Puritans and Revival II: The Dark Before the Dawn | Behold Your God Podcast

The End of the Puritan Era and the Great Awakening

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Grazie. I'm joined with John Snyder, host and author of the Behold Your God study series and pastor of Christ Church, New Albany.

John, we started a new series last week on Puritans and Revival and a topic that is particularly close to your heart as it is the topic of your PhD that you spent a long time writing and preparing for.

So John, for this episode and probably for several episodes within this series, I want to basically become a person listening to the podcast and just sit back and listen to you teach about this. Every once in a while, I'm going to throw in a question, but John, where are we going today?

We're going to focus on the end of the Puritan era, which was about 1662 to the beginning of the Great Awakening in 1735. So what all's going on in that era? Yeah, this era is generally a period of time that we've generally neglected.

It's been neglected by academics until recently, but it's definitely a period of time in the history of the church that the evangelical rarely looks at because it's a pretty spiritually dark time. But when I was doing the research for the thesis, which did go forever because I'm kind of lazy, I found out that this really was a period that's very encouraging to us as believers because even though there's a lot that's occurring that's wrong, there are a lot of responses in the culture, especially in England and Wales where we're going to be looking, responses against the Puritan movement, a reaction to it.

There's a lot of those responses that are just sinful, but God uses those and the misdirected efforts within the church of England to cure those. Ultimately, as we look back, we can see how God uses all of that to prepare the nation for the preaching of the gospel from men like George Whitefield.

And so it really, I would consider this period, rather than a dark period, a preparatory period. It's a plowing of the ground. It's God using even the worst choices of church and nation for good to prepare them for the preaching of the gospel.

So there's a lot that's encouraging. So John, when you mentioned that there's a darkness almost to the culture, is that similar to today? I think there are similarities. Sin is always the same. I had a pastor friend who used to say to me, it's the same noose that you're hanging yourself with, sin.

It's just a different color of rope. And so when we look at what was happening in the 17th century, it's not really any different than what happens in our own when we go away from God or we reject his word.

What we find is that from 1662 to 1735, there is a whiplash reaction in the culture of Britain against the Puritan regime. And so there are some reasons for that. The Puritan movement, because most of parliament, when the removed, actually beheaded, and parliament now rules the nation under Cromwell, some of that political intrigue, that stink, sticks to Puritanism.

So even though you're a Puritan pastor and you may not have had anything to do with the political intrigue, well, people don't like you because you're like them. And then there was some, what we would call kind of, there were fringe elements in the Puritan movement that were fanatical, saying that the millennium was about to start or it's already here.

And so anytime you have a large-scale movement in religion, you do have these fringe groups. And now the main body of Puritanism wrote against that, preached against that, but it doesn't matter. It still sticks to the whole group.

And so there was some of that that was distasteful. And then there's the Puritan moral strictness. The Puritans were very strict with how was the Sabbath to be used. It was illegal to work on Sunday before the Puritans, and it was illegal to work on Sunday after the Puritans for a long time.

But the Puritans really were pretty in earnest about how to use the Sabbath. And the Puritans were in earnest about drunkenness. So they laid, in a sense, a biblical grid over a nation that wasn't full of Christians.

And the non-Christians, they really strained at the leash. But they all thought they were. Well, yeah, they would have thought they were, at least many of them. And so as these people were coming and saying, oh, you think you're being a super Christian.

I'm a Christian too, and I don't... Yeah, I don't have that same view. I feel free to do that. So when Puritanism is removed in 1662, and the nation is free of that, it's like a teenager who's been misbehaving when the parent's watching and getting grounded and punished.

Now the parent leaves for the weekend, and the teenager's like, man, we are really going to live it up now. And so what we find is there's this pendulum swing. There's a whiplash reaction against everything Puritan.

And it's going to be so strong that even the Anglican church, who doesn't want the Puritan back, doesn't want this heathenish nation. And so we're going to see how the Anglican church responded. We're going to see what was going on among the grandchildren of the Puritans, the non-conformists that we mentioned last time.

