b]Sixthly,[/b] 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.

- J.I. Packer

Thanks for posting this excellent article brother Paul.

Have you read Meet the Puritans yet? It can be found for sale on several websites. I have not made the purchase yet but it is on the top of my wish list. Here are a couple reviews.

“Joel Beeke and Randall Pederson have produced a tremendous gift to and resource for all who want an entryway into the study of the Puritans. They not only provide accurate biographical and theological introduction to every Puritan whose works have been reprinted in the last fifty years, but also combine with their helpful summaries an insightful analysis. If this were not enough, they’ve added major appendices that include the so-called ‘Scottish Puritans’ (that is, the great Scottish theologians who were contemporaries of and like-minded brethren in doctrine and piety with the English Puritans) as well as the Dutch Further Reformation divines. Meet the Puritans, With a Guide to Modern Reprints is a must have. I know of nothing like it. If you are looking for a reliable window into the life, theology, piety and ministry of the Puritans—this is it.”
—DR. LIGON DUNCAN,

“ Meet the Puritans is a cornucopia of good things: a remarkable portrait gallery, a wonderful library of biographies, a reader’s guide to great Christian literature, a record of an international movement of the Spirit, a personal tutorial in Puritan history and theology—and much more. The student of Puritanism will often reach for it, and yet the bedtime reader will be enthralled by it. It will persuade you that giants for Christ did once exist. Here are their stories. They will make you want to grow tall spiritually, too.”
—DR. SINCLAIR B. FERGUSON,

Excellent article. Their views on marriage were great. Thanks.

[i]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.[/i]

This is tremendous brother.

Thanks Paul,

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.

It is a tickle for modern Christians to deride the Puritans, and all Godly people who labor to be separate from the world, as 'holier than thou'. On the contrary, 'O modern Christian, Puritans saw their own wanton hearts with grave clarity and dire urgency, making them merely wiser than thou.

MC

[i]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. [/i]

This whole writing is good, thank you.

Can anyone discuss the ways of meditation that are important to this maturity that Packer talks about in here? I earnestly long for this...

Can anyone discuss the ways of meditation that are important to this maturity that Packer talks about in here? I earnestly long for this...

Maturity in this aspect, I have found, is comprised both of the grace of God and our own discipline of bringing our bodies and minds under the subjection of the Spirit of Christ. When we learn to surrender and die to our manifold resolutions and endless chores before God, to our strict, self-induced and imposed Bible reading and prayer marathons and our incessant comparisons of ourselves with the lives of other great saints, God will then meet us abundantly right where we are. He has a unique, custom-tailored plan for each one of us, at different levels in His School, and we shouldn't cookie-cut the process by trying to imitate heroic icons such as Spurgeon and Ravenhill and Wesley and the amazing Puritans.

When we finally come to an end of all the unauthorized laboring and emulating and just desire to fall in love with the pure Word of God, God the Spirit will meet us right where we are and begin the mentorship. What follows then is an act of sovereign grace, an expansion of understanding, floods of light begin to enter in and suddenly it is a [i]pure delight[/i] to meditate on what God is feeding you. And this, in turn, fosters growth and wisdom and a greater agility in handling Holy Scripture to feed others. And the cycle perpetuates.

How do I spell out a deep gasp from my soul into English...that was a good word and very pertinent to my predicament right now. My, my, my...thank you for sharing that...

I highly recommend this book by Joel Beeke as well-
[url=http://www.heritagebooks.org/bookstore/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=6019]Puritan Reformed Spirituality[/url]

It will bless your socks off!

Maturity in this aspect, I have found, is comprised both of the grace of God and our own discipline of bringing our bodies and minds under the subjection of the Spirit of Christ.

Speaking for myself,even my own discipline is[b] [i]brought[/i][/b] to me via His grace.

When we learn to surrender and die to our manifold resolutions and endless chores before God, to our strict, self-induced and imposed Bible reading and prayer marathons and our incessant comparisons of ourselves with the lives of other great saints,[b] God will then meet us abundantly right where we are. He has a unique, custom-tailored plan for each one of us, at different levels in His School, and we shouldn't cookie-cut the process by trying to imitate heroic icons such as Spurgeon and Ravenhill and Wesley and the amazing Puritans.

Well said! Surely the Master of His School alone can do this for His pupils.I appreciate the above a lot since I've been watching and listening to many sermons lately, and noticed myself becoming increasingly frustrated with myself, as though my walk just could never measure up to these "great" men of God.

