Puritan I: Understanding the Times | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Gratiae, and I'm here again with Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and presenter and author in the Behold Your God study series for Media Gratiae.

Why the Puritans Still Matter

This is a special episode where we want to introduce or talk to you about a group of Christians who lived about 400 years ago and who have been a big help to us spiritually in our lives and many others, a group of people known as the Puritans.

We have seen a significant resurgence of interest in the Puritans, in their books, their writings in the last 70 or so years, dating all the way back to probably Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones ministry in London, before that, Charles Spurgeon and others.

John, your PhD dealt with Puritan theology. How did you get interested in the Puritans? Did you grow up hearing about them or how did you get interested in the Puritans to begin with?

Yeah, I mean, I grew up in church and in a Christian home, but I hadn't heard of Puritans. So for me, it came through kind of working backward in reading. So I remember being given a book on prayer by Charles Spurgeon.

It's one of those little paperbacks where, you know, 12 sermons on a certain topic from Spurgeon. So it's 12 sermons on prayer and I was trying to read one of those sermons and I probably was 12 years old.

I think it was just trying to be precocious or something, you know, but I was working through Spurgeon's old-timey language as a 12-year-old. But I remember him mentioning a guy named George Whitefield and he made this big statement.

And he said, you know, like, we're only half alive. Whitefield was really alive and, you know, so I thought, well, who does Charles Spurgeon think is really alive? So I later in college, I found a book on George Whitefield that The Banner of Truth published by J .C. Ryle, short little biography, and then a few sermons that demonstrated his theology.

And I read that book and I had already become a believer by then. And that book was just like, it was like throwing open a window and, you know, the sunshine just pouring in and you think, wow, so this is the God that Elijah talked about.

You know, this is the big God of the Bible. But when I was reading Ryle and he was quoting Whitefield, Whitefield said that he was a pygmy spiritually. And if you wanted to see a giant spiritually, you had to read the guys that he was reading.

He was reading guys called Puritans. And I thought, pilgrims? Or like, who are Puritans? And so, you know, so I found a couple of names mentioned in Whitefield and other of his co-workers, you know, the Great Awakening, the Evangelical Revival men.

They kept a lot of journals. So when you read their journals, you would find all these names. And I think, well, who are they? And I would go back and, you know, find these Puritan books by these men.

And that's kind of how I fell in love with the Puritans.

Yeah, I bet that's a fairly common experience reading backward, hearing names, hearing, you know, I mean, you hear about Spurgeon or you hear maybe Lloyd-Jones and you hear these different guys quoting people from behind.

My experience was a little different. I grew up in a PCA church here. My childhood pastor was one of the first graduates from RTS. And so, you know, Martin Lloyd-Jones was fresh on everybody's mind. I mean, this was the 80s, you know, so he was constantly saying the name Martin Lloyd-Jones and he would, I remember my parents read Spiritual Depression by Lloyd-Jones.

And so I would hear names being brought up. So Spurgeon was a name that I was familiar with. But it wasn't until much later in life when I came to church here at Christ Church and I started to hear the people just in normal conversation.

How's your week been? What have you been reading? What's been going on? Oh, I read this great little helpful bit from Flavel, you know, on Christ in this way or in that way. And it was just so good. Let me tell you about it.

And then somebody would say, oh, well, you know, I was reading Rutherford this week and I heard, now these aren't, we don't have a church full of, people may think that we have a church full of, you know, people whose houses look like this.

They just all live in libraries and they just sit around and read Puritans all day. That's not the case at all. We live in a very blue collar, you know, Mississippi town. And these are, these are just folks like you and me who live in, in Mississippi, but they're, they love Jesus and they're reading these people who are helping them to see Christ in clearer and clearer ways.

And they're talking with each other about it at church. And so all these names that I was fairly unfamiliar with, I remember asking somebody, how do you know who all these people are? Do you have like Puritan trading cards?

You're just all swapping them back and forth, you know? So I started to pick up little Puritan paperbacks, kind of the on-ramp into reading the larger things and then as groups and classes, you know, small groups and even men's studies that we've had here, we've read some excellent books together from the Puritans and they've just, they've been a kind of a constant companion to me for the last, you know, 10 to 12 years.

