CHAPTER 20: Afterword
CHAPTER TWENTY
Afterword
The foregoing chapters have sought to appreciate the Puritans as men of God. They are, in other words, explorations in historical spirituality. They have aimed to look at aspects of Puritan belief and behaviour in ways that would enable us to see the grace of God in Puritans’ lives and think to some purpose about what we might learn from them. I introduced the Puritans by comparing them to the California Redwoods, huge trees that are not handsome in any conventional sense but have very straight, strong, solid trunks. The evidence presented has, I believe, shown that the comparison is justified. Now we stand back from detailed evidence in order to take one last look at the Puritans and make sure that we see them steadily and whole. We shall reflect briefly on three final questions.
The first is the historical question: what, really and essentially, was a Puritan, and what, at deepest level, was Puritanism? To this disputed question, at which we glanced before, we can now give the following answer:
Puritans were Englishmen (some of whom eventually went to America) who embraced whole-heartedly a version of Christianity that paraded a particular blend of biblicist, pietist, churchly and worldly concerns. The biblicism was that of William Tyndale, the Bible translator; it led the Puritans to move with Tyndale into a reformational doctrine of justification by faith and to move beyond him, setting this doctrine in the frame of a sharply-etched Augustinian-Calvinist account of God’s sovereign grace drawing faith, love, and holiness out of spiritually impotent sinners. The pietism was that of John Bradford, the Marian martyr, who pioneered the Puritan discipline of keeping a journal as a kind of private confessional in order to spur himself on in the ‘heart-work’ of self-knowledge, self-watch, daily repentance for daily shortcomings, and methodical praise and prayer. The churchly concern was that of John Calvin, for whom the glory of God in his people’s corporate life was always the goal, and the faith, form, and fidelity of churches at home and abroad was a matter of unending care. The worldly concern was that of John Knox, who saw the blessing of national reformation as entailing both God’s call to model communal godliness for all to see and God’s threat of judgement should this not be done. The essence of Puritanism was whole-heartedness in pursuing this fourfold concern by preaching and praying, by propaganda and pamphleteering, by programmes for changing the church, and by consciousness-raising education at every level, from the family and village school to the universities. All of this is reflected in the statement of an anonymous sixteenth-century tract, ‘the hotter sort of Protestants are called Puritans.’
Puritans as a body shared all four concerns listed above, and viewed them holistically, as integral and inseparable elements in the social sanctification of which they dreamed—although within the spectrum of peers, squires, clergy, educators, lawyers, politicians, weavers, traders, and others, with womenfolk, who made up the Puritan constituency, specific aims and emphases on church and community questions varied from person to person. On matters of liturgy and order in the church, in particular, agreement on what needed to be abolished far outstripped agreement as to what should be brought in instead. But in seeking to honour and please God by the methodical holiness of mortifying sin, vivifying habits of grace, keeping the Sabbath, governing one’s family, mastering the Bible, working hard in one’s calling, practising purity, justice, and philanthropy in all relationships, and keeping up communion with God by regular, constant prayer, the Puritans were all at one, and all the more so because these were the things that their preachers most stressed. The sense of being called by God to practise and establish holiness wherever they went, and to crusade together for the moral and spiritual transformation of England, was strong in their hearts, and they valued the endless instruction on personal religion that the preachers gave as restoring their vision of God, renewing their grasp of his grace, and recharging their batteries for the tasks that lay ahead of them. They liked the loud, dramatic, uninhibited, down-to-earth, heart-to-heart, ‘plain’ expository preaching, ripping up consciences and lifting up Christ, that was a hallmark of the Puritan pulpit throughout; this seemed to them the only proper way for a man to speak when the issues of eternity were his subject. Love for such preaching was in fact as strong a bond among them as any, and that in itself tells us much about their habit of mind. As businesslike believers, unpretentiously serious, humble, sober, and confident in Christ, fair and just in all their dealings, wholly uncompromising when God’s truth and glory were at stake, and willing to accept unpopularity and suffer for taking a stand, they were far and away the most impressive Englishmen of the era. In the short term, they lost their battles and failed in their reforming purposes; in the long term, however, they have done as much for English Christianity (not to mention that of America) as any group of would-be change agents has ever done, and their ministry to their successors shows no sign of ending yet.