What are they doing? So let's talk about that Puritan reaction. There's a theological reaction first. So the church, the Puritan, is very serious about doctrine. Now the Puritan's gone, and the Anglican church is kind of tired of arguing about doctrine.

So their cure for that is to create a sense of unity by de-emphasizing doctrine to the point that pretty much everybody fits. So doctrine is not important. Unity and peace is more important. And I'm being oversimplistic, but that's kind of where we're headed.

When you have 2 ,000 ministers who are very in earnest about doctrine suddenly removed from your churches in 1662, what you end up with is an Anglican church that in many ways is doctrinally anemic, weak.

She's become puny. The spiritual steel, the backbone theologically of the Anglican church has just been removed. And now she's kind of watery in her theology. When that happens, at the same time that that's happening on the continent in Europe, atheism, skepticism, infidelity has been on the rise.

So suddenly you have in France and other places, atheism is rising up and saying, how do we even know there is a God? Why would we believe that? When you look at all these wars and things, if that's what your God brings us, we refuse to believe He exists.

And so it starts coming toward Britain. So the Anglican church, the church of the 96 of the people in England and Wales, the Anglican church responds intellectually, academically, theologically to this new movement.

And it does better than the continental churches did. We're not reading in the late 17th century that the Anglican church is pretty much deserted and atheism sweeps the people, as you read in many ways of what happened in France.

But what you do find is this, the Anglican church battled skepticism and atheism by emphasizing the reasonableness of Christianity. So they used apologetics, but their main apologetic was this, Christianity makes the most sense.

And so Christianity must be true. Now, what happens when you do that then is Scripture is no longer the judge and we place ourselves beneath Scripture when we have ideas about how life ought to be, we put them beneath Scripture and Scripture judges it.

Now man's intellect, my idea of what's reasonable called natural religion, that becomes the judge and Scripture is now subject to that. So that's where we get deism and that's a movement that really flourishes in Britain at this time.

In Britain and then in the colonies, deism, you know, Thomas Jefferson, others. A lot of the founding fathers. Yeah, a lot of the founding fathers, noble men in many ways would consider themselves very Christian and yet their version of Christianity is deistic.

Now, what is deism? Well, there are a number of elements of deism. Here's how one author describes it. There's five basic beliefs. God exists, it is man's duty to worship his creator and the proper way to worship God is to practice virtue, the golden rule.

Well, you can see this, you know, in Thomas Jefferson when he says, I've created a Bible where he takes out all the miracles, basically. Yeah, so he takes his knife to the Bible. He cuts out the miraculous and all you're left with in his ethics.

So God is a good God. He started us, then he backs away. Our job is to worship him. The way you worship God is not by paying attention to the death of Jesus and resurrection and these miracles and these doctrines.

That's not important. What's important is ethics. So be a good man. Number four, men should repent of sin. And number five, rewards and punishments will follow death. Now, when we were talking earlier about this, some deists wouldn't have held to all five points.

They would have disagreed because they weren't very Christian at all. This would be kind of a Christianized deism. This is the deism that we see in England in the 17th and 18th century. But deism is a pretty fluid movement.

And so it's kind of like, all right, the only thing I could think of is tofu. You throw tofu, you know, you throw tofu into a pot and it tastes like whatever's in the pot eventually. So if it's something very spicy, then it has a lot of flavor.

If it's something very bland, then tofu doesn't have any flavor. And deisms like that, you can throw it into any culture and it comes out kind of tasting like that culture. So right now, the deism we're talking about is a very religious version of deism.

So yeah, there's a God, but look, let's be reasonable. Doctrine is not important. What's important is ethics. So we would almost think of it as like a social gospel today. What's important is how you treat your fellow man, not what you believe about God.

You know, Christianity is a life to be lived, not a set of beliefs. So that's what happened. Now, what follows on that is a thing that we call, that historians call latitudinarianism. And TJ and I have been talking about the fact that we're probably going to have to edit the podcast numbers of times because we won't get it straight.

