Puritans and Revival IV: Understanding Knowledge | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome back to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Grazie. Joined by Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church, New Albany and host of the Behold Your God Studies.

We're in the middle of a series now. We're on episode four of Puritans and Revival. Particularly what we're talking about are the influence that the Puritans had on the work in the United Kingdom that is known as the Evangelical Revival.

A twin work here in the United States and the New England colonies at the time. It's called The Great Awakening. So last week we talked about some of the very early leaders, Hal Harris, Daniel Rowland, George Whitefield, the Wesley brothers.

Evangelical Revival and the Great Awakening

In this week, we're gonna focus on some of the doctrines that kind of fueled the revival, right?

Yeah, we're gonna, well actually, we're gonna have to talk about something before we get to that. We're gonna talk about the Evangelical epistemology. And that's a big word that we don't normally use in real life.

So epistemology is just the study of how we know things. So what did the early evangelicals believe regarding true Christian knowledge? And that may seem to us like maybe that's kind of philosophical and not so practical, but we have this problem all the time as Christians.

You go to church with somebody or you talk with somebody at work and you may even agree about certain things. So we agree that the Bible is the word of God. We agree about certain words in the Bible. I believe in the new birth, so do I.

I believe in holiness, so do I. But then when you start to talk to them, you realize that the things they say they believe don't change anything about their lives. And so we have to ask ourselves, do you have, do you really know these things?

Do you know them in the right way? Is there a wrong way to know things? So in our day, it'd be very customary to say things like this. It's not enough to just know it in your head. You gotta know it in your heart.

And so head knowledge versus heart knowledge. That's a pretty common dichotomy, a contrast. You're just agreeing with them in your head. It doesn't affect your heart at all.

Or in the first Behold Your God study, you might call these true truths. It's things that you know to be true, but they haven't really impacted your life.

So it's not the truth that's different from person to person in this situation. It's the way the person has come to know that truth, their epistemology, like do you really know this? What do you mean when you say really?

Of course I know it. Well, do you really know it? What do you mean? Then there's another side, and other than your heart has to be involved, then there's another side that says, look, why are you even talking about the heart?

Emotions have nothing to do with it. What you need is right doctrine, and you need to understand that doctrine, and you need to believe that doctrine, and the heart really is inconsequential. And so in that kind of a situation, and I've often had friends who will be amazed at someone's behavior.

So let's say someone goes to a church that's pretty heavy on doctrine, and then that person, they just go off the rails. Morally, they leave their wife, whatever, and it breaks everyone's heart. But the people in that very doctrinal kind of church don't tend to say this.

Well, they didn't have enough heart knowledge. They just had head knowledge. They tend to say things like this. I don't understand why they did that. I mean, they knew the truth. And so, yes, they knew the truth,.

But how did they know it?

And did they know it in a way that the Bible wants us to know it? So that's what we're talking about. In the early days of the evangelical revival, there was a real divide between these revival men talking about, yes, but do you really know it?

And their Anglican church saying, of course we know it. Or the common church member, and everybody was basically a church member because 90, what, 94, 96 of the population was baptized into the Church of England as soon as they were born.

Right, and so if you're baptized as a baby, then you are a member of the church.

Yeah, if you're a citizen of the country, you're pretty much a church member. So this culture says, well, we're a Christian nation. Of course we believe and we know these things. And so there was a different view of knowledge, and that's what we wanna talk about because it really is important before we get to their doctrines to see how they viewed knowledge.

A second preliminary thing that we need to hit is the question of doctrine. Are these men theological at all? I mean, what theology book did George Whitefield write? What theology book did Hal Harris write?

I mean, even men like John Newton, and we have six volumes of his works. Is there any systematic theology in that?

Well, there isn't.

There's a lot of letters. There's a lot of sermons, some pamphlet-sized books. So are these men theologically-minded men? And many academically, and many who are very keen on theology look back on this period with a little bit of disdain.

So they admire the earnestness of the young men,.

But they would say,.

But they're really not theologically-minded men. So therefore, you might wanna imitate the way they lived, that zeal, that sacrificial pursuit of the kingdom of Christ, but you don't want to imitate the way they thought because they weren't really thinkers.