Puritan piety can fairly be characterised as a reformed monasticism. Those who sought the desert and the cloister for a thousand years and more before the Puritans arrived did so because they wanted to be thorough-going for God (at least, this was the purpose of the best of them, and probably of most of them), and to that end they were willing to accept rigorously disciplined routines on a lifelong basis. The Puritans, whose minds were in some ways medieval just as they were in other ways modern, also accepted rigorously disciplined routines on a permanent basis, and for the same reason; but, like the Reformers, they believed that God calls his saints to serve him in the family, the church, and the world, rather than in any form of closed celibate society, and hence they thought and taught about the believer’s life of ‘duties’ (a Puritan key word) in terms of these three spheres of relationship. Monasticism signified to them improper and entangling vows of celibacy and poverty, and they would have been horrified to think of their own path of devotion and duty as having any links with such perversions, but in fact their aim was to ‘walk through the wilderness of this world’ (Bunyan’s phrase) with as rhythmical a routine for daily life as any monastic rule had ever required, and it is illuminating to observe the parallelism.
About the piety that was central to Puritanism we may generalise as follows. Four qualities stand out as showing its temper. The first is humility, the cultivated lowliness of a sinful creature who is always in the presence of a great and holy God, and can only live before him through being constantly pardoned. The second is receptivity, in the sense of openness to be taught, corrected, and directed by one’s discoveries in Scripture; plus willingness to be disciplined by the darkness of disappointment and inward desertion, as well as encouraged by happy providences; plus readiness to believe that the good hand of a faithful and gracious God, who is ripening his children for future glory, shapes it all, the rough no less than the smooth. The third is doxology, the passion to turn everything into worship and so to glorify God by all one’s words and deeds. The fourth is energy, the spiritual energy of the true Protestant work ethic whereby laziness and passivity are damned as irreligious, just because so much remains to be done before God’s name is hallowed in his world as it should be. That all four qualities are formed by the Puritan view of God, who he is and what he does, is obvious; that, together, they constitute a mind- and heart-set which, once formed, nothing can daunt or destroy is surely no less obvious. In the combination of these four qualities lay the secret of the Puritans’ indomitable and inexhaustible inner strength.
More can be said. For all the Puritans, the landscape of piety—that is, the spiritual topography of the ongoing life-situations in which each saint serves God—was determined by four realities, on all of which, as their books show, they laid out a great deal of expository effort. These were the sovereignty and sanctity of God, under whose eye we live, in whose hands we are, and whose purpose to have us holy, as he is holy, explains his way with our lives; the dignity and depravity of human beings, made for God but ruined by sin and now needing total renewal by grace; the love and Lordship of Christ, the Mediator, the Christian’s Saviour-King; and the light and power of the Holy Spirit, who convicts, quickens, regenerates, witnesses, leads, and sanctifies.
Then, in mapping the path of piety, the Puritans focused on four areas of particular concern, to which in their preaching they constantly returned: the first steps (conviction and conversion through faith and repentance Christ-ward, leading to assurance); the fight (against the world, the flesh, and the devil, as one seeks to go forward with one’s God); the fellowship (communion with God through prayer, and with other Christians by means of ‘conference’—we would say, through talk and sharing); and the finish (dying well, in faith and hope, with all preparations made and a clear and quiet conscience as one moves into that final momentous meeting with the Father and the Son).
And four further emphases permeated all Puritan practical teaching: the need for Christians to see themselves as warrior-pilgrims, travelling home to God; the need for Christians to educate, sensitise, and heed their consciences on all matters of divinely specified duty; the need for Christians to sanctify all relationships, handling them all responsibly, benevolently, and creatively so as to please the God who calls for neighbour-love; and the need for Christians to delight in God and praise him joyfully at all times. Such was Puritan godliness: faithful, thoughtful, ‘painful’ (that meant, for the Puritans, taking pains, working hard), and joyful. We can now see why, for many evangelicals since the eighteenth century, to call persons ‘Puritans’ has been to pay them a compliment.
Now to our second question, which is evaluative and spiritual. I have compared the great Puritans to giant trees; I have implied throughout that they were saints of great stature, showing up the characteristic pigmyhood of present-day believers, at any rate in the West. What was so outstandingly grand-scale about them to merit this verdict? Here are four specifics, stated in generalised but not, I think, idealised terms.