As long as you're the one saying it and not me, we're probably going to be okay. Maybe, maybe. Latitudinarianism. What is latitudinarianism? Well, think of latitude, width, breadth. Latitudinarianism is the historic label that we put on what happened next in the church.

So here comes atheism. A lot of your great theologians, you kicked them out of the church. Atheism comes over. You respond philosophically with the reasonableness of Christianity. Any reasoning man would be a Christian.

You remove the supernatural. You remove the need for the new birth. And all you're left with is ethics. That's latitudinarianism. It is where it's a version of Christianity, a shell, where doctrine is boiled down to the very minimum.

And really, all that matters is how you live. And that became really popular in the English church, in the Welsh church, especially under a guy named Archbishop John Tillotson. Probably you haven't heard of this archbishop, but that's because latitudinarianism is pretty bland.

I mean, it just doesn't have much. That's how it kept peace, by not believing much of anything. And liberalism like that always dies quickly because it doesn't offer you anything, except it's removed things.

John Tillotson, though, in his day was so popular that if you went to any preacher's house in the church of England, you would likely find a set of his sermons. A very intellectual man, a very capable speaker.

In fact, he was personal friends with the philosopher of enlightenment, John Locke. When Tillotson died, John Locke wrote that he had no one left with whom he could discuss questions of religion. Tillotson, when you read his sermons, he's not a flaming heretic.

He doesn't come across as a bad guy. But you do notice that the strong statements that scripture would require us to make in sermons are missing. It's kind of like the Mr. Rogers of Christianity. It's just, you need to feel good and everybody's part of our neighborhood and we just need to treat each other kindly.

And that was Tillotson. Now, the reason we take time to even mention any of this is that this really forms a backdrop to the rise of the evangelical movement and the revivals, the evangelical revival, because you're going to find that men like Whitefield are aroused by the doctrineless church that they're a part of.

And they're going to really preach the Puritan doctrines again. And they're going to preach them aggressively because they feel that their church has moved too far away from doctrine. And then you're going to find that in the 18th century, the reaction, the negative reaction to the evangelical revival is coming from that latitudinarian kind of stance that, hey, whoa, you're bringing back doctrines that divided people 100 years ago.

We don't need division. We need to just love each other. So you need to understand that that's kind of the backdrop there. Yeah. And again, we go back to what we said at the very beginning. This stuff, when we look at our own day, it's almost like looking in a mirror when we study these things.

I mean, we don't have latitudinarianism, but we kind of do. We do have churches that say, okay, well, we're going to focus on being really easy and we're going to focus on all the things that join us together.

And we're going to sing kumbaya and all these things. And we don't focus on doctrine. And there's a lot of weakness in that. So just going back all the way to what we were saying at the very beginning, don't lose hope when you see these things in ourselves.

This is not the first time that God has seen these times and God has done amazing things with them. So while we are living in dark times, we don't want to say that we're not. It's not hopeless times. No, certainly not.

The Church of England’s Moral and Intellectual Response

Well, what we see next is the Church of England's response, shocked by the moral slide, the gin craze, alcoholism was throughout the nation. There was a common joke in the early 18th, late 17th century that the English Parliament was going to vote to remove the word not from the Ten Commandments.

So it's thou shalt murder, thou shout, because especially among the elite, among the nobility, the wealthy and powerful, it seemed as if just a complete casting off of all moral restraint was popular.

And so the common man tends to follow, you know, the leaders of the nation. And, you know, they kind of set the fashion for the day. So the Church of England looks at this, you know, doctrinal onslaught from atheism and then there's deism with, you know, your own homegrown problem.

And then they've got this moral decline in the nation and they decide it's time to react because the leaders in the Church of England are not bad guys. They want the nation to be good. But they've got some wrong ideas about how to do that.

And again, I think that reminds us of our own day. Many people in positions of leadership, denominationally, want to see lost men rescued, want to see culture transformed, want to see the social issues of our day answered in a right way.

But lacking biblical wisdom, they may be earnestly pursuing ideas that ultimately will prove futile. So let me give you a couple of ones that were popular in the 18th century because I think these are fascinating.

