Worldly Saints

Having completed John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, the next church history book in my queue is Worldly Saints by Leland Ryken.

You’ve no doubt heard the terms “puritan” and “puritanical” used pejoratively; but those who use those words in that way know nothing of the faith and character of the Puritans. In truth, most of us probably know little about them; so when I discovered Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were by Leland Ryken, I knew I had to get it and put it near the of my to-read stack.

The Puritans, as you likely know, were Calvinists. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that truth was extremely important to them. Ryken writes:

   The Puritans placed a high premium on religious truth. The intellectual content of a person’s faith was not an indifferent matter for them. Thomas Hooker claimed that “all truth, though the least that God reveals , is it not better than all the world?” John Owen urged Christians to “look on truth as a pearl, as that which is better than all the world, bought with any price.”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 17.

It should not be believed, however, that bare dogma was the sum of the Puritans’ religion. The possibility that religious belief could be intellectual without touching the heart was very real to them. They were diligent in self-examination (perhaps sometimes too much so) as a defense against that deplorable condition.

   The idea of cold or coldness and the synonyms for dull and dullness, were major spiritual aversions for the Puritans. Richard Rogers recoiled from “the coldness and half-service . . . Which is in the world.” wile Cotton Mather warned, “beware of . . . A strong head and a cold heart.” Samuel Ward recorded in his diary the self-accusation “How on the 15 and 16 of February thou was very dull in God’s service.” as a counterpart to these rejections of coldness, zeal and zealous were recurrent positive value-terms in Puritan vocabulary.
   Spiritual complacency and mediocrity were the greatest of all Puritan aversions. Richard Baxter wrote,

As mere idleness and forgetting God will keep a soul as certainly from heaven as a profane, licentious, fleshly life, so also will the usual company of such idle, forgetful, negligent persons as surly keep our hearts from heaven, as the company of men more dissolute and profane. [The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (Fleming H. Revell, 1962), 125.]

Samuel Willard lamented that in New England “forwardness and zeal for God is almost out of date” while “lukewarm-confession is much in credit.”

—Ibid.

The Puritans were known as a hard-working people. Even today, when the words “puritan” and “puritanical” are meant as insults, one hears references to the “puritan work ethic.” Few, however, understand the motivation for that ethic, which stemmed from a conviction that Jesus was Lord of all of life. Leland Ryken writes:

   To understand Puritan attitudes toward work, we must take a look at the background against which they were reacting. For centuries it had been customary to divide types of work into the two categories of “sacred” and “secular.” Sacred work was work done by members of the religious profession. All other work bore the stigma of being secular.   This cleavage between sacred and secular work can be traced all the way back to the Jewish Talmud. One of the prayers, obviously written from the scribe’s viewpoint, is as follows:

I thank thee, O Lord, my God, that thou hast given me my lot with those who sit in the house of learning, and not with those who sit at the street-corners; for I am early to work and they are early to work; I am early to work on the words of the Torah, and they are early to work on things of no moment. I weary myself, and they weary themselves; I weary myself and profit thereby, and they weary themselves to no profit. I run, and they run; I run towards the life of the age to come, and they run towards the pit of destruction.

   The same division of work into categories of sacred and secular became a leading feature of medieval Roman Catholicism. The attitude was formulated already in the fourth century by Eusebius, who wrote,

Two ways of life were given by the law of Christ to his church. The one is above nature, and beyond common human living. . . . Wholly and permanently separate from the common customary life of mankind, it devotes itself to the service of God alone. . . . Such then is the perfect form of the Christian life. And the other, more humble, more human, permits men to . . . have minds for farming, for trade, and the other more secular interests as well as for religion. . . . And a kind of secondary grade of piety is attributed to them.

This sacred-secular dichotomy was exactly what the Puritans rejected as the starting point of their theory of work.
[Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 24.]

The Puritans, following the lead of Luther and Calvin, believed that all honest labor was holy. The differences between sacred secular were extrinsic only. The most common, menial labor was intrinsically as valuable and God-glorifying as the most honored vocations, including preaching. According to Hugh Latimer,

This is a wonderful thing, that the Savior of the world, and the King above all kings, was not ashamed to labor; yea, and to use so simple an occupation. Here he did sanctify all manner of occupations. [Ibid., 25.]

The Christian faith of the laborer was believed to sanctify the most humble calling. John Cotton wrote:

Faith . . . encourageth a man in his calling to the homeliest and difficultest. . . . Such homely employments a carnal heart knows not how to submit unto; but now faith having put us into a calling, if it require some homely employment, it encourageth us in it. . . . So faith is ready to embrace any homely service his calling leads him to, which a carnal heart would blush to be seen in. [Ibid.]

