Puritan II: Sola Scriptura and Conversion | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome back to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Mediagratia, and I'm here again this week with Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church, New Albany, and author and teacher of the Behold Your God study series from Mediagratia, also one of the 21 interviewees on the new project from Mediagratia, Puritan, All of Life to the Glory of God, and we're in episode two of a short series on Puritanism, introducing the concept of Puritanism as well as a little of the history of who these people were, where did they live, and what did they do.

In our last episode, which you can go back to Mediagratia .org and listen to if you haven't heard, we dealt a little bit with the history, placing them in the historic and temporal context. Where did they live?

When did they live? What were their origins? Now we want to begin to try to define, well, okay, so what was a Puritan? So how would you approach that question, John?

Well, we've got a few definitions here that we just kind of picked. We've got some secular historians who weren't, who aren't necessarily Christians, but they're good historians. They're gonna, Matt's gonna read a couple of those.

Then we'll give you a Puritan, one of the Puritans, the kind of the father of Puritanism, William Perkins. Then we'll give you one by a king, King James I, and it's a pretty startling and pithy statement.

One of the enemies of the Puritans. Yeah, really. He was, he was tired of the Puritans.

Well, before we get into those definitions, I do think it's important for us to understand that this was not a self-applied label. They didn't just say like, hey guys, what are we gonna call ourselves?

Right. Oh, you know what would be cool? Let's call ourselves Puritans. You know, that sounds really holy. It was kind, it was a pejorative. Much like Christian was initially a bit of a pejorative. Oh, look at these little Christs, these Christians.

And then later the Methodists, you know, were, were called Methodists because people would say very snarkily, look at these methodical people. They think they're so holy. They're like little Methodists.

So this is not a, a name that they chose for themselves. It was a name chosen for them to say, here are these people who just, you know, they want a pure church. They're so concerned with being pure and being purely biblical.

Puritan Definitions and the Meaning of the Label

So jumping now into a couple definitions that secular people have, secular academics have given for the, for the Puritan. These may or may not be believers. They would define Puritanism as a way of characterizing the distinctive style of piety practiced by a zealous subset of Protestants in the English-speaking world, an effective evangelical piety rooted in an experimental application of the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and revolving around preaching, prayer, and pious reading of the Bible and other godly books.

It's a very academic definition there. I hope that guy got an A. Here's the second one. Puritanism is the name we give to a distinctive and particularly intense variety of early modern Reformed Protestantism, which originated within the unique context of the Church of England, but spilled out beyond it, branching off into divergent dissenting streams and overflowing into other lands and foreign churches.

So these men may not have understood much of the spirituality of the movement, but they're giving accurate historical.

Definitions to a degree, would you agree? Yeah, I think some of the elements they mention are certainly fundamental. I think, you know, you do find the kind of classic, in my opinion, overemphasis on the doctrine of predestination as if that was like the heart of all Puritanism.

Or as if it was unique to Puritanism. That's true, and we were talking in the interval about that that has been, that has, that's a historically inaccurate picture of the situation that the Church of England was a happy, harmonious family of, of, you know, really earnest Arminians, and then these rabid Calvinists come back and try to shove that into, but actually the.

Early.

Protestant Reformed Church of England, with its 39 articles, was officially Calvinistic, was in agreement.

Well, it was just like the Southern Baptist Convention before all these founders guys came along in the 80s or 90s, you know, they were just, everybody was an Arminian and, and then all of a sudden these Calvinists came out of nowhere with this made-up thing, right?

I mean, that's the way it was. Yeah, yeah.

So there have been some really good guys. One guy's named Nicholas Tayake, and he's a, he's an academic, and he's pointed out, I mean, he's, he's not a Calvinist, you know, he's, he's pointed out that if you go back to the early records, the Puritans were in harmony with the original Protestant Church in England.

Yeah. Which, and what I just said was meant to be a joke, obviously. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it. Okay. Okay. You didn't laugh. No, I know, I know. Okay. I was laughing on the inside. All right.

Well, why don't you give us a definition from one of the sort of top Puritan men?

William Perkins says this, Puritans were those that most endeavored to get and keep the purity of heart in a good conscience and are branded with the vile terms of Puritans and Precisions. So men who want their heart and conscience to be clear before the Lord, but those that don't understand some of their, you know, strong stands they take, you know, label them with Puritans, oh, you think you're so holy, or Precisions, you're, you're so precise.