I think that that would be a misconception. The truth is more like this. Whitefield and these men did not write any systematic theologies. Some of them wrote books on individual doctrines. For instance, one man, John Berridge, that we will mention again and again.

Berridge, in the north of England, was a Methodist or an evangelical. In the Church of England, he was a leader in that area and a revival preacher, as well as a pastor. A very close friend of Whitefield and Wesley, he was Reformed in his thinking.

Berridge wrote a book on justification by faith because he was having to deal with that as a pastor. People saying, well, are we justified by faith plus good works, like Mr. Wesley says, or justified by faith in Christ finished work alone, like Whitefield says.

And so sometimes they did have to write theological works. But for the most part, what we have is letters, journals, and sermons. And those aren't systematic theologies, but they are theological men. And we will be talking in the podcasts in the near future about their views of individual doctrines, particularly dealing with the doctrines of the gospel as they are the experiential ones, the things that happen to us, regeneration and sanctification and the assurance of the believer.

So we don't want to think of them as non-theological.

But John, one of the reasons that they didn't necessarily write systematic theologies or entire tomes was because they were reading entire tomes of systematic theology that, frankly, they thought, why would I rewrite?

Why would I reinvent the will? I have John Owen. I have, and they're reading these wonderful theological works that they're clearly being shaped and influenced by.

Yeah, so a lot of times what they did, they just pointed men back to the guys that wrote a century before them. Read the Puritans on this.

Yeah, as we talked about last week, like the guys who mentored them 50 years after their death. Go read those guys.

Right, even John Wesley, the Arminian of the group, when he put together a thing called his Christian Library, about 40 volumes of small books printed inexpensively so average people could afford to buy them, greatly reduced, Wesley edited everything he got his hands on.

So he would take a big, fat Puritan book and reduce it from 600 pages to 220 pages. But he also edited Calvinism out of them, to be honest. But of Wesley's great Christian classics of the Western world, the great majority of his library were Calvinists, were Puritans, were Reformed guys that he edited.

So yeah, even Wesley pointed his people back to the Puritans through an indirect kind of edited route. Now, saying that they were theologically minded men I think is accurate, but we do want to be careful because there were times in reacting against what they feared was a dead orthodoxy, people that just wanted to sit around and talk about doctrine and not do anything.

They did sometimes overreact and they were young men and some of their statements are immature and we don't want to follow them where they were immature. One example is a famous one by John Wesley and it's probably the most startling.

Wesley was in an argument with a fella and they were talking about a particular doctrine and Wesley basically said this to paraphrase him, that right doctrine plays a very little part, if any part in the Christian life.

Now, John Wesley didn't really believe that. John Wesley, we have quite a lot of volumes of Wesley's works, depending on which edition you get, you know, 22 volumes, it does 15 volumes. Wesley believed in doctrine.

Wesley divided from his friends over doctrine. Wesley argued over doctrine. So that statement by John Wesley really isn't even accurate of Wesley, but it is true that if we're not careful, like the early evangelicals, we can sometimes have kind of a chip on our shoulder and say to people who are more careful about doctrine than we are, that you're more careful because you don't really care about living the Christian life because I don't think that getting precise about doctrine is really a part of the Christian life at all.

But there's a problem with that. First of all, it's not the biblical pattern. When we look at the writings, particularly the New Testament epistles, it's just such a clear guide. Take the book of Ephesians, chapters one, two, and three.

These are chapters on doctrine. Chapters four, five, and six, these are really chapters on practice. Now, I'm being a bit over simplistic, but right thinking leads to right living. When right thinking is brought within in the right way.

So you have Paul's two prayers, one at the end of chapter one. So chapter one, a lot of great doctrine and then a prayer. I'm praying that God will open your eyes and give you wisdom to really understand this, you know, experientially to grab hold of these truths.

And then chapter two and chapter three, more doctrine. End of chapter three, I want God to, by the Holy Spirit, strengthen you within so you can understand the measure of the love of God in these things and that God would do in the church far beyond what you think he can do.

