CHAPTER 1: Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
On a narrow strip of the northern California coastline grow the giant Redwoods, the biggest living things on earth. Some are over 360 feet tall, and some trunks are more than 60 feet round. They do not have much foliage for their size; all their strength is in those huge trunks, with foot-thick bark, that rise sheer for almost half their height before branching out. Some have actually been burned, but are still alive and growing. Many hundreds of years old, over a thousand in some cases, the Redwoods are (to use a much-cheapened word in its old, strict, strong sense) awesome. They dwarf you, making you feel your smallness as scarcely anything else does. Great numbers of Redwoods were thoughtlessly felled in California’s logging days, but more recently they have come to be appreciated and preserved, and Redwood parks are today invested with a kind of sanctity. A 33-mile road winding through Redwood groves is fittingly called the Avenue of the Giants.
California’s Redwoods make me think of England’s Puritans, another breed of giants who in our time have begun to be newly appreciated. Between 1550 and 1700 they too lived unfrilled lives in which, speaking spiritually, strong growth and resistance to fire and storm were what counted. As Redwoods attract the eye, because they overtop other trees, so the mature holiness and seasoned fortitude of the great Puritans shine before us as a kind of beacon light, overtopping the stature of the majority of Christians in most eras, and certainly so in this age of crushing urban collectivism, when Western Christians sometimes feel and often look like ants in an anthill and puppets on a string. Behind the Iron Curtain and in the starving, war-torn lands of Africa the story may well have been different, but in Britain and America, the parts of the world that I know best, affluence seems for the past generation to have been making dwarfs and deadheads of us all. In this situation, the teaching and example of the Puritan giants have much to say to us.
The ecclesiology and politics of the Puritans, their conscience-bound but reluctant and stumbling transitions from medieval solidarities to the individualism of their nonconformist and republican stances, have often been studied, but only recently have Puritan theology and spirituality (that is, to use their own word, godliness) begun to receive serious scholarly attention. Only recently has it been noted that a devotional quickening occurred throughout the divided Western church during the century after the Reformation and that Puritanism was a foremost expression (the foremost expression, I would contend) of this stirring. My own interest in the Puritans has, however, always centred here, and the essays in this book are the fruit of more than forty years’ pursuit of it. Nor is my interest merely academic, though it is not, I hope, less than academic. The Puritan giants have shaped me in at least seven ways, and the thrust of the following chapters may be clearer if I list at the outset these items of conscious debt. (Any reader whom this personal stuff wearies may of course skip it; I do not claim for it any intrinsic importance.)
First, at something of a crisis time soon after my conversion, John Owen helped me to be realistic (that is, neither myopic or despairing) about my continuing sinfulness and the discipline of self-suspicion and mortification to which, with all Christians, I am called. I have written about this elsewhere, and shall not rehash the matter here. Suffice it to say that without Owen I might well have gone off my head or got bogged down in mystical fanaticism, and certainly my view of the Christian life would not be what it is today.
Second, some years after that, Owen, under God, enabled me to see how consistent and unambiguous is the biblical witness to the sovereignty and particularity of Christ’s redeeming love (which is also, of course, the love of the Father and the Holy Spirit: the Persons of the Godhead are always at one). The theological implications of ‘he loved me and gave himself for me’ (Gal 2:20), ‘Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her’ (Eph 5:25), ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us’ (Rom 5:8), and many other passages came clear to me, after some years of dalliance with what I now know to call Amyraldism, through a study of Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, out of which five years later grew the essay on that title in this book. I have found since that I could have learned the same lesson in substance from Spurgeon’s sermons or Toplady’s hymns or Bernard’s discourses on Canticles; but in fact it was Owen who taught it to me, and it has marked my Christianity ever since, as decisively as did the kindred realization, which came to me some years earlier, that biblical religion is God-centered, not man-centered. To get the love of Christ in focus changes one’s whole existence.