Right.

We see a couple things that we've mentioned already there, that these are men who are seeing the truth of these Reformation principles, the Sola, that the scripture is the highest authority and only true authority.

They're pressing that into every area of life and in doing so they're trying to keep the purity of heart and a good conscience to worship God as they see the scripture commands that he has told us to worship him, etc.

And others seeing that heart desire to obey the Lord, brand them. So there's that external, you know, giving of a name, not a self-application of the name Puritan or Precisionist. So here's one of the more famous caricatures of Puritanism, which is found in a comment made by King James I, who was, as we've already said, a bit exasperated with the ongoing efforts of the Puritan faction.

He said, a Puritan is a Protestant straight out of his wits.

Yeah, yeah, and well, if you know the life of King James, you can see why he would say that. Really, when we think about Puritanism, we shouldn't think that, you know, 1558 they return and they all sit down, they have a conference of Puritan, you know, the first Puritan conference, and they are a well-organized, clearly defined group.

Really what we find is the work of the Lord in, really, in conversion and men grabbing hold of the scriptures as everything and, you know, in a sense as our guide, as our authority, as the fuel for our thoughts and these men, like William Perkins and others, in the universities and in the churches, beginning to influence, and especially in the universities.

It's amazing how the Reformation and the Puritan movement, they were movements that occurred in universities. These are not thoughtless people, you know, these are PhDs and these are university students thinking through life.

So they're coming to similar convictions, core values, and they begin to recognize each other as really, you know, we have more in common than we don't have in common. So as the culture begins to oppose some of their ideas, and even at times there's some mild persecution, we find that there begins to develop a mutual identity that transcends, there are these core values that transcend the secondary issues that they might disagree on.

And if we were to give just in our short podcast some of the core values of Puritanism, we want to list four for you. We want to talk about sola scriptura, number two, personal conversion, number three, a precise piety.

I mean, they were called precisionist. Was that true? Well, yes, but why? How? And number four, they were and number four, they were characterized by an experiential and warm Reformed theology.

Sola Scriptura and the Authority of Scripture

Right. So starting at the beginning of that, sola scriptura, again, one of the five sola coming out of the Reformation, these principles that these men are now gripped by the truth and the rightness of, and they're trying to press these things out into every area of life.

Obviously, the Roman Catholic system de-emphasized, they would be okay with scripture is very important.

Or.

Perhaps, you know, scripture is right up there with some other important things as the most important things, but they would never be okay with sola scriptura, the scripture alone is our authority, because they clearly elevated church councils and church traditions, popes to the same level as the scripture.

But the Protestant churches, it might be assumed that all the Protestant churches were agreed that, no, hold on, the scriptures are our only authority. Is that true in this time of the Puritan men?

Yeah, I think we would say that that is a generally true stereotype, that the Protestants did agree that the scriptures were the guide. So what set the Puritan apart.

Was,.

Really, was his understanding of the intellect and how that was to relate to scripture, and that was heavily influenced through Calvin. Calvin's clear teaching that the scripture teaches that all aspects of our human persona have been influenced by sin.

So it's not just that my desires are wrong or that my choices are wrong. My intellect is wrong. I think wrong. It's that, you know, there's a, in a sense, there's a fatal infection in my mind and when God begins to work in us, when regeneration and, you know, we embrace Christ and his gospel, of course, the new life has been given and the changes begin to occur.

It begins to be worked out into every area. Truth begins to replace error.

Yet,.

While we are on this earth, the Puritans taught that we must not trust our hearts, not trust our will, but nor can we trust the mind in a way that would put it above scripture. So in a sense, the Puritan was pretty pessimistic about the intellect.

Okay, God has given us an intellect and we have to use it, but the intellect must always be placed beneath scripture. If I don't understand scripture, then something's wrong with my understanding. It's not scripture.

And if there seems to be a paradox in scripture, then I have to hold both apparently contradictory truths to be true as I study and try to understand how they relate to each other. But I don't put my logic above that and say, well, that doesn't sound logical.

So I'm not, I don't, I don't want to, I'm not accepting that. Really, it was the non-Puritan Anglican that had a very optimistic view of the intellect. And well, God has given us the intellect and the intellect isn't affected in the same way as the other things in the fall.