This was the puritan’s view of every activity. Ryken continues:

   For the Puritans, all of life was God’s. Their goal was to integrate their daily work with their religious devotion to God. Richard Steele asserted that it was in the shop “where you may most confidently expect the presence and blessing of God.” The Puritans revolutionized attitudes toward daily work when they raised the possibility that “every step and stroke in your trade is sanctified.” John Milton, in his famous Areopagitica, satirized the businessman who leaves his religion at home, “trading all day without his religion.” . . .
   The Puritan goal was to serve God, not simply within one’s work in the world, but through that work. John Cotton hinted at this when he wrote,

A true believing Christian . . . lives in his vocation by his faith. Not only my spiritual life but even my civil life in this world, and all the life I live, is by the faith of the Son of God: He exempts no life from the agency of his faith.

And Cotton Mather said,

A Christian should be able to give a good account, not only what is his occupation, but also what he is in his occupation. It is not enough that a Christian have an occupation; but he must mind his occupation as it becomes a Christian.

With the Puritan emphasis on all of life as God’s, it is not surprising that a late seventeenth-century pamphlet entitled St. Paul the Tentmaker could note that the Protestant movement had fostered a “delight in secular employments.” [Ibid., 25–26.]

We all know, don’t we, that the puritans hated sex and considered it to be exceedingly sinful. After all, that is what “puritanical” means, isn’t it? Well . . . maybe not. According to Leland Ryken, that attitude belongs to the Roman Catholics, particularly during the middle ages. Rome taught that sex, although less sinful for some than the alternatives, was always sinful, not in the act itself, but in the driving passions and resulting pleasure. This view was held by no less than our beloved Augustine, who commended married couples who abstained from sex!

The Puritans rejected that attitude wholeheartedly, and made no secret of their opposing view. Ryken writes that “When a New England wife complained, first to her pastor, and then to the whole congregation, that her husband was neglecting their sex life, the church proceeded to excommunicate the man.” [Worldly Saints, 39.]

Catholic doctrine had declared virginity superior to marriage; the Puritan reply was that marriage “is a state . . . Far more excellent than the condition of single life.” Many Catholic commentators claimed that sexual intercourse had been the resultof the Fall and did not occur in Paradise; the Puritan comeback was that marriage was ordained by God, “and that not in this sinful world, but in paradise, that most joyful garden of pleasure.”
   . . .
   Given the Catholic background against which they wrote and preached, the Puritans’ praise of marriage was at the same time an implicit endorsement of marital sex as good. They elaborated that point specifically and often. This becomes clearer once we are clued into the now-outdated terms by which they customarily referred to sexual intercourse: “matrimonial duty,” “cohabitation,” “act of matrimony,” and (especially) “due benevolence.”
   Everywhere we turn in Puritan writing on the subject we find sex affirmed as good in principle. [William] Gouge referred to physical union as “one of the most proper and essential acts of marriage.” It was Milton’s opinion that the text “they shall be one flesh” (Gen. 2:24) was included in the Bible

to justify and make legitimate the rites of the marriage bed; which was not unneedful, if for all this warrant they were suspected of pollution by some sects of philosophy and religions of old, and latelier among the Papists.

William Ames listed as one of the duties of marriage “mutual communication of bodies.”
   So closely linked were the ideas of marriage and sex that the Puritans usually defined marriage partly in terms of sexual union. [William] Perkins defined marriage as “the lawful conjunction of the two married persons; that is, of one man and one woman into one flesh.” Another well-known definition was this: Marriage

is a coupling together of two persons into one flesh, according to the ordinance of God. . . . By yoking, joining, or coupling is meant, not only outward dwelling together of the married folks . . . but also an uniform agreement of mind and a common participation of body and goods.

   Married sex was not only legitimate in the Puritan view; it was meant to be exuberant. Gouge said that married couples should engage in sex “with good will and delight, willingly, readily, and cheerfully.” An anonymous Puritan claimed that when two are made one by marriage they

may joyfully give due benevolence one to the other; as two musical instruments rightly fitted do make a most pleasant and sweet harmony in a well tuned consort.

Alexander Niccholes theorized that in marriage “thou not only unitest unto thyself a friend and comfort for society, but also a companion for pleasure.”
   In this acceptance of physical sex, the Puritans once again rejected the asceticism and implicit dualism between sacred and secular that had governed Christian thinking for so long. In the Puritan view, God had given the physical world, including sex, for human welfare.