Yeah, Matt, as you mentioned, we don't live in an area that is, you know, this is not some highly academic little town. Sometimes when I talk to pastors about how we try to approach some things, they'll say, you do what?

You read, you read like an old Puritan book once or twice a year, maybe we say, well, we try to, and they say, oh, well, you must be a very academic church, but we're not that way.

That would never work.

Yeah, and I think, no, I mean, we have, I think of one man in our church that was a truck driver and he loves to read these things. It doesn't mean that they're easy at first. It does take a little time to get, I usually tell people, don't give up on a book till about chapter three because even, you know, even having read a lot of my adult life, when I read a new author, even if it's a modern author, it usually takes me a couple of chapters to understand this is how this man is communicating, you know.

So what we have found, both of us have found by our own experience, and then, you know, as we've been a part of a church that's tried to read, is that appetite for God will overcome the initial hurdles of reading old books, you know.

So don't be discouraged if you don't normally read books. Let your love for Christ kind of, you know, entice you into a new Puritan book. We'll talk about some of those later, and I think you'll find that it'll be really worth the effort.

How Ministers and Churches Are Drawn to the Puritans

Yeah, that's right. And I've heard John Rawlinson say at Banner of Truth events, John Rawlinson is the director of the Banner of Truth. He has said, and this is true, this is certainly true in the experience that we see here in the local church, that people will say, how can I get my people to read the Puritans?

And he'll say, if the minister reads the Puritans, and if the minister has helped, and if the minister is, you know, he takes some of this light and heat that he's getting, you know, from the scriptures through the lens of these Puritan authors, and then that comes out in the ministry, then before long, the people are going to be enticed.

And then, you know, point two, make those books available to people. Like John said, we're going to talk about some books from Reformation Heritage, and the Banner of Truth, and maybe some other publishers that are great on ramps, if you're interested in that.

The occasion for us talking about this on our podcast is, you know, John, that we've just finished at Media Grantiae a new, I want to say documentary, but it's actually much larger than a documentary, a new project on the Puritans.

It's made up of a film called Puritan, All of Life to the Glory of God, which is a feature-length documentary with something like 21 contributors, theologians and pastors and teachers from all around the world, as well as a series of 35 Sunday school lesson type lessons on Puritan themes and Puritan bios, again, from theologians and pastors.

So this has been what I've been working on kind of in my spare time for the last couple of years, and it's certainly not me. It's been a whole team of incredibly talented people of whom I am the least, but there's been a real effort with the Media Grantiae team and guys like David Woolen from Reformation Heritage Books and Puritan Reform Theological Seminary.

We partnered together to put this project together. And so you can find out about that if you go to mediagrantiae .org or themeansofgrace .org right there at the very top of the website, you'll see information about the Puritan package, which is now available in a deluxe edition box set.

But for this episode, we want to talk about just kind of giving a little quick overview of the Puritan movement, just to try to whet people's appetite. You know, like you said, who the pilgrims, the Puritans, where do those people even fit in history?

Yeah, it's helpful. That's not the end of the story. It's not the history of it that is really so fascinating. It's the God who is orchestrating all these great events and working in these different lives in the way that He does that's so fascinating to us about the Puritan era.

But just knowing where that fits on a map and on a timeline helps us to think about those things. And so we want to talk about that a little bit. It's kind of going to be a bit of an extended interview with you.

I mean, you're one of our interview contributors in the film. And so I have some questions for you, and we want to hear some of your input on this. Let's start with just a basic definition of Puritanism.

The Puritan Movement as an Outworking of the Protestant Reformation

Yeah, it's very tempting to give kind of devotional definitions of Puritanism. But when you think of the fact that Puritanism was a religious reform movement that spanned about 100 years and was what the scholars call transcontinental, you know, so it's Europe, the UK, continental Europe, UK, and America, you know, mostly, it touched a number of denominations.

So when you go to describe a movement like that, you know, are we talking about early Puritanism, later Puritanism? Which branch, which emphasis? It's easy to be kind of oversimplified. So we could say like this, Puritanism was primarily a British and then, of course, the American Colonies movement that God raised up within the established church to, you know, and that attempted to purify the church of its unbiblical aspects.