And so the intellect can kind of come to scripture. And I don't think that any non-Puritan Anglican would have voiced it like this, but in practice, it kind of tended to be like this. I come to scripture and I see what the Bible says about a lot of things.

But when I look at my local situation, my intellect, becomes the judge of scripture, which scriptures are most profitable, which ones are most practical. And so I can come to the Bible and kind of, you know, use it the way my intellect, my logic says is best and apply to my situation.

The Puritan would have been horrified by that. No, we place ourself beneath scripture. Two areas we see this in particular in Puritanism. One is, you know, this whole issue of personal salvation or soteriology, the doctrine of salvation.

When you have a system that heavily stresses the biblical teaching of God's sovereignty and salvation, and at the same time heavily stresses the biblical teaching of man's responsibility to repent and believe the gospel, you're going to have a system that has on the surface a paradox, a tension.

And people would accuse Puritans or maybe Calvinistic people of being all about logic. But actually, these men place logic beneath the scripture. They would say, yes, there does appear to be a contradiction.

There is not a contradiction, but our limited intellect can only go so far. And we submit ourselves to scripture. We hold both to be true. We preach the gospel and call men to repent and we cry out to God and plead with Him to give them what is needed to respond.

Another area that we see them placing their intellect beneath scripture and demonstrating in a very practical way that the scripture is the only authority for the church is in their ecclesiology. You know, while Elizabeth was a shrewd politician and, you know, politically some really good decisions, the Puritan would come to the scripture and say, I don't have a right to put my intellect above the scripture.

If the Bible doesn't command us to worship God in a certain way, we're not free to invent a bunch of other things. We don't say, well, the Bible didn't say I'm not allowed to do that. So I'll go ahead and do it.

So the Puritans were, you know, really careful as much as they could be to make sure that scripture in very practical ways was the.

All-sufficient authority for the Christian. Yeah, you might say that the Puritan had a biblical and therefore a more realistic anthropology, an understanding of man and what sin has done to us. And that biblical anthropology led them to never place their own intellect or their own ability to reason and think above the plain revelation of the scriptures.

And we deal in the film a good bit about some issues that you just raised, the issue of the regulative principle of worship versus the normative principle of worship. The Puritans clearly pressing for what we would now call the the regulative principle that God in the scripture commands certain forms of worship.

And we're not free to, as maybe you were alluding to earlier, use our own ideas, use our intellect to say, well, I think it would just be lovely to worship God in these ways. That would be the normative principle of worship, as we've come to call those things now.

So those are issues, again, that we deal with in the film a little bit. And there's clearly lots of things that have been written that we can go and look at that. Now look, their opponents, the opponents of the Puritans, they would never say, now you guys believe the Bible, but we're just going based on our logic.

Yeah, yeah. I don't think anybody would have said that. They would just accuse the Puritans of being a bit too literal, a bit OCD with scripture. Kind of like, you know, that's not what the Bible intends for you to do with it.

And, you know, and a lot of people didn't understand that the precision of the Puritan conscience, especially with some external things, you know, do we bow when we come to the Eucharist, to the Lord's Supper, to what was the Mass?

Well, the Puritans looked at the Catholic bowing before the Mass because that's supposed to be the actual re-sacrifice of Jesus. Yeah, you venerate the sacrifice. That's Jesus. You ought to bow. And the Puritans said, look guys, bowing before that just, you know, there's all these things they were so precise about.

And the guy out here watching from a distance thought, you're just OCD. You're kind of pig-headed. What's the big deal? Right. But for the Puritan, it was the scripture. As William Perkins said in his.

Definition, or as his sort of apology for his own approach, which became labeled as precisionist or Puritan, they're doing that out of a conscience issue. They know we can't bow before bread and wine, you know.

God never commanded us to do this. And so, so they're doing that to, how did William Perkins say it? They're trying to keep a heart,.

A pure heart and conscience.

Right. A pure heart and a pure conscience. And, you know, that obviously may have some connections to some of our listeners today who may have seen things in the scriptures with some help of older authors or even contemporary authors.

And they see certain things in their church situation and they may come under the same kinds of criticism. Why are you being so precise? Why are you making such a big deal about these things? When their desire is not to just be seen as really serious people who make a big deal about things for no reason, but their desire is to keep a clear conscience and to keep a clear heart.

So that same spirit of Puritanism, even though as a movement, as we'll talk about later, has ended. That's really something that I think we see in every generation of believers, which is put there by God's own zeal for his honor.