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 42, 43–44.

The Puritans, as we have seen, were industrious, hard-working people. This has led some to paint them as avaricious, materialistic capitalists. It is true that they were capitalistic, and it is them we have to thank (and thank them, I do) for American free enterprise. But it is not at all fair to call them greedy and materialistic. Their view of wealth was much the same as their view of work: that it was ordained by God, and therefore good in itself.

   In affirming the goodness of money, the Puritans found it necessary to defend the legitimate aspects of money against its detractors. William Perkins did so in a sermon an Matthew 6:19-20, in which he listed what Christ did not forbid:

Diligent labor in a main vocation, whereby [a person] provides things needful for himself, and those that depend on him. . . . The fruition and possessions of goods and riches: for they are the good blessing of God being well used. . . . The gathering and laying up of treasure is not simply forbidden, for the word of God alloweth herefor in some respect. 2 Corinthians 12:14.

   The puritans had no guilt about making money; to make money was a form of stewardship. . . . [Richard Baxter wrote]:

If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul, or to any other), if you refuse this, and choose a less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward.

In the broader context of Baxter’s writing on economics, this call for efficiency and productiveness is simply evidence of common sense and a strong sense of wishing to be a good steward of God’s gifts. —Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 58.

Likewise, the Puritans defended the concept of private property:

   The Puritans’ defense of private property was an extension of their belief in the legitimacy of money. William Ames wrote that private property is founded “not only on human but also on natural and divine right.” Elsewhere Ames wrote that there is justice “in the lawful keeping of the things we have.” when John Hull, one of the first merchant princes of Massachusetts, lost his ships to the Dutch, he took consolation in God’s providence: “The loss of my estate will be nothing, if the Lord please join my soul nearer to himself, and loose it more from creature comforts.” but when his foreman stole his horses, Hull took the view that “I would have you know that they are, by God’s good providence, mine.” —Ibid., 59.

While the puritans believed that hard work was godly, and that the success gained thereby was good, it did not follow that success was an automatic sign of godliness, or that poverty was a sign of wickedness.

   If godliness is not a guarantee of success, then the converse is also true: success is not a sign of godliness. This is how the Puritans understood the matter. John Cotton stated that a Christian “equally bears good and evil successes as God shall dispense them to him.” Samuel Willard wrote, “as riches are not evidences of God’s love, so neither is poverty of his anger or hatred.” Samuel Hieron said that just as many of God’s “beloved servants do feel the smart of poverty, so even the most wicked . . . have a large Portion in this life.” —Ibid., 60.

The Puritans believed that wealth was often a temptation and the cause of spiritual downfall. Yet they did not make a virtue of poverty.

   The puritans did not idealize poverty as something to be sought. Contrary to Catholic monastic theory, the Puritans theorized that poverty is no sure way to avoid temptation. Richard Baxter commented:

Poverty also hath its temptations. . . . For even the poor may be undone by the love of that wealth and plenty which they never get: and they may perish for over-loving the world, that never yet prospered in the world.

—Ibid., 61.

Further, the puritans believed that poverty existed to display God’s glory, both through the impoverished, and through the wealthy.

   The Puritans also rejected the ethic of unconcern that is content to let the poor remain poor. In their view, poverty is not an unmitigated misfortune, but it is certainly not the goal that we should have for people. “The rich man by liberality must dispose and comfort the poor,” said Thomas Lever in a sermon. “God never gave a gift,” preached Hugh Latimer, “but he sent occasion at one time or another to show it to God’s glory. As if he sent riches, he sendeth poor men to be helped with it.” Latimer even went so far as to say that “the poor man hath title to the rich man’s goods; so that the rich man ought to let the poor man have part of his riches to help and comfort him withal.”
   On the subject of poverty, then, the Puritans taught that it is sometimes the lot of godly and that it can be a spiritual blessing. It is not, however, meritorious in itself, and poor people require the generosity of people who have resources to help them. —Ibid.

In my previous post on the Puritans, I gave them credit for the American system of free enterprise. I even went as far as to call them capitalistic. That does not mean they were greedy opportunists. Capitalists may be greedy and unethical, but greed, corruption, and free enterprise are not inseparably linked, as the Puritans demonstrated. While they believed in a legal economic freedom, they did not believe they were morally free to do business as they pleased.