Well, that would be true.

And let me interrupt you. When we say the established church, we're talking about the state church of England.

Yeah, so the Church of England.

Yeah, you may hear us talk about the Anglican Church. You may hear us talk about the Church of England. You may hear us say the established church. We mean the same thing.

Right, right. So here are these men primarily within that church, within the state church, and they want to see it transformed. But if we just say, well, that's a group of guys that God raised up and they love Jesus.

Well, then really we miss a lot of what God was doing if we oversimplify. You know, there was a lot of complexity to the movement. There were so much going on that, you know, that really becomes a mirror of God's activity.

So we don't want to kind of oversimplify.

The Reformation Roots of Puritanism

Well, let's begin with the origins then. Where did this group of people who came to be known as Puritans, what were their origins?

I think one of the most helpful things for us is to realize that Puritanism, although we can describe it as a separate thing, it really isn't organically disconnected. It's not as if God was working here for a while and then things stopped, and then maybe there was a period of darkness and confusion, and then suddenly God began to work again, and then He stopped, and then another period.

So what we really are seeing, we're seeing Puritanism is an outworking of the Protestant Reformation on the continent and then, of course, in the UK.

Right, and on the timeline, we're about 100 years in the future from the Reformation.

The Reformers, particularly in Britain, the Reformers that left under Queen Mary's persecution and went to the continent, they were one with the Continental Reformers in heart and desire and those main principles, but really they benefited greatly by going to areas where the Reformation had already gotten roots down, and so that the precision, the clarity of thought of those men on the continent, whether it's Calvin in Geneva or others.

Heinrich Bollinger up in...

Yeah, yeah, I forget where Bollinger is, but anyway. So they go here, they see these things fleshed out more fully. Mary then is gone. Elizabeth I takes the throne, 1558. They come back to the UK, hearts full of hope.

We can come back, we won't be persecuted, but not only that, we can come back and under a Protestant church again, we can implement a fully biblical paradigm, and when they get back, there's kind of some disappointments.

Right, because their situation was unique.

Right, right.

What Calvin had been able to do there in Geneva, they were dealing with a different situation. So how so when these men who got to go and sit at the feet of these Reformers who were seeing very thorough Reformation in their areas, they then go back to the UK when it's safe for them to do so, and they meet some frustration.

Why is that? How was their situation different?

The Elizabethan Compromise and the Limits of Reform

Well, understanding that Mary, Queen Mary before Elizabeth, had tried to bring Catholicism back in, and so it was a pretty bloody time, and Elizabeth comes in and she doesn't want, she's a very shrewd politician, she does not want the UK ripped in half, and she doesn't want to see this kind of internal war continue.

So she comes up with what we call the Elizabethan compromise, and that is that the church, the state church would be Protestant. It would have Protestant articles. The 39 articles are very Protestant.

They're very Reformed. So think of it in an oversimplification, the heart of the church is Protestant and Reformed, but the outside, the exterior of the church still looks pretty Roman Catholic. It's still got a lot of traditions and rituals that if you didn't pay very close attention, you could show up at church again, and other than the fact that things were now in English instead of Latin, it would kind of be the same old church.

So good. Good old church is back to normal, and Elizabeth is ruling over a fairly settled, calm nation. Now, what that means, though, is this. The Puritans come into a church now where they're not really allowed to be put into positions of strategic importance.

They're not allowed to fashion the English church. Elizabeth does not want these people to be the thinkers of her church, but nor will she persecute them. So it's unlike the continent, you know, where Luther or Calvin or Bullinger, these other people, they have a freedom to carry out what they believe is the most biblical pattern, but neither are they this persecuted minority, you know.

So it's kind of like a limited freedom to work within the church as pastors, to write books, but not to fashion the church.

Yeah, which is never going to be enough. It's fascinating to think you can put a more biblical confession down on paper, okay, so we have the 39 articles, but the worship of the church is still perverted.