No doubt, The Lord uses the Puritans' writings and the testimonies with their lives for His pupils, while for me,on a daily basis alongside Scripture. John Owen's ability to discern the heart of man alone can serve to be the best counsel for any Christian who seeks to know further of their own hearts; psychology is no match!

I must add, praise to be the longsuffering and patience of our Father and The Lord Jesus Christ, without such, I cannot imagine how is the Christian life even possible. We need the Puritans, though we need The Lord of them by far.

Edifying posts, brothers! Thank you very much.

mamaluk

When we learn to surrender and die to our manifold resolutions and endless chores before God, to our strict, self-induced and imposed Bible reading and prayer marathons and our incessant comparisons of ourselves with the lives of other great saints, [b]God will then meet us abundantly right where we are. He has a unique, custom-tailored plan for each one of us, at different levels in His School, and we shouldn't cookie-cut the process by trying to imitate heroic icons such as Spurgeon and Ravenhill and Wesley and the amazing Puritans.[/b]

One of the greatest posts I've ever read on here.

Thank you for posting this.

Speaking for myself,even my own discipline is brought to me via His grace

Amen, Margaret. This is true with me as well. The more I study the Word and the closer I am able to get to God and fellowship with Him at the feet of Jesus, the more I am being convinced of the doctrines of grace and my own sore depravity. When I say "discipline" in the Holy Spirit, I am alluding to the fact that God doesn't [i]physically[/i] open our Bibles for us, He won't forcefully take the fork out of our mouths if we are given to overeating, He doesn't [i]physically[/i] lift us out of bed (though He wakes us up) in the mornings for quiet time. I wish He would do all these things! But he doesn't make these choices for us, though He certainly urges us unto them and deeply impresses it upon our spirits to concede to His will in all these areas.

I have recently become fascinated with the word [i]"let"[/i] in the New Testament, in the letters of Paul. [i]Let[/i] the Word of Christ dwell in you richly with all wisdom (Col. 3:16); [i]Let[/i] no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth (Eph 4:29), etc. These here speak of areas God has already given us dominion over, areas God expects us to comply with according to His will, and He gives us the grace to obey and conquer through Christ, with the acts of obedience not being forced upon us but rather exercised on our part to Him by love. This is the "discipline" in the Holy Spirit I was referrring to, the willful disciplining of ourselves to comply to God's will - to the [i]letting[/i] of them become evident in our own lives by the strength and faith of the Son of God Who is our life.

The more I study the Word and the closer I am able to get to God and fellowship with Him at the feet of Jesus, the more I am being convinced of the doctrines of grace

Ah, praise God so much,perhaps the more we realize that the more Christ glorifies, and the more honor The Father receives..that's the crux, I suppose, of our faith..all back to Christ crucified, all glory to Him and Him alone. I dont dare consider myself in anyways "matured" in faith, as the apostle had not found himself "attained", through the walk in life's journey.

I ended the day last night filled with joy, for the love of Christ demonstrated by some of you brethren here on SI has been so refreshing. I'm really thankful to borrow some fellowship from you here from time to time.

"..let there be light..". Indeed, from the third verse in Scripture onward, all of God's orchestration, all of His design, even our ultimate hope in life and beyond, on earth and in the universe, was, has been, is and will be, I believe, "let" by God, from the grandest to the minuest, from Adam's life to our lives. That's just how wonderful He is, and how truly blessed we are ,as His children. For us, not only did HE give us new birth, but continue to guide us by being our Schoolmaster...

Some saw me as being pathetic sometimes, even thought I have "self-esteem" issue whenever I tried to give God credit for every little thing in my life. But if the apostle Paul had found no goodness in himself(edited), and when God has clearly claimed that He would share no glory with man...ah..one understands.

In light of the Christian duty, to the extreme, even that duty, when we look closer, is for our own benefit. Surely it's GOD Who bends my will, my knees and calls upon me to assume my responsiblity towards Christ's grace in my daily life. There are so much distractions in life, family members and their affairs alone often cause me to neglect the important responsibilty towards our Lord, our private worship and "knowing" Him.

The Lord does not only use His precious Word, He uses men like the puritans, He has even used some of you and some wonderful preachers on the videos here to set me straight in His Path. (Thank you SI)

It's important, I gather, for Christians to boast Christ and Him alone. As for living, to always bear in mind of God's total sovereignty, even more so perhaps, our total responsiblity.

Thank you brethren,
Margaret