The Puritans

Yeah. They sound like one of those extreme fundamentalist groups whose required reading includes books on how to identify and burn their friendly neighbourhood witch. Much-maligned by generations past, even now, they are often thought to be a sour, dour lot, ready to clamp down on any laughter or festivities, coldly living out their uptight lives with misguided tender consciences, an embarrassment to the universal Christian community.

Having recently acquired and read some writings of John Owen, Richard Baxter and Thomas Brooks however, I have had to reassess my opinion of them: they have been greatly encouraging as forerunners in the race, having tread the path that I (and other Christians) now tread, having struggled with the same reality of personal and neighbourly sin.

According to JI Packer in his book, "Among God's Giants", the name "Puritan" was coined in the early 1560s as a satirical smear word implying peevishness, censoriousness, conceit, and a measure of hypocrisy. However, far from being religious fanatics who were comic and pathetic, native and superstitious, primitive and gullible, superserious and overscrupulous, unable and unwilling to relax, the Puritans were actually great souls serving a great God. In them, clear-headed passion and warm-hearted compassion combined. Visionary and practical, idealistic and realistic, they were goal-oriented and methodical, great believers, great hopers, great doers and great sufferers. They were mature Christians, as exemplified by their wisdom, goodwill, resilience and creativity.

What do the Puritans have to offer us? Much, argues Packer:

1. there are lessons for us in the intergretion of their daily lives. Their lifestyle was holistic. There was no disjunction between the sacred and secular. They were so heavenly-minded that they saw life whole-intergrating contemplation with action, worship with work, labour with rest, love of God with love of God with love of neighbour and of serlf, personal with social identity, and the wide spectrum of relational responsibilities with each other, in a thoroughly conscientious and thought-out way.
2. there are lessons for us in the quality of their spiritual experience. In their communion with God, as Jesus Christ was central, so Holy Scripture was supreme. Knowing themselves to be creations of though, affection, and will, and knowing that God's way to the human heart (the heart not being the seat of affections as we know it today, but the will or decision-making centre of the person) is via the human head (the mind), the Puritans practised meditation, discursice and systematic, on the whole range of biblical truth. 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. 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 ourselves being imposed on by irrational emotional romanticism disguised as super-spirituality, could profit much from the Puritan's example.
3. there are lessons for us in their passion for effective action. The Puritans had no time for the idleness of the lazy or passive person who leaves it to others to change the world (and by way of excuse claims that he is acknowledging the sovereignty of and depending on God by doing so). They were men of action in the 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. Today, Christians found to be on the whole passionless, passive, and prayerless; cultivating an ethos which encloses personal piety in a pietistic cocoon have much to learn from the Puritans.
4. there are lessons for us in their programme for family stability. The Puritan ethic of marriage was to look not for a partner whom you do love passionately at the 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. At home in the first instance, the Puritan layman practised evangelism and ministry. 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 learnt from the Puritan's very different ways.
5. there are lessons to be learnt 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. They felt keenly the wonder of human individuality. 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.
6. there are lessons to be learnt from the Puritans' ideal of church renewal. "Church renewal" was not a word that they used-they spoke only of "reformation" and "reform", which suggests to our modern mindsa concern that is limited to the externals of the churhc's orthodoxy, order, worship forms, and disciplinary code. But when the Puritans preached and prayed for "reformation", they had in mind far more. The "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 have an enriched understanding of God's truth. "Reformation" aroused affections God-wards, increased the ardour in one's devotions, and increased the love, joy and firmness of Christian purpose in one's calling and personal life.