Third, Richard Baxter convinced me long ago that regular discursive meditation, in which as he quaintly put it you ‘imitate the most powerful preacher you ever heard’ in applying spiritual truth to yourself, as well as turning that truth into praise, is a vital discipline for spiritual health. This was the unanimous Puritan view, and it is now mine too. God knows, I am a poor practitioner of this wisdom, but when my heart is cold I do at least know what I need. In much current teaching about prayer, contemplation is ‘in’ and talking to yourself before God is ‘out.’ I am Puritan enough to think that this contemplative fashion is largely a reaction against devotional formalism, and that it owes as much to twentieth-century anti-intellectualism and interest in non-Christian mysticism as it does to Scripture, and that in cutting loose from the meditative manner of the Psalms, the Fathers, and specifically the Augustinian heritage of which the Puritans are part, it loses without gaining. The contemplative style is not the whole of biblical prayer. At this point Puritan influence puts me out of step with my time, but much, I think, to my advantage.
Fourth, Baxter also focused my vision of the ordained minister’s pastoral office. As Warfield said of Luther’s Bondage of the Will, so do I say of Baxter’s Reformed Pastor: its words have hands and feet. They climb all over you; they work their way into your heart and conscience, and will not be dislodged. My sense of being called to preach the gospel, teach the Bible, and shepherd souls could have been learned from the Anglican ordinal that was used to ordain me, but in fact it crystallised out through my study of Baxter’s own ministry and his Reformed (we would say, Revived) Pastor. From student days I have known that I was called to be a pastor according to Baxter’s specifications, and my subsequent commitments to lecturing and writing have simply defined for me aspects of the way in which I should fulfil that role. I wish I had done better at it.
Fifth, the Puritans have taught me to see and feel the transitoriness of this life, to think of it, with all its richness, as essentially the gymnasium and dressing-room where we are prepared for heaven, and to regard readiness to die as the first step in learning to live. Here again is an historic Christian emphasis—Patristic, Medieval, Reformational, Puritan, Evangelical—with which the Protestantism that I know has largely lost touch. The Puritans experienced systematic persecution for their faith; what we today think of as the comforts of home were unknown to them; their medicine and surgery were rudimentary; they had no aspirins, tranquillisers, sleeping tablets or anti-depressant pills, just as they had no social security or insurance; in a world in which more than half the adult population died young and more than half the children born died in infancy, disease, distress, discomfort, pain and death were their constant companions. They would have been lost had they not kept their eyes on heaven and known themselves as pilgrims travelling home to the Celestial City. Dr. Johnson is credited with the remark that when a man knows he is going to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully, and in the same way the Puritans’ awareness that in the midst of life we are in death, just one step from eternity, gave them a deep seriousness, calm yet passionate, with regard to the business of living that Christians in today’s opulent, mollycoddled, earthbound Western world rarely manage to match. Few of us, I think, live daily on the edge of eternity in the conscious way that the Puritans did, and we lose out as a result. For the extraordinary vivacity, even hilarity (yes, hilarity; you will find it in the sources), with which the Puritans lived stemmed directly, I believe, from the unflinching, matter-of-fact realism with which they prepared themselves for death, so as always to be found, as it were, packed up and ready to go. Reckoning with death brought appreciation of each day’s continued life, and the knowledge that God would eventually decide, without consulting them, when their work on earth was done brought energy for the work itself while they were still being given time to get on with it. As I move through my own seventh decade, in better health than can possibly last, I am more glad than I can say for what Puritans like Bunyan and Baxter have taught me about dying; I needed it, and the preachers I hear these days never get to it, and modern Christian writers seem quite clueless about it—save for C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, whose insight on this as on so much else is surely unique in the twentieth century.