The first is the establishment of what we call the Anglican societies. So this happened in like in the late 1670s. A man named Anthony Horneck is preaching and a group of basically college age kids get together and they say, man, we need to get serious about religion.

So they start meeting together in small societies, guys in one society, girls in other societies, and they just try to hold each other accountable. Like, are you doing good deeds? But the focus of the group is not the gospel, but good deeds.

That's the Anglican society system. And it's spread throughout the church. And it really is important because these will become, I would call them, the nurseries of the great awakening or the evangelical revival in the 1730s and 40s.

In other words, George Whitefield, when he starts preaching and God starts using him, well, who wants to hear him? Well, kind of really serious people in these societies because you're in a society because you're pretty serious about religion.

Even if you don't know what it is to be converted, you're serious about religion. So suddenly this guy over here, Whitefield's preaching. So you say, come speak to our group. We meet every Thursday morning at 6 a .m. Whitefield shows up, he preaches the gospel, and so many are converted.

It goes from being a kind of a religious group of people trying to do good works to suddenly a cluster of Christians, like a baby church almost. So these are significant, but they are groups that focus on good works, good deeds, and they do not preach the gospel.

So for the most part, it's full of lost pharisaical people. The most famous of all of these groups we're going to talk about next time, and that's the Holy Club. The Oxford group that gathered together to stir themselves up to good works, the Holy Club, John Wesley, Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, a guy named Benjamin Ingham, and a whole slew of others that ended up being mightily used by God, but when they met as the Holy Club, not one of them knew what it was to have peace with God through the finished work of Christ.

I was going to say, none of them were actually believers. No, they were all good Pharisees trying to work their way into a state of holiness where God would accept them. So that's the Anglican societies.

A funny attempt by the Anglicans that failed was the Anglican, the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, all right? So I don't want to spend a lot of time on it, but basically what this was, was a system of paying informants.

You could snitch on your friend for being drunk out in the street making a lot of noise on Friday night, and you could turn them in, and you'd get a little payment for it. Well, that didn't work because after enough people get paid off for snitching on their friends, well, then their friends are mad at them.

You know, you told them you got me busted. I had to spend a day in jail because of you. You got 30 bucks. I got a day in jail. So it became so unpopular in the culture that eventually they quit it. Another thing the Anglicans did but was good was the publication of Christian literature.

They created the SPCK, the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge. That still exists today and is still the largest publisher of religious books in the UK. But it began back in the late 1600s.

Now, what they wanted to do was get good Christian books into the homes of people. And by this time in the British culture, people are having enough leisure money and leisure time to buy a book. You may only own two or three because they're still very expensive, but an average worker, especially a middle class guy, could buy a book.

He could also afford glasses. He could also afford candles. This was the rise of the middle class. Right. So with that rise, you have the rise of a reading class. And so they begin to buy these books.

Here's the problem. The books that are being published are not Puritan books about the gospel and the work of Christ. They are what I would call moralistic books. So books on how to prepare yourself for communion service, how to live your whole day.

And so if you read, you know, Unto Christ, well, if you read these books, they have a lot of good chapters on things like this, the right use of money, the right use of time. What about humility? What about how you act in your home?

What about how you raise your children? What about how you lead them in prayer each morning? What about how you prepare yourself to take the Lord's Supper? What about this? And so all the chapters were how to chapters.

Not bad, except this, no chapter on regeneration, the new birth, no chapter. It just assumed that being a good Anglican, you already knew what faith, repentance, conversion, the new birth, you already knew what all that was.

Well, had they let go of conversion? Well, yeah, I mean, because, you know, as we talked about the last time, the Anglican church tended not to emphasize that because you had the baptism to start the whole process.

So the whole idea of needing to be born again in order for these Christian duties to be done correctly by faith, you know, looking to Christ out of gratitude, that was lost in these books. So what you have is men like George Whitefield or the Welsh preacher, Hal Harris, reading these books, trying to be better men.

Trying to better themselves. Yeah, so trying to make myself a better religious guy. And how many of us have been there and seen that? Yeah, and a total failure. Right. So what these books do, they do not lead them to Christ directly.