First, these Puritans were great thinkers. The Puritan movement was led mainly by ministers, and most of the leaders among the ministers were brilliant and articulate polymaths from the universities. (Baxter and Bunyan are the significant exceptions, and Baxter became a polymath beyond most, even though he was not a university man.) The age was one of intellectual ferment in many areas, and Puritan teachers had to be abreast of many things—biblical exegesis, which was being practised at a much higher level of competence than is usually recognised; the ins and outs of Reformed theology as it was debated at home and abroad and written about, usually in Latin, in the large volumes that continental divines produced so prolifically; the Roman, Arminian, and Socinian controversies, plus in the Commonwealth period the aberrations of the sects; and, above all, the heritage of practical, pastoral, devotional theology that Greenham, Perkins and their followers had begun to develop, and that others were constantly augmenting throughout the Puritan era. The leading Puritan theologians—Owen, Baxter, Sibbes, Preston, Perkins himself, Charnock, Howe—all achieve a massive, adoring simplicity when speaking of God that argues intense reflective study, deep and prayerful Christian experience, and a sharp sense of responsibility to the church corporately, to their hearers and readers individually, and to the truth itself. This quality gives Puritan theological writing a flavour—you could call it an unction—that one rarely finds elsewhere. Luther’s dictum that the three things that make the theologian are prayer, thinking in God’s presence, and conflict, outward and inward (oratio, meditatio, tentatio), seems to find verification in the great Puritans; as you read, you feel a power of thought and a spiritual authenticity in their writings that is matched by very few. By comparison, a great deal of Christian communication in our own day is made to appear shallow, simplistic, and sloppy.
Second, these Puritans were great worshippers. The Puritans served a great God, the God of the Bible, unshrunk by any of the diminishing and demeaning lines of thought about him that press upon us today. The only forms of God-shrinking in the Protestant theology of the Puritan age were Arminianism, which limited God’s sovereignty, and Socinianism, which in addition to doing that denied the Trinity and internal grace; and the Puritans repudiated both these views quite violently. For Scripture had given them a vision of the transcendent Creator who rules and speaks, the God from whom, and through whom, and for whom are all things, in whom we live and move and exist, the holy God who hates sin and judges it, and yet out of incomprehensible love has sent his Son to bear sin’s curse on the cross so that guilty sinners might be justly justified and saved. Also, Scripture had shown them Christ the Mediator now glorified and reigning, and effectually calling blind, deaf, impotent, spiritually dead souls to himself by his Spirit’s secret agency as God’s human messengers—pastors and parents, friends and neighbours—laboured to instil into them the message of law and gospel. Finally, Scripture had told them of God’s everlasting covenant relationship with believers—that total commitment on his part that guarantees blessing for eternity and entitles Christian to call on their Creator as ‘my God, my Father’, just as each of them calls on Jesus as ‘my Saviour, my Lord, and my God.’ The Westminster Confession is a Puritan statement of faith, and it is no accident that it is a classic embodiment of covenant theology. The Puritans’ perception of the glory and greatness of God, of Christ, and of the covenant of grace thrilled their hearts, and produced in them an ardent, overflowing spirit of worship that on fast days at least, when time did not press, led pastors to pray extempore in their services for up to an hour at a time. It is a fact of Christian history that those who are consciously worshipping a great God do not find that worship services lasting two or three hours are a bore; on the contrary, they are experienced as a joy. That was true in the seventeenth century, as it is true today. By comparison, the modern Western passion for services lasting not more than sixty minutes raises the suspicion that both our God and our own spiritual statues are rather small.