It's still essentially Roman Catholicism. And so in practice, God is still being dishonored, and that just is not going to sit well with these men who we now call Puritans, who want to see the honor of God upheld, not only doctrinally, but in the way that he's worshiped.

And man, does that have some application if we wanted to sit and preach on that for a little while for our day. But one historian wrote that the Puritans saw the Elizabethan church as a half-hearted flirting with the Reformation.

So in a sense, this new state church, the situation that these men are coming back into, it excluded devout Catholics who wanted to be all the way Catholic, and excluded devout Protestants who wanted to see true, thorough Reformation go through.

And it really just made, would you say, room for nominal churchgoers.

Yeah, and I mean, we don't want to paint them all with this, you know, dark brush. There would have been, you know, legitimate believers in there. But those that really didn't, maybe didn't understand what everybody was so worked up about.

But the end result of that is you have a church that lacks any real biblical identity.

Certainly, certainly. And you know, you could say it this way, that Puritanism, while organically attached to the Protestant Reformation, we do see trajectory, like shooting an arrow, all right. So there is progress, and there is development.

And so there are some differences in the way, you know, they have the same core beliefs. But difference in the way they work that out, you know, 100 years later. Really, the Puritans are building on these great discoveries or rediscoveries of the Reformation.

Right.

So how do, you know, how do I take what Luther and Calvin and these men brought from the Scripture and, you know, risk their lives to bring back to prominence within the church? How do I apply that as a pastor in a situation where everybody in my town has been baptized into the church and been told that they're pretty okay?

So you have two things there. 100 years later, we're applying, we're building on what these men say. We're applying what these men reminded us of. But we're also doing it now with the Puritans in a setting of a limited freedom.

Puritanism in England, Scotland, and Wales

Yeah, the title of the film that we've just done is Puritan All of Life to the Glory of God. And that comes from, as Dr. Beakey explains, Dr. Joel Beakey, who is the presenter and the narrator for the film, that they're building on this program of Reformation from the Reformation and the sola, the five sola, which were, as you said, rediscovered in the time of the Reformation.

But 100 years later, they're pressing these sola out into every area of life. And so if the Scripture alone is our authority for life and practice, not just in justification by faith, but in how I am a father and how I'm supposed to, how we worship and how we should, you know, organize the worship of God publicly and privately.

And so, yeah, it's taking these Reformation principles and pressing them out into every area of life. Now, we've talked so far about the Church of England. What was going on down in the little country of Wales and then up north in Scotland during this time?

There were Scottish and Welsh Puritans as well. Scotland is a little different because under Knox and enjoying a certain kind of isolation a little bit from the throne of England at times, the Scots were able to kind of bring a more thorough application to their land of the Reformation.

So while, you know, they would be in complete agreement with the English and Welsh Puritans at the heart of the matter, they were, their context was a little different. But England and Wales were very similar, except Wales was worse off.

The Puritans called the Welsh the dark corner of the land spiritually. They weren't being, you know, pro-English, anti-Welsh. But what happened was this in a simple way. When the Roman Catholic Church was replaced by the Protestant Church under King Henry, who had terrible motives, but we're glad that the Reformation, that God used that man's bad motives in spite of himself.

So you're a Welshman, you go to a church, and one week you're going to a church, you know, it's your Roman Catholic Church, and the Mass is in Latin, and you don't know Latin. So the preacher goes through his things, and then you go through the rituals, you go home, you're a good Christian.

Right, you have no idea what you just did.

Yeah, yeah, we don't know what we did, but it's what we're supposed to do. So next week I go, well, there's been an upheaval, and now we're Church of England, not Church of Rome. Church building looks the same.

Preacher looks the same. Everything looks the same. Rituals look pretty much the same. Difference is it's being preached in English. Well, I don't understand English, so it's kind of the same thing. I don't know what he said, but it must have been good.

It sounded different.

Yeah, so we go home. So the Welsh did not really rebel against the Protestant Reformation. Now, when Puritans come in, and when Puritanism kind of under the, you know, during the Civil War era, and when the Puritans in Parliament were united, and there was some real power behind Puritan application, and churches started to be changed, well, the Welshman goes to church, and suddenly it's not just the language that was changed, it's the rituals that are changed.