It has become an axiom of modern business that the goal of business is to make as much profit as possible and that any type of competition or selling practice is acceptable as long as it is legal. The Puritans would not agree. For one thing, they looked upon business as a service to society. “We must therefore think,” wrote John Knewstub, “that when we come to buying and selling, we come to witness our love towards our neighbor by our well dealing with him in his goods.” William Perkins said, “The end of a man’s calling is not to gather riches for himself . . . But to serve God in the serving of man, and in the seeking the good of all men.” —Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 69.

While believing that their labors were a “service to society” for “the good of all men,” they were not concerned with the pursuit of economic equality.

A final force of modern life of which the Puritans would not approve is socialism, whether in its overt form of government ownership or in its subtle form of the welfare state. William Ames wrote, “Ownership and differences in the amount of possessions are ordinances of God and approved by him, Prov. 22:2; 2 Thess. 3:12.” John Robinson commented:

God could, if he would, either have made men’s states more equal, or have given every one sufficient of his own. But he had rather chosen to make some rich, and some poor, that one might stand in need of another, to help another, that so he might try the mercy and goodness of them that are able, in supplying the wants of the rest.

—Ibid., 70.

Puritan preaching was the bane of the Anglican establishment. Starved on a diet of liturgy and homilies prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer, parishioners would travel for miles to hear the genuine preaching of Puritan pastors. Congregations sat with pleasure through typically hour-long sermons, usually two per Sunday.

The Puritans favored “painful preaching.” By “painful” they meant painstaking, meticulous, prepared with diligence to rightly divide the Word.

   Despite their bent toward doctrine and theology, the Puritans overwhelmingly favored expository sermons that “opened” the meanings of a specific biblical passage. William Ames paid his disrespect to topical preaching that slighted the announced text from the Bible:

Ministers impose upon their hearers and altogether forget themselves when they propound a certain text in the beginning as the start of the sermon and then speak many things about or simply by occasion of the text but for the most part draw nothing out of the text itself.

   The physical opening of the Bible in the pulpit during the service symbolized the aim of expository preaching, which was to unfold the latent meanings of a specific biblical text.
   This aim, in turn, determined the methodology of Puritan preachers, which was to tie the entire sermon to the chosen text in the Bible. William Chappell defined a sermon as “a discourse on a text of scripture, disposing its parts according to the order of nature.” the Puritans were strong advocates of application in a sermon, as we will see, but it all started with the Bible itself. In the words of William Ames, “first the things in the text must be stated. . . . In setting forth the truth in the text the minister should first explain it and then indicate the good which flows from it.”
   Of the customary three parts of a Puritan sermon, two were closely tied to the Bible itself. According to the Dictionary of Public Worship adopted by the Westminster Assembly,

In raising doctrines from the text, his care ought to be, first, that the matter be the truth of God. Secondly, that it be a truth contained in, or grounded on, that text that the hearers may discern how God teaches it from thence.

This conviction about the centrality of the Bible in preaching was reinforced by the practice of largely or exclusively limiting the details of the sermon to biblical material. William Perkins, for example, encouraged the reading of patristic sources in sermon preparation, but also the concealment if his study in the citations made from the pulpit.
   The effect of this type of biblical preaching has been well summarized by a modern scholar who studied a century of the St. Paul’s Cross sermons preach in London:

For the Puritans, the sermon is not just hinged to Scripture; it quite literally exists inside the Word of God; the text is not in the sermon, but the sermon is in the text. . . . Put summarily, listening to a sermon is being in the Bible.

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 98–99.

As we have seen, Puritans preachers were diligent scholars, meticulous in their sermon preparation. But they were not show-offs, concerned with demonstrating just how scholarly they were. The purpose of their scholarship was to bring the message to all classes, from the most learned to the most simple.

William Perkins theorized that preaching “must be plain, perspicuous, and evident. . . . It is a by-word among us: It was a very plain sermon: And I say again, the plainer the better.” Richard Sibbes claimed that

truth feareth nothing so much as concealment, and desireth nothing so much as to be laid open to the view of all: when it is most naked, it is most lovely and powerful.