They lead them to, really, to the law. It's just like putting rules on top of a man who's already failed to keep the rules. So in many cases, especially in the leaders of the evangelical revival, so many of them read these moralistic books and came under terrible conviction that the more I try, the worse I get.

And it drove them inadvertently to the gospel. And they found the gospel not in the Anglican books, but in the Puritan books, which talked about the work of Christ and regeneration and faith and repentance.

So it was like a plow that God used. Now, let's talk about one more thing. What was happening in the children and the grandchildren of the Puritan movement, the non-conformists? Well, in some ways, it's a dark period for them as well.

Now that in 1689, now that they're free to form their own churches, a lot of them at first were very aggressive, like the Puritans before them, or some of them were the Puritans that were kicked out of their churches.

But within 20 or 30 years into the 18th century, what you find is there tended to be a less aggressive approach to Christianity because you don't want to go back to being persecuted by your country. So like, look, let's just not make waves like we used to.

Well, you could see this argument from a parent. As a kid, I watched my parents being persecuted. I endured persecution. Don't want to put that on my kids. You could see that. Yeah, so it's not as if they gave up their Christianity or changed their doctrines, but they kind of just pulled it back.

Right, just kind of eased up a little bit. They eased off the accelerator, you know. And so the people around them, kind of, okay, fine, you got a Baptist church down the street, you know, before we used to persecute you.

Now you're legally allowed to have a church, but don't cause a lot of problem. There were still riots that occurred in the nation when they thought dissenters were getting too much influence. Dissenters were not allowed to go to Oxford and Cambridge.

If you wanted to go to those schools and you were not Church of England, you couldn't go there. So that's why we have dissenting academies. Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge, other guys, they have to basically start their own little colleges to train people because being non-Anglican, they couldn't use the state schools.

So they back off the pedal. Another thing they do is, once you're not being persecuted by a common enemy, you're free, you know, to start your own churches, you start noticing that you got a lot of differences with other people.

So I'm Baptist, and I'm Presbyterian, and I'm Congregationalist, and it used to be that we would just agree to ignore those differences while we're being put in prison by these people because we have a lot in common.

But now that we're free to form our own churches, then we, you know, those secondary differences become more pronounced. And so they divide and they become somewhat isolated. And even within those groups, you know, they become more and more and more precise theologically to the point that you have multiple types of Baptists.

And you become kind of insular. And in many of them, hyper-Calvinism started to flourish where we, you know, we just we don't need to tell everybody the gospel. God will save his people. And we just need to focus on cultivating godly families and godly kids within our little building and not worry so much about out there.

Now, that's an exaggerated, you know, statement because we're trying to summarize, but that did happen. There were bright spots, though. There were churches that were experiencing wonderful success under the preaching of the gospel, you know, during this time.

Here is an old, really old, ratty looking book. It's the diary of Joseph Williams. Joseph Williams was actually an early Baptist, early 1700s. And he writes in this diary and describes how God saved him from his Phariseeism as a Baptist and brought him to know Christ and the blessing that his church underwent.

And it sounds just like something George Whitefield would write. And that's helpful because a lot of people, a lot of, well, a lot of academics say George Whitefield and these Methodists, these revival people, they whipped the crowd up into a frenzy and they had a very emotional religion.

But the Puritans and the people before them were very intellectual. But it's not true. The Puritans and the people between the Puritans and the Great Awakening, they were experiential. And it's not just that Whitefield whipped up the crowd.

It's that they were gripped by truths that affected the emotions. I mean, we need time. Look, emotions do not bring Christ, but Christ does bring emotions. Yeah, so we don't want to have Christ only affecting the intellect and the will.

So a full-orbed Christianity. And many historians feel that that's why the evangelical revival was so successful was because, you remember, we talked about deism and all those things. The church's response tended to be kind of really brainy and left the heart unaffected.

And they said, well, Whitefield touched the heart, so that's why. Well, I wouldn't say that's why, but certainly God did use that. Well, Whitefield, I mean, his preaching was both. I mean, it was. Yeah, I think so.

