William Bridge

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.

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.