Third, these Puritans were great hopers. One notable strength of the Puritans, setting them far apart from Western Christians today, was the firmness of their grip on the biblical teaching about the hope of heaven. Basic to their pastoral care was their understanding of the Christian’s present life as a journey home, and they made much of encouraging God’s people to look ahead and feast their hearts on what is to come. The classic works here are Richard Baxter’s massive Saints’ Everlasting Rest, written to show how the hope of glory, analysed by biblical study and internalised by meditation, should give believers energy and direction for present living, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, both parts of which reach their climax with triumphant passages through Jordan to the celestial city. The vividness of the vision of heaven in both Baxter and Bunyan is remarkable by any standards; sanctified imagination gives concreteness and colour to theological perception, resulting in extraordinary power to convey the flow of glory to the Christian heart. The Puritan point, which was first, of course, a New Testament point, was that Christians should know what their hope is and draw from it power to resist whatever discouragements and distractions present circumstances may produce. The unreadiness for pain and death that Western Christians too often reveal today contrasts unhappily with the realism and joyful hope that the Puritan masters inculcated in order to prepare the saints to leave this world in peace when their time came.
Fourth, these Puritans were great warriors. The Puritans saw the Christian calling as, from one standpoint, an unending fight against the world, the flesh, and the devil, and programmed themselves accordingly. ‘His whole life he accounted a warfare,’ said Geree of the old English Puritan, ‘wherein Christ was his captain, his arms, praiers and tears.’ One of the all-time classics of Puritan literature is William Gurnall’s The Christian in Complete Armour; A Treatise of the Saints’ War against the Devil: Wherein a Discovery is made of that grand Enemy of God and his People, in his Policies, Power, Seat of his Empire, Wickedness, and chief design he hath against the Saints. A Magazine Opened, From whence the Christian is furnished with Spiritual Arms for the Battle, helped on with his Armour, and taught the use of his Weapon: together with the happy issue of the whole War; it is a work of over 800,000 words, which C.H. Spurgeon described as ‘peerless and priceless’, and John Newton said he would choose it if he could only read one book beside the Bible. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is a story of almost constant fighting, both verbal and physical, and the ideal Puritan pastor, Mr Great-heart, who acts as guide, instructor, and protector to Christiana’s party, is cast for the role of giant-killer as well, fighting and destroying giants Grim, Maul, Slay-good and Despair as he goes along. When the pilgrim party meets another ideal Puritan figure, Mr Valiant-for-Truth, found ‘with his Face all bloody’, having just beaten off three thieves, Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and Pragmatick, the following exchange takes place:
Then said Great-heart to Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, Thou hast worthily behaved thyself: let me see thy Sword. So he shewed it him.
When he had taken it in his Hand, and looked thereon a while, he said, Ha! It is a right Jerusalem blade.
Valiant. It is so. Let a man have one of these Blades, with a Hand to wield it, and skill to use it, and he may venture upon an Angel with it. He need not fear its holding, if he can but tell how to lay on. Its Edges will never blunt. It will cut Flesh, and Bones, and Soul, and Spirit, and all.
Greath. But you fought a great while, I wonder you are not weary?
Valiant. I fought till my Sword did cleave to my Hand: and when they were joined together, as if a Sword grew out of my Arm, and when the Blood run thorow my Fingers, then I fought with most Courage.
Greath. Thou hast done well. Thou hast resisted unto Blood, striving against Sin.
In the margin alongside Valiant-for-Truth’s second speech Bunyan inserted, ‘The Word’ (= the sword), ‘The Faith’ (= sword and hand joined together), and ‘Blood’ (= the cost of battling for God). The Puritans fought for truth against error, for personal holiness against temptations to sin, for ordered wisdom against chaotic folly, for church purity and national righteousness against corruption and hostility in both areas. One facet of their greatness was their principled hostility to all evils that stood in the way of godliness and true faith, and their willingness, much as they loved peace, to go out and fight those things, and to keep fighting as long as the evils were there.
The third question is practical: where do Christian people today fall short of the Puritans? and what ought we to learn from them for our own future?
It is said that the late Louis Armstrong, asked at the end of a performance what swing was, replied as follows: ‘Lady, if you don’t know by now, it’s no use trying to explain.’ In the light of all that I have said already, I think it best to leave the thoughtful reader to answer my third question for himself or herself. I believe that in the providence of God some ages have special messages for other ages, and that as the New Testament era provides a model for the life of all churches and Christians everywhere, so the Puritan era has particular lessons to teach the Western Christian world at the end of the twentieth century. But that is something on which readers must make up their own minds. If my view of the Puritans as wise giants and ourselves as zany pigmies has not yet convinced you, it never will; if it has convinced you, you know already how my third question should be answered. So I leave the matter there.