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

Welcome to the Beholder God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Grazie. I'm joined with John Snyder, host and author of the

Beholder 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 is 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, 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. I mean, 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 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.

You know, the Puritan movement, because most of Parliament, when the king was 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, you know.

And then there was some, what we would call kind of, there were fringe elements in the

Puritan movement that were fanatical, you know, saying that the millennium was about to start or it's already here.

And so, you know, 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, you know, I mean, the Puritans, you know, 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 be, how to use the Sabbath. And the

Puritans were in earnest about, you know, drunkenness, and they were in earnest. 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, you know.

But they all thought they were, I mean. Well, yeah, they would have thought they were, you know, at least many of them. So, as these people were coming and saying, you know, oh, you're just, 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, and 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, kind of that reaction. There was, there's a theological reaction first.

And, you know, 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, you know.

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, all right, kind of, she's become puny, you know.

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, all right, 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, that's, you know, 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 land, that's 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, all right.

So, we're not reading in the late 17th century that the Anglican church is pretty much deserted, and atheism, you know, 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 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, and you can see this, you know, in Thomas Jefferson, when he says, well,

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 then is 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's 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, but 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, your great, 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, all right,

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 just kind of like a, you know, 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 you know, 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 Whitfield 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.

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 shalt, 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 the leaders of the nation, and they kind of set the fashion for the day.

So, the Church of England looks at this doctrinal onslaught from atheism, and then there's deism with 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 the late 1670s. A man named

Anthony Hornac 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, is 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. It doesn't 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 what 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.

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. 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, like their fathers, or some of them were the Puritans that were kicked out of 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.

Okay, as a kid, I watched my parents being persecuted. I endured persecution.

Don't want to put that on my kids. I mean, 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 ease up a little bit.

Yeah, 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, those secondary differences become more pronounced, and so they divide, and they become somewhat isolated.

And even within those groups, 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 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 a 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. But 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 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. 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. But 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 and side 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, you know, it's not the first time that culture has been this way. So, 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 Whitefield.

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 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.