And he births these desires in his people. So what about the key, second key issue that you brought up, personal conversion? Did other groups not believe that, you know, you had to get saved, you had to be born again?

Personal Conversion and the New Creature

Again, there were groups that would have certainly said that using, you know, different phrases. But what we see in Puritanism, if we could say that the scripture is the soil from which this new thinking and new living is flowing out of, then we would have to say that conversion, personal conversion, is the starting line of this life, not the finish line.

Now, for us today, you know, we might say, well, that's a no brainer. Everybody knows that. But that wasn't a no brainer in that day. Roman Catholicism clearly taught, OK, we've got some things the church will do for you.

We're going to baptize you and you're going to end and we're going to give you the Eucharist. And that's going to mean that you're a Christian and you've been fed. And now you're just kind of going to grow up in the church.

And as long as you remain a fairly faithful, you know, adherent to the church and its ways, then at the end, there is this wonderful permanent union with Christ. Now, that's an oversimplification, but that's kind of the picture that the goal is over here.

Like life is here and we're working toward life. Well, even the Church of England, you know, held in a sense to some of that. But the Puritan said that's exactly the opposite of what scripture teaches.

Scripture teaches that God, by the purest act of grace, makes us alive, wakes us up. We turn in repentance and faith toward him. And with this new heart that he's placed within us in regeneration, life has begun.

And now we're working from life. And so flowing out of that is the changed life.

Right. Well, I can see where that would make for a lot of conflict. You know, this as a Baptist, these sound like very church state problems to me. And clearly that was the context that they were in. I can see where that would lead to a lot of conflict in a state church where, as you've said already, everyone has been baptized upon birth and their safety is implied.

Eternal security is kind of implied in that by virtue of being English. Like, hey, you're fine, man, you're a member of the church or a member of the Church of England.

Everything's cool.

Yeah. And so for the Puritans, really, the beginning of evangelistic efforts wasn't with foreign missions. It wasn't with people that didn't attend church, so to speak, or didn't want anything to do with church.

It was inside the church. So they would go to church members and say to them, you must be born again, regardless of what was told you at your baptism. You must be born again. And that made for a lot of tension in the country when you have a group of preachers telling nice churchy folks that you may not necessarily know the Lord.

Yeah. It's funny how history repeats itself. It sounds very first century to me, telling church people that they have to be born again. Yeah. Let me read what one of the key Puritans, Thomas Goodwin, wrote.

He says, and this is very Puritan language. It hath been one of the glories of the Protestant religion, that it revived the doctrine of saving conversion and of the new creature brought forth thereby.

But in a more imminent manner, God hath cast the honor thereof upon the ministers and preachers of this nation, speaking there about the Puritans, who are renowned abroad for their more accurate search into and discoveries hereof.

So he's saying, hey, this is a Protestant thing. We're seeing that the doctrine of saving conversion. But especially now in this day and age, these Puritan men, God has given special insight and helpful carefulness in explaining.

Thomas Goodwin's statement there that you just read really does point out a central quality of Puritanism in which they excelled. Such a careful understanding of the dealings of God with a soul. And we've talked about this in podcasts where we talked about evangelism because there just isn't anybody better to go to when we want to look at what is occurring within in the work of regeneration.

And that really far above even the Reformation, the Puritans took those great truths of pneumatology of the work of the spirit and excelled in the doctrine of conversion.

Well, if you want to take a look at the film Puritan, all of life to the glory of God, we go into even more detail on that very point. This is one of the places where they really clung to the scriptures and demonstrated in a very clear way what what they had to say about about conversion, personal conversion.

But this is that's we're out of time again in our podcast. So we'll be back next week with the remaining points of defining who these men and women were. But stay tuned for another sneak peek of the Puritan film coming right up.

The Puritans effectively took the baton from reformers like Tyndale, Luther and Calvin, and they shared with them the five solas of the Reformation. They believe that they were saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone.

And they believe that scripture alone was their highest and only authority. And those are crucial distinctions between Puritan belief and Roman Catholic belief. Roman Catholicism said and still says, it's grace plus the sacraments that will save you.

It's faith plus good works, Christ plus the church, scripture plus the authority of tradition. And the Puritans were saying, together with all the great reformers, no, scripture makes it clear that it's by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, that we are saved.

Anything else and you're robbing God of his glory.