So the old kind of Roman Catholic clinging traditions, they're thrown out the door, and a pretty strictly biblical, simple approach to worship is put into place, and suddenly the Welsh are angry. What did you do to my church?

And they think this is just an English political fight. So there's a lot of rebellion. Now, in 1650, the Parliament appointed under Puritan influence, appointed a committee to interview ministers throughout the land, and to try to discern whether they were biblically qualified.

I mean, were these godly men? Were they even living anywhere near their church, you know, or were they just drawing salaries from multiple churches? So after that, they sacked a lot of preachers. Puritans did provide financial help for these men, even though they felt that they were unbiblical, they did not just throw them out and let their family starve.

But one of the results was that 700 parish churches throughout Wales, suddenly don't have pastors, and there weren't enough Puritans to fill those pulpits. So Parliament gathered funds to supply a number of Puritan itinerant ministers who traveled throughout the land.

And they did see, some of them saw some extraordinary success. But as a whole, you know, imagine again, you're a Welshman, all you know is over there in London, there's some political argument, and I show up at church, and now not only is it not my good old church, it looks different, but now there's no preacher.

Well, thanks a lot, you know. So that doesn't look like it's a religious advancement, you know. So the Welsh had, there was a real struggle. It really wasn't until the 18th century, under the preaching of the evangelical revivalist, that we see Wales really being turned to the doctrines of the gospel.

A Trailer on the Puritans’ God-Entranced Life

Right, so that is a good historical overview of the origins of this movement of men that came to be known as Puritans. That kind of helps us understand where are we on the map? Where are we on the timeline?

What's going on in the context historically? But in our next episode, we want to get into what was a Puritan? How can we define them? What were some of the distinguishing characteristics of the men in the movement?

So tune in next week as we go a little bit further into these episodes on Puritanism. In the meantime, hang around for a special trailer from the film, Puritan, All of Life to the Glory of God by Mediagratia.

And definitely take a look at Mediagratia .org. Get a copy of the deluxe edition box set, and you'll be way ahead of us by this time next week.

Well, how about if we begin at the beginning?

The goal is not to reconstruct the 16th or 17th or 18th century. We're not on some liturgical excavation. But it is to say that the Puritans have something to teach us.

It's a God-entranced heart and a God-entranced stomach and a God-entranced ears and eyes and all of life and experience is God-entranced.

Puritanism was part of the Reformation. To be a Puritan, you were swimming against the tide.

And the Puritans were ruthless in their determination to remove everything that God was not pleased to have there.

They had a revolutionary, more biblical view of what it means to be a Christian.

Bunyan was a layman, but he used to gather congregations of four figures when he would be preaching to something like 3 ,000 people at six o 'clock in the morning.

And the Christian life was so beautiful, as he described it, so rich. I wanted to live like that. And I wanted to preach like that, too.

We have too much of empty motivational preaching, which is just saying, we can do it. We can all do it. Come on, let's do it. There's no depth.

We're so far from the depth of the Puritans' commitment to the Word of God. That is the great, great gift they gave to us.

In a secular age, it's hard to remember that there was a time when people were theologically driven. So as I understand who God is, I begin to see who I am. They were such utterly serious and joyful Christians.

They knew that there was nothing in grace that coddled sin. They understood the necessity of the truths of theology to take root in their heart and in their life.

If we had that view, we wouldn't need all of the other books that tell us to look inside ourselves to find the answers, because we would know that this comes from God and God alone.

They understood that God is everywhere, and that everything concerns him, and that he sees everything, and that consequently, the biggest problem in life is God, if you are not right with him.

To say that you're a gospel man or woman, and then to hold back from pursuing the effects of that through all of your redeemed humanity, individually and corporately, is really to make a nonsense of what we describe as salvation.

And they saw this is the joy and good news we're made for. And therefore, this is truth worth living and worth dying for.

And if we are not ready and willing to lay down our lives for the truth of God, then not only is God being dishonored, people's eternal lives are being imperiled.

Are you interested in knowing the Bible? Are you interested in knowing Christ? Do you want someone to attend to the care of your soul? Then you're going to want to get to know the Puritans.