It was intellectual, but it was also emotive. Yeah, so we have doctrine. We have brain and heart together. So within the dissenting churches, there were a lot of bright spots. We don't have time to go into them now, but there were.

Lessons from a Dark Period That Prepared the Ground

So what do we look at? What do we learn from this period? It looks like a dark period. You know, it's not Puritanism and it's not Great Awakening. So what's happening? Well, the Anglican church is reacting against Puritanism.

They're putting out books that talk about how to be better people, but they've neglected the gospel and it's all dark. It's not all dark. First of all, you know, there are still people who are carrying the gospel and the truth through and their churches may be small and they may be a little isolated and they may not be, you know, they may need rejuvenation, but it's there.

So think of a stream running underground and it bursts up in a fountain during the Puritan period. So it happens in the Reformation, happens again under Puritans, happens again in the 1740s and 50s and 60s in the Great Awakening and the Evangelical Revival.

Even when it's not bursting forth in a noticeable way, it's there. God has a people and they are still living on those truths and they're still talking about those truths and God is still saving people, even if it's a day of small things.

So this is not a dark period if you think that darkness means God isn't at work. Another great lesson is this, that even when things are at a low ebb, God uses even the stupid choices of humanity and the wrong responses of churches that are not very biblically informed.

He even uses that to prepare the ground for a greater work.

Now that the Puritan film is out and shipping after two years of working together with Reformation Heritage Books and Puritan Reform Theological Seminary, we're here in Tupelo, Mississippi where we've gathered some friends and family together just to screen the film as a way to celebrate.

A recently married couple, Jade and Lamar, came out to see the film and this is what they had to say.

Tomorrow morning what I'm going to remember is their love of God, their, I guess their full orb of theology as far as how God encompasses every aspect inside of their life. It wasn't just, you know, like they spoke about, you know, their tolerant minds, but that their tolerant minds came down to the practical level of everyday life.

And so it wasn't just intellectual theology, it was very practical as well.

For me, I actually enjoyed the part when John Piper was talking about how they, their shortcomings. I love that part because what it showed was, because in the beginning I was like, well, these men are on a whole nother level that I'm not on.

But when that part was brought up, it reminded me that they were humans and that we all need the help of the Holy Spirit to help us as we move from glory to glory in Christ Jesus. And so that was the part that stood out to me is coming to Christ, coming to the foot of the cross and asking, Lord, help me.

For more information about Puritan, all of life to the glory of God, visit themeansofgrace .org.

All right, so John, we've just spent a long time talking about, and honestly being really encouraged by the fact that what we may see as a really dark time today is not new. It's not the first time that culture has been this way.

But it is honestly a very dark time, but there are bright spots and there are moments of hope. So where are we going from here? Yeah, we're going to spend a long time in the podcast looking at the right answer.

And I would say it's a full, it's a more full answer than what we talked about. You know, we found in Anglicanism or nonconformity in the 18th century, we're going to find the great doctrines of the gospel that were taught by the Puritans.

Well, they're read. The Puritans are dead now. 1730, 1740, 1750. You have guys and girls, but particularly the young leaders, the men in university, in college, reading these Puritan books, being transformed by those truths, by the gospel.

And then reading more Puritan books to understand, did I get this right? Yeah. You know, here's my Bible and here's Matthew Henry's commentary, like George Whitfield. And then preaching and applying that to every area of life in a warm, fervent way.

So really what we find that the answer to the deism and the atheism and the moral slide was not ethics, was not even apologetics. Hey, Christianity is the most reasonable system. It fits. Just just look at it.

Ultimately, the answer was a person. The nation needed to meet Christ in the preaching of the gospel. I don't mean a gospel free Jesus, but through the great teachings of Scripture, men and women encountering the Christ of the Bible in a way that transforms them.

And England and Wales, they were rescued from the deistic flood, not by an academic explanation of why deism doesn't work, but by meeting Christ through the gospel. So make sure to catch up with us next week, where we'll pick that up.