Sixth, the Puritans shaped my churchly identity, by imparting to me their vision of the wholeness of the work of God that they called reformation, and that we would more likely nowadays call renewal. Today, as in my youth, some conservative Anglicans (I speak as one of them) care about orthodoxy, some about liturgy and corporate life, some about individual conversion and nurture, some about aspects of personal sanctity, some about central and congregational structures, some about national moral standards, some about compassionate social witness, some about the reviving of piety amid our Laodiceanism. But each of these concerns gets outflanked, undermined, and ultimately trivialised if it is not linked with all the others. Divided, they fall and run into the sand. I have seen this happen across the board, both in and outside Anglicanism, in my own lifetime. The Puritans gave me a concern for all these things together, as all sustaining each other, and all bearing on the honour and glory of God in his church, and I am thankful to be able to say that inside me they are together still.
I could have learned this ideal of overall evangelical renewal from England’s still unappreciated reforming genius Thomas Cranmer or from the nineteenth-century colossus J. C. Ryle (hardly from any more recent Anglican, I think); but, in fact, I got most of it from the Puritans, and principally from the would-be Anglican and reluctant nonconformist Richard Baxter, to whom I owe so much in other areas, as I have already said. Following this gleam as a reforming Anglican has sometimes put me in places where I seemed not to be in step with anyone, and I do not suppose that my judgement on specific questions was always faultless, but looking back I am sure that the comprehensive, non-sectarian lead that Baxter gave me was the right one. I continue to be grateful for it, and expect that gratitude to last for eternity.
Seventh, the Puritans made me aware that all theology is also spirituality, in the sense that it has an influence, good or bad, positive or negative, on its recipients’ relationship or lack of relationship to God. If our theology does not quicken the conscience and soften the heart, it actually hardens both; if it does not encourage the commitment of faith, it reinforces the detachment of unbelief; if it fails to promote humility, it inevitably feeds pride. So one who theologises in public, whether formally in the pulpit, on the podium or in print, or informally from the armchair, must think hard about the effect his thoughts will have on people—God’s people, and other people. Theologians are called to be the church’s water engineers and sewage officers; it is their job to see that God’s pure truth flows abundantly where it is needed, and to filter out any intrusive pollution that might damage health. The sociological remoteness of theological colleges, seminaries, and university faculties of theology from the true life of the church makes it easy to forget this, and the track record of professional teachers in these units has in my time been distinctly spotty so far as concerns their responsibility to the church and to the world. In fact, anyone could learn the nature of this responsibility from the Fathers, or Luther, or Calvin, or even, in his own funny fashion, Karl Barth, but it was given to me to learn it through watching the Puritans put every ‘doctrine’ (truth) they knew to its proper ‘use’ (application) as a basis for life. It seems to me in retrospect that by virtue of this Puritan influence on me all my theological utterances from the start, on whatever theme, have really been spirituality (i.e., teaching for Christian living), and that I cannot now speak or write any other way. Am I glad? Frankly, yes. It is a happy inability to suffer from.
C.S. Lewis’ first and, for my money, most dazzling Christian book was his Bunyanesque allegory, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933). There he traced the lure of what he called Sweet Desire, and Joy: namely, that tang of the transcendent in the everyday that hits the heart like a blow as one experiences and enjoys things, revealing itself ultimately as a longing not satisfied by any created realities or relationships, but assuaged only in self-abandonment to the Creator’s love in Christ. As Lewis knew, different stimuli trigger this desire in different people; for himself, he talks of ‘the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, the noise of falling waves’. None of those items produces the full effect for me, though I understand how they could do so for Lewis and others; but I can speak of the sight of trees, waterfalls, and steam locomotives, the taste of curry and crab, bits of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Wagner, some improvisatory moments and architectural marvels on my records of performances by Wilhelm Furtwängler, Edwin Fischer, and Otto Klemperer, and occasional sublimities by Jelly-Roll Morton, Bubber Miley, and Louis Armstrong, plus—and this is why I bring the matter up—some touches of rhetoric which for me are recurrently numinous in the five writers I have already named: Lewis himself, and Williams, and (you saw it coming) seraphic Baxter, dreamer Bunyan, and elephantine Owen. Form and content though distinct are connected, and here I connect them, saying that by writing as they do, no less than what they do, these authors fill their books with God for me, making me want him more as they bring him closer. That this material should be as significant for me in its style as it is in its substance seems to me pecularly happy. Your experience here may not match mine (Owen’s lumbering Latinised idiom, in particular, delights very few); however, there will be that in your experience which enables you to understand mine, and I wanted you fully to know where, as the Americans say, I am coming from when I celebrate the Puritan giants.