   And Henry Smith said that “to preach simply is not to preach rudely, nor unlearned, nor confusedly, but to preach plainly and perspicuously that the simplest man may understand what is taught, as if he did hear his name.”
   Plain preaching was defined by what it lacked as well as by what it contained. What is avoided was such things as the “heaping up of citations of Fathers, and repeating words of Latin or Greek.” What the Puritans did not want was a pastiche of quotations or an embellished style that called great attention to its own ostentatiousness. For Samuel Torshell it was a sign of bad preaching to “tell you how many Fathers we have read, how much we are acquainted with the schoolmen, what critical linguists we are or the like. It is wretched ostentation.”
   Why did the Puritans dislike the high style in sermons? For one thing, they felt it diverted attention from the content of the sermon to the preacher, for whom the occasion became, in modern parlance, an “ego trip.” In the ostentatious style, said Perkins, “we do not paint Christ, but . . . our own selves.”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 104–105.

Six hundred years ago, Jan Hus wrote that “neither is the pope the head nor are the cardinals the whole body of the holy, universal, catholic church. For Christ alone is the head of that church, and his predestinate are the body and each one is a member, because his bride is one person with Jesus Christ” [The Church, ed. David S. Schaff (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 66.]. One hundred years later, Luther echoed those words. That Reformation tradition was carried forward by the Puritans. Leland Ryken writes:

   The greatest of all Puritan legacies in regard to ecclesiastical theory was also the most revolutionary in its time. It was the notion that the church is a spiritual reality. It is not impressive buildings or fancy clerical vestments. It is instead the company of the redeemed.
   The Puritans repeatedly showed their acceptance of Luther’s dictum that “The church is a spiritual assembly of souls. . . . The true, real, right, essential church is a matter of the spirit and not of anything external.” For William Gouge the church consists of those who “inwardly and effectively by the spirit . . . believe in Christ.’’ John Hooper denied that the church consists of “bishops, priests and such other,” affirming rather that it is “the company of all men hearing God’s Word and obeying unto the same.” Richard Baxter agreed: the church is “a holy Christian society for ordinary holy communion and mutual help in God’s public worship and holy living.”
   Implicit in these definitions of the church is a Puritan preference for the invisible church over a type of institutional structure. The church is emphatically not the professional clergy and their rituals. “What understand you by the church?” asked John Ball’s Catechism. The answer: “by the church, we understand not the pope. . . ; nor his bishops and cardinals met in general council. . . ; but the whole company of believers.” If the church is essentially invisible rather than institutional, its head is obviously not a pope or church council, but Christ. The Puritans reiterated this again and again, as when Gouge spoke of “that church whereof Christ is properly head.”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 115.

A key characteristic of Puritan life was simplicity; and nowhere was that simplicity more intentional than in their formal worship. Leland Ryken comments on what that meant, as well as what it did not mean.

[T]he Puritans simplified church architecture and furnishings. They took images and statues out of churches. They replaced stone alters with communion tables. The multiroom floor plan became a single, rectangular room. The walls were painted white. The physical objects that would have caught one’s eye upon entering a puritan church were a high central pulpit with a winding stairway to it, a Bible on a cushion on a ledge of the pulpit, a communion table below the pulpit, and an inconspicuous baptismal font.
   All this simplicity should not be interpreted as an attempt to avoid symbolism. It was the symbol of Puritan worship, and it was a richly multiple symbol. Here in visual form was the Puritan aversion to idols and human intervention between God and people. Here was a sign of humility before God and His Word. Here was a sign of the essentially inward and spiritual nature of worship. Here was a reminder that God cannot be confined to earthly and human conceptions, that he is transcendent and sovereign. By calling their buildings “meeting houses,” moreover, Puritans stressed the domestic aspect of worship as a spiritual family meeting with their heavenly father.
   This triumph of simplicity was not necessarily unaesthetic. The simple is a form of beauty as well as the ornate. Horton Davis calls the simple beauty of Puritan church architecture “a study in black and white etching, rather than the colored and multi-textured appearances of Anglican . . . churches.” a study of Puritan vocabulary shows that “naked” was one of their positive words when applied to worship. In the Puritan Church, the individual worshiper stood “naked” before the light and purity of God’s word and presence. An authority on church architecture writes about Puritan churches, “Clean, well-lighted, they concentrated on the essentials of Puritan worship, the hearing of God’s Word, with no distractions.”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 121–122.

The word-based faith of the Puritans and their disdain for religious images has led some to conclude that theirs was an abstract religion, offering nothing concrete to enliven the imagination. But, while the Puritans did do away with all physical images, their worship was hardly lacking in imagery. As Ryken puts it, they “expected the verbal imagination to do the work that Catholic/Anglican worship had placed on the visual and aural imagination.” Ryken likens Puritan worship to the plays of William Shakespeare, who “was content with the scantiest of stage props and built scenery and imagery into the texts of the plays themselves.” Likewise, Puritan sermons contained ample imagery to engage the mind.

