Transcript
Michael Reeves (0:00)
For the Puritan, the Bible is the most valuable thing that this world affords. Puritanism was about reforming all of life under the supreme authority of the Bible. And that was something that would put the fear of God into the authorities.
Nathan W. Bingham (0:24)
The highest authority in the Christian life is God's word, the Bible, because as Paul teaches, it is God breathed. It's useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. And we see a zeal for the word of God in the life of the Puritans. I'm Nathan W. Bingham and thank you for joining us today for this Saturday edition of Renewing your mind. Over the past number of weekends, Michael Reeves has been helping us see the hand of God in England in the 16th century and he has spent most of his time focusing on kings and queens. But today he will shine a spotlight on a group of people who, despite the image you might have of them, had a zeal, a passion to obey God and for many of them had a way of communicating the gospel that could not be sweeter. As this is the last Saturday that will be in Michael Reeves series the English Reformation and the Puritans, it is also the last time you can request the series on DVD along with lifetime streaming access when you donate in support of renewing your mind@renewingyourmind.org before midnight tonight. This offer will not be repeated next Saturday. Well, for the final time, here's Dr. Reeves.
Michael Reeves (1:44)
In this lecture, what we're going to do is we're going to press in a little bit to see who were these Puritans? Who were they? Now, Puritan, the word has always been more of a weapon than a real description for the very small minority. Today, Puritan is used as a description of a united golden team with impeccable spiritual theological credentials. Something that's not strictly true, as we'll see. For the vast majority though, the word Puritan is verbal mud. You throw it at someone and it makes them look like a laughable lemon sucking fool. The sort of, you know, the frozen chosen, baptized in vinegar. H.L. mencken put it, he said, puritanism, the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy. There's that very negative view of Puritanism. And the word was coined originally as a term of abuse shortly after Elizabeth became queen. So for the average Englishman, there was the papist on one side and then there was the precisionist or puritan. Those were the two terms who went too far in the other direction. The English like being the sort of golden mean in the middle. And this Term Puritan, it suggested a nitpicking, holier than thou sort who considered themselves purer than the rest, who were much too precise and pernickety. Now, this certainly wasn't a fair description. People who thought they were purer than the rest, their descriptions of themselves, clearly they never thought of themselves as purer than the rest. A constant testimony to their own sinfulness demonstrates that. But neither was it a very precise description. A recognized Puritan could differ from another on a whole host of different issues. They were quite a broad and varied bunch. And so the word Puritan is about as accurate a description as the word evangelical today. You can mean quite a few things by that. And so recognized Puritans could disagree with each other over what the cross was about. They could disagree how to be saved. So John Owen, who we'll come to see in a moment, disagreed with Richard Baxter, another major Puritan figure, over the cross, over what justification meant, over the nature of the Christian life. John Milton, the poet and author of Paradise Lost, he was an undoubted Puritan. But Milton almost certainly didn't even believe in the Trinity, God of all Christian creeds. If that's the case, well, who were the Puritans then, if they could be that diverse? Well, perhaps John Milton put it best when he spoke of the reforming of the Reformation. So Puritans were not those who thought they themselves were pure. It was that they wanted to purify what in the Church had not yet been purified and what in themselves had not yet been purified. They wanted reform. And while they had some different ideas as to what that should look like, the Puritans wanted to apply Reformation to everything to themselves, to the church, to the country, to everything it hadn't touched. So they thought the Reformation was a good thing. But unlike Elizabeth, they thought it wasn't over yet, it wasn't complete. Now, before seeing their story, some of the mud that's been thrown at the Puritans needs to be wiped off a little bit so we can get to know them. Now, for one thing, then, who were the Puritans? They didn't even look like what we tend to think they looked like. And this helps because visually, you picture a Puritan and you feel you've got a good idea of what they're like. So we tend to think of the gaudy puffed sleeves of the Elizabethan period, the beautiful bodices, the jolly ruffs and doublets of the laughing Cavaliers. And then you got the Puritans who wore black and scowled. And that is often how their portraits showed them. But you need to know a couple of things. Virtually nobody smiled when their portrait was taken because you had to hold that pose for days and it was a formal thing. And also the reason they wore black was because that was their Sunday best. It's wearing a suit to be smart for a portrait which is going to last for years. But on other days they'd wear all the colors of the rainbow. So John Owen, perhaps the greatest Puritan theologian, will come to meet him. He would walk through Oxford, we are told, hair powdered cambric band with large costly band strings, velvet jacket breeches set about at knees with ribbons pointed and Spanish leather boots. So he loved his Spanish leather boots with cambric fancy lacy tops. And they weren't a crowd of inveterate sourpusses either. One author put it like this. He said, contrary to popular impression, the Puritan was no ascetic if he continually warned against the vanity of creatures as misused by fallen man. He never praised hair shirts or dry crusts. The Puritan liked good food, good drink, homely comforts, and while he laughed at mosquitoes, he found it a real hardship to drink water when the beer ran out. Now, bluntly, to say what all Puritans were like is going to be misleading, given what a varied bunch they were. And so, of course, some were quite glum. William Prynne we'll hear of in a bit. William Prynne once said, Christ Jesus, our pattern was always mourning, never laughing. You think, okay, doesn't seem to be much room for Christ's language of his own joy there. But what's true of one Puritan isn't necessarily true of the next at all. So we'll be meeting Richard Sibbes in a bit. And something I found out is there are only, I think, a couple of 17th century portraits that I've ever seen that show someone with a twinkle in their eye or a bit of a smile. One of them is Richard Sibbes, one of the leading puritans, testimony to his enormous amiability shining through even a portrait. What can be said, a concession I'll make is their zeal for reforming all of life could make many of them a little pedantic. They could often be very, very detailed in how they wanted to speak of something very particular. And so you read a Puritan and they will quite often go on a bit. They'll really cover a ground quite thoroughly, more thoroughly than we're used to. But the most important trait that really unites all puritans and the one that Makes them so misunderstood. Is this their passionate love for the Bible, for Bible study, for listening to sermons. And again and again we read of Puritans happily traveling for hours to hear a good long sermon, how they thought an evening's Bible study was better than an evening's dancing, and how they loved a good long sermon. Sermons of up to seven hours long were not unheard of. Happy days, eh? Thinks a preacher, Lawrence Chadderton, who the extraordinarily long lived master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which was a real nursery of Puritanism. He lived to be over 100. And Lawrence Chatterton, he once found that he'd been preaching, and without noticing, he found that he'd been preaching for two straight hours, which point he paused and apologized to the people. And the people shouted back, for God's sake, sir, go on, go on. Such eagerness there was to hear the word of God. Now, to people who've never experienced the Bible as something exciting, at best that sounds boring, at worst, it sounds deranged. But think about it. Europe had been without a Bible that people could read for something like a thousand years. And to hear God's words and in them see such good news that God saves by his grace alone, it was like a burst of Florida sunshine into this gray world of religious guilt. It was intoxicatingly attractive and alluring for people and really to fail to understand that love of the Bible makes it impossible to understand the Puritans. So take for example, an account of a typically Puritan event, a sermon preached by Roaring John Rogers of the pretty little village of Dedham. I say pretty. I spent much of my childhood in Dedham. My grandparents lived there, and they're buried right by Roger's pulpit. And he was known as Roaring John Rogers because he could be quite a character in the pulpit. He would, for example, he'd personate the screams of the damned in the pulpit and so on. He'd be quite a character.