I hope these chapters will excite you, for in them I share discoveries that for forty years have been exciting me. The essays are not just history and historical theology; they are themselves, in aim at least, spirituality, as much as anything else I have written; they focus on ways in which, as I see it, the Puritans are giants compared with us, giants whose help we need if ever we are to grow. Learning from the heroes of the Christian past is in any case an important dimension of that edifying fellowship for which the proper name is the communion of saints. The great Puritans, though dead, still speak to us through their writings, and say things to us that we badly need to hear at this present time. I shall try to set some of these before you, in the chapters that follow.
Sources
Much of the material in this book is reproduction or revision of items that have appeared in print before: hence the occasional repetition.
‘Why We Need the Puritans’ is partly based on a chapter contributed to Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1986), pp ix-xvi.
‘Puritanism as a Movement of Revival’ was published in The Evangelical Quarterly, LII:i (January 1980), pp 2–16.
‘The Practical Writings of the English Puritans’ began life as the Evangelical Library Lecture for 1951.
From the privately printed and now out of print annual reports of the Puritan and Reformed Studies Conference come ‘John Owen on Communication from God’ (One Steadfast High Intent, 1966, pp 17–30); ‘The Puritans as Interpreters of Scripture’ (A Goodly Heritage, 1958, pp 18–26); ‘The Puritan Conscience’ (Faith and a Good Conscience, 1962, pp 18–26); ‘The Doctrine of Justification in Development and Decline among the Puritans’ (By Schisms Rent Asunder, 1969, pp 18–30); ‘The Puritan View of Preaching the Gospel’ (How Shall they Hear?, 1959, pp 11–21); ‘The Witness of the Spirit in Puritan Thought’ (The Wisdom of our Fathers, 1956), pp. 14–25; ‘John Owen on Spiritual Gifts’ (Profitable for Doctrine and Reproof, 1967, pp 15–27); ‘The Puritans and the Lord’s Day’ (Servants of the Word, 1957, pp 1–12); ‘The Puritan Approach to Worship’ (Diversity in Unity, 1963, pp 3–14); ‘Jonathan Edwards and Revival’ (Increasing in the Knowledge of God, 1960, pp 13–28).
Some of the material in ‘The Spirituality of John Owen’ was printed in my introduction to Sin and Temptation, by John Owen, abridged and edited by James M. Houston (Multnomah Press: Portland, 1983), pp xvii-xxix, and some is taken from ‘The Puritan Idea of Communion with God’ (Press Toward the Mark, Puritan and Reformed Studies Conference report, 1961, pp 5–15).
‘Puritan Preaching’ in its original form was written for The Johnian (Lent 1956), pp 4–9.
‘Puritan Evangelism’ broke surface in The Banner of Truth, 4 (1957), pp 4–13. Some of the material in the chapter comes from my introduction to Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, edited by William Brown (Banner of Truth: London, 1974), pp 9–19.
‘“Saved by his Precious Blood”’ is my introduction to a 1958 reprint of John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (Banner of Truth: London).
Quotations
Absolute consistency in reproducing sixteenth- and seventeenth-century material has not been aimed at, nor achieved. Materials are cited as they appear in whatever printed books I was using as I wrote each item. Where reprints of Puritan material exist I usually cite them, but not invariably.
1.John Owen, Sin and Temptation, abridged and edited by James M. Houston (Multnomah Press: Portland, 1983), introduction, pp xxv-xxix.
2.C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, 3rd edition (Geoffrey Bles: London, 1944), preface, pp 9f.