   Puritan worship services . . . were far from being devoid of images and symbols. These were simply embodied in the sermon instead of visible to the eye in the church sanctuary. To test that thesis, I once randomly opened three books of Puritan sermons that a student had just brought in to my office. Here are the specimens that greeted me:

The sinner is a bramble, not a fig tree yielding sweet fruit. . . . A wicked man, like Jehoram, has “his bowels fallen out” (2 Chronicles 21:19). Therefore he is compared to an adamant (Zachariah 7:12) because his heart does not melt in mercy. Before conversion the sinner is compared to a wolf in his savageness, to a lion in his fierceness (Isaiah 11:16). . . . [Thomas Watson, The Beatitudes, 143.]

Adam’s posterity has not been so numerous as his sins. A little cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand — so it seems at first — grows and spreads to cover the whole hemisphere. The water at first seemed little and shallow, swells more and more from the ankles to the knees, from the knees to the loins, from there to the head until it grows into such a great river that it cannot be passed over. In this way grows sin. . . . It is as a snowball that grows bigger by rolling in the snow. [Ralph Venning, The Plague of Plagues, 165.]

The law may chain up a wolf, but it is the Gospel that changes the wolfish nature; the one stops the stream, the other heals the fountain. [Samuel Bolton, The True Grounds of Christian Freedom, 84.]

No worship service that includes such appeals to the imagination can be said to be excessively abstract.

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 125–126.

Leland Ryken quotes Puritan Robert Coachman [Cushman] (1577–1625):

. . . it is no small privilege . . . to live in such a society, as where the eyes of their brethren are so lovingly set upon them, that they will not suffer them to go on in sin.

—Robert Cushman, The Cry of a Stone, cited in Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 133.

It’s a nice thought, but I wonder, how many enjoy that kind of fellowship? Does anyone watch over us like that, and if so, do we appreciate it, or resent it? Do we watch over our brothers and sisters with that kind of love?

Leland Ryken on Puritan hermeneutics:

The logical starting place is the Puritans’ belief that the Bible must ordinarily be interpreted literally or historically, not arbitrarily allegorized. To understand why the Puritans made so much of the literal or single interpretation of Scripture, we need to know something about the centuries-long Catholic practice of attributing allegorical interpretations to virtually all of Scripture.
   Catholic interpreters, for example, claimed that in the story of Rebekah, Rebekah’s drawing water for Abraham’s servant really means that we must daily come to the Bible to meet Christ. The six water pots at the marriage in Cana refer to the creation of the world in six days. The woman’s comment in the Song of Solomon that “my beloved is to me a bag of myrrh, that lies between my breasts” was interpreted as meaning the Old and New Testaments, between which stands Christ. Another commentator found the breasts to denote the learned teachers of the church, and yet another thought the verse referred to the crucifixion of Christ, which the believer keeps in eternal remembrance between his breasts, that is, in his heart.
   To the Puritans, such allegorizing was ridiculous and unreliable. “The Scripture hath but one sense,” claimed Tyndale, “which is the literal sense, and that literal sense is the root and ground of all, and the anchor that never faileth.” Thomas Gataker agreed: “Sir, we dare not allegorize the Scriptures, where the letter of it yields us a clear and proper Sense.
   We should pause to note what the Puritans did not mean when they insisted on the literal or plain interpretation of Scripture. They did not mean that the Bible is literal rather than figurative. William Bridge, for example, commented that “though the sense of the Scripture be but one entire sense, yet sometimes the Scripture is to be understood literally, sometimes figuratively and metaphorically.” The Puritans did not even deny that there were allegorical passages in the Bible. James Durham wrote, “There is great difference betwixt an allegoric exposition of Scripture, and an exposition of allegoric Scripture.”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 145.

While Rome had held the clergy above the common people, declaring that only they could interpret the Scriptures, the Puritans followed the Reformers in insisting

that the Holy Spirit illumines the mind of any Christian as he or she reads the Bible. “Every godly man hath in him a spiritual light,” declared John White, “by which he is directed in the understanding of God’s mind revealed in His word.” Thomas Goodwin said with equal confidence that

The same Spirit that guided the holy apostles and prophets to write it must guide the people of God to know the meaning of it; and as he first delivered it, so must he help men to understand it.

What are we to make of this confidence that the Holy Spirit guides us in understanding the Bible? We must realize that Catholic allegorizing of the Bible had obscured Scripture, in effect making “the Pope the doorkeeper of Scripture, not the Holy Spirit.” Set in the context of ingenious Catholic allegorizing in which the Bible’s message was decipherable only by the clergy, the Puritan belief in the illumination of the Holy Spirit put the Bible back within the grasp of every reader. Thus John Ball could write:

We are not necessarily tied to the exposition of Fathers or Councils for the finding out of the sense of Scripture. Who is the faithful interpreter of Scripture? The Holy Ghost speaking in the Scripture is the only faithful interpreter of the Scripture.

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 146–147.

A point that seems to come up continuously regarding biblical interpretation is that of context. The practice of wresting Scripture from its natural setting and interpreting and applying it in a user-friendly manner is nothing new.

The Puritans were as insistent as good scholars today that a given passage in the Bible must be interpreted in its context. One of them wrote, “It is the best rule to come to the understanding of the phrases of Scripture, to consider in what sense they were taken in that country, and among the people, where they were written.” William Bridge added, “If you would understand the true sense . . . of a controverted Scripture, then look well into the coherence, the scope of and context thereof.” William Perkins’s stock questions for a passage were: “Who? to whom? upon what occasion? at what time? in what place? for what end? what goeth before? what followeth?”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 147.

The church has always had its anti-intellectual element: people who are drawn toward the mystical, treating faith as blind following, or those who elevate zeal above knowledge. The Puritans had no time for such thinking. For them, faith and reason were not contradictory, but complementary.

In the seventeenth century, radical Protestants in England known as “sectaries” kept up a running attack on the Puritans and others who extolled the value of education and the importance of reason. Their counterparts in America, known as “the antinomians,” created such a disturbance that the Puritans finally banished them to Rhode Island. One of the antinomians asserted his preference in preaching with the comment, “I had rather hear such a one that speaks from the mere motion of the spirit, without any study at all, than any of your learned scholars, although he may be fuller of Scripture.”
   The Puritans overwhelmingly defended the cause of learning and the faculty of reason against such’ attacks on the mind. For the Puritans, zeal was no substitute for knowledge. John Preston declared, “I deny not but a man may have much knowledge and want grace, but on the other side, . . . you cannot have more grace than you have knowledge.” Richard Baxter believed that “education is God’s ordinary way for the conveyance of his grace, and ought no more to be set in opposition to the Spirit than the preaching of the Word.” John Cotton claimed that although “knowledge is no knowledge without zeal,” yet “zeal is but a wild-fire without knowledge.”
   The sectaries and antinomians pictured faith and reason as antagonists. The Puritans rejected the perennial attempt to belittle reason in religious matters. “Faith is grounded upon knowledge,” said Samuel Willard; “though God be . . . seen by an eye of faith, yet he must be seen by an eye of reason too: for though faith sees things above reason, yet it sees nothing but in a way of reason.” John Preston wrote that divine grace

elevateth reason, and makes it higher, it makes it see further than reason could, it is contrary indeed to corrupt reason, but to reason that is right reason it is not contrary, only it raiseth it higher: and therefore faith teacheth nothing contrary to sense and reason.

John Cotton called reason “an essential wisdom in us,” and William Hubbard, “our most faithful and best councilor.”
   The Puritans’ faith in the authority of the Bible did not lead them to belittle reason as unimportant. Cotton Mather made the profound comment that “Scripture is reason in its highest elevation.” Harvard’s first college laws required that students be able not only to read the Scriptures, but also “to resolve them logically.” A hint of what this entailed is suggested by Richard Baxter’s description of instances when Christians must use their reason:

We must use our best reason . . . to know which are the true Canonical Scriptures . . . , to expound the text, to translate it truly . . . , to gather just and certain inferences from Scripture assertions; to apply general rules to particular cases, in matters of doctrine, worship, discipline, and ordinary practice.

William Bridge sounded the authentic Puritan note when he wrote that “reason is of great use, even in the things of God.” Thomas Hooker was eulogized by his colleague Samuel Stone for making “the truth appear by light of reason.”
   Given the forces of anti-intellectualism at work in their own religious milieu, the Puritans could have slipped into a disparagement of reason. Instead they remained defenders of reason and knowledge.

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 161–162.

To say that the Puritans were very serious thinkers is an understatement bordering on absurdity. This characteristic — a virtue, really — was also the cause of their greatest faults. As much as I want to defend the Puritans and correct popular misconceptions about them, it cannot be denied that they had their faults, and that those faults provide impetus for the slanderous treatment they have received. And it seems to me that an almost pathological seriousness was at the root of all of their failings. In Worldly Saints, Leland Ryken includes a chapter called Learning from Negative Example: Some Puritan Faults. He lists the following (among others):

An Inadequate View of Recreation
The Puritans were opposed to sport on Sundays, and against gambling and certain sports such as cock fighting, but they were certainly not against recreation, as some have concluded. They considered it a good and necessary part of life. They believed this so strongly that in England in 1647, a Puritan-controlled Parliament decreed that on every second Tuesday of the month, all businesses were to be closed from 8 A.M. until 8 P.M. to give workers time for recreation. Ryken writes that American Puritan “Thomas Shepard advised his son at college, ‘Weary not your body, mind, or eyes with long pouring on your book. . . . Recreate yourself a little, and so to your work afresh.’” [Worldly Saints, 190.] The problem with the Puritan view of recreation was that it was entirely utilitarian. They had no appreciation for the enjoyment of leisure as an end in itself. Its sole purpose was to refresh the body and mind for more work. The following statement from William Perkins is typical:

In commanding labour, [God] alloweth the means to make us fit for labour. And therefore . . . he admitteth lawful recreation, because it is a necessary means to refresh either body or mind that we may better do the duties which pertain to us. . . . And therefore recreation . . . serveth only to make us more able to continue in labour. [Ibid.]

Too Many Rules
The Puritans were a disciplined people who enjoyed living well regulated lives. This virtue was carried out so enthusiastically that it often became the vice of legalism. Ryken writes that “such legalism produced false guilt and a loss of discrimination about what constituted a serious sin.” [Ibid, 192.] The diary of sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Mather records,

When very young, I went astray from God. . . . Of the manifold sins which I was then guilty of, none so sticks in my mind as that . . . I was whittling on the Sabbath Day; and for fear of being seen, I did it behind the door. A great reproach to God! a specimen of that atheism that I brought into the world with me. [Ibid.]

Too Many Words
Ryken writes:

The characteristic Puritan style . . . is to take at least wice as many words as possible to express a thought. Like the poets of the Bible (but without their poetic conciseness and artistry), the Puritans seemed to search for ways to say everything at least twice in different words. A random specimen [Richard Sibbes] of such redundancy is this:

God hath placed us in the world to do him some work. This is God’s working place; he hath houses of work for us: now, our lot here I to do work, to be in some calling . . . to work for God.” [Ibid., 194.]

[Ibid., 194.]

Too Much Pious Moralizing
It seems they could not simply enjoy a worldly pleasure without finding some moral to teach or adding a theological qualifier. Ryken writes, “When Cotton Mather’s children fell sick, he would remind them of ‘the analogous distempers of their souls’ and instruct them ‘how to look up unto their great Saviour for the cure of those distempers.’” [Ibid.] John Winthrop wrote to his wife “that she was ‘the chiefest of all comforts under the hope of salvation.’” [Ibid.]

My own analysis is that legitimate criticisms of the Puritans can all be boiled down to two causes: the chronic seriousness already mentioned, and a proclivity for taking every good thing to the most absurd extreme. It must also be noted that the most extreme examples are not necessarily representative of the Puritans in general. Ryken concludes:

   I know of no group that has been more victimized by what today we would call its “lunatic fringe” than the Puritans. I refer to individuals whose aberrations made them a liability to the movement or good people whose blunders have been paraded through the years to the discredit of the Puritans. Throughout subsequent history, anyone wishing to discredit the Puritans has found it easy to find material, which is usually far from the norm for Puritanism generally. [Ibid., 201.]

One last word from Leland Ryken on the Puritans:

   We live at a moment in history when evangelical Protestants are looking for “roots.” One of the foibles that some would foist on them is that the only traditions from the past to which they can return are the Catholic and Anglo-Catholic traditions. Like Nicodemus, who was a teacher in Israel but did not know about the New Birth, evangelical Protestants tend to be strangers to what is best in their own tradition.
   Puritanism can give us a place to stand. The Puritans believed that all of life is God’s. This enabled them to combine personal piety with a comprehensive Christian world view. Beginning with the premise that the Bible is a reliable repository of truth, the Puritans had a basis from which to relate their Christian faith to all areas of life — to work, family, marriage, education, politics, economics, and society.
   The Puritan’s zestful approach to life and the world was fed by the spiritual springs of the new life — prayer, Christian fellowship, meditation, preaching, and contact with the Bible. In Puritanism, a theology of personal salvation was wedded to an active life in the world.

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 220–221.