So right doctrine brought within the life by the Holy Spirit in the right way, or known in the right way, leads to right living. Also, another thing I would say is what I said to a lady in Wales once when she, after a sermon, she said, oh, I just love Americans.

You know, so being an American, I stuck out a bit. And I said, oh, you do. You know, she said, yeah, my husband and I go to America all the time for vacation. And she said, we went to a big church. I won't tell you the preacher.

A nice guy, not a very doctrinally careful guy, but you know, not a heretic. So she said, I went to so-and-so's church and oh, I just love his preaching. It's just so, you know, it's just so friendly and it's kind of low key and easy.

And he doesn't really make a lot about doctrine. I think we make too much of doctrine over here in our churches. And I said, well, I can't agree with you there.

Here's why.

The doctrines that we're talking about here in the churches, if we're doing it in the right way, these are Christ's truths. They're truths that belong to the King and the King entrusted the church with the truth.

Therefore, we cannot neglect these truths without betraying the King, His honors attached to them. And for that reason, for love of the King, we want to love His truth. You know, not love of being right.

That produces a different attitude. Well, and also not love the truth just because it's truth.

Right, right.

I mean, we love the truth because of whom the truth is connected to rather than just, you know, I know really big words like epistemology. We do connect it, but also that prevents it from just being this cold, dead, scientific and sterile type of knowledge, you know?

So theology is a science. It is a study. It is a discipline, but that doesn't mean that it has to be, you know, this cold, dead thing that I think it has a reputation of being that it doesn't have to be.

Right, and we're gonna look in a minute at what these early evangelicals wanted. If they said, hey, book learning's not enough, well, what is enough? I mean, what do you want from me? And there's some pretty helpful guidelines.

But before we get to that, part of the divide that we see in the evangelicals, between the evangelical and the non-evangelical who both go to church, when they're talking about knowing something in the Christian religion, part of the divide goes much deeper than the question of my head and my heart or am I really living it out?

And that same divide was seen a century earlier between Puritan and non-Puritan in the Anglican church. And this is something that we often don't understand. And while I was doing my research for the dissertation, I came across a guy named J .F .H. New, N-E-W.

And I don't know anything about Mr. New except this. He wrote a book in 1964 called Anglican and Puritan. And it is a wonderfully insightful academic book that describes the completely different view that the Puritan and non-Puritan had regarding the impact of the fall of sin, of original sin, of the sin nature, how that impacts man now, particularly the intellect.

And so, because when we talk about a Puritan and a non-Puritan in the Anglican church in the 17th century, and we talk about George Whitefield and the people that didn't like George Whitefield's views in the 18th century, we're not talking about like, you know, a godly man and atheist necessarily.

We're not talking about scripturalist versus liberals who don't even own a Bible. We're talking about men who, groups of people who both said that scripture was the guide and they both used a type of logic.

But they had a different view of man. They're a different anthropology. And here's basically what it boils down to. Like John Calvin and the reformers, the Puritans, and then later the evangelicals, believed that the impact of sin through Adam, the polluted sin nature that we all inherit impacts not just the emotions and the will, but the intellect.

And therefore, even the mind is not a friend that helps us figure God out and pursue God and understand God, if unaided by God. So left to ourselves, the brain, the intellect, which has been influenced by sin, like all the other faculties of the soul, is deceitful and selfish and proud and unbelieving, and it will not help you reach God.

And that is the depth of depravity is what we're talking about here.

All of us is affected. The Anglican tended to have, the non-Puritan and the non-evangelical, tended to have a bit more of a optimistic view of the intellect. Okay, the heart is bad. Oh, you can't trust the heart.

And the will, well, we don't always make the right decisions, but the intellect, no, no, the intellect is still a tool that we can use to come to the truth. So the scripture plus my intellect, in a sense, in practice, even without the aid of the Holy Spirit, I can read these things, I can understand these words on a page, and I can kind of make myself a better me.

And so they were very optimistic about how far reason, rationalism, and the intellect can take you. Now, the ultimate implication was this. The Puritan became a scriptural totalitarianist. That is, the Bible is our guide.

And what we learn in the Bible, what we infer from the Bible, these are the things that guide us. And we don't trust our intellect when it contradicts this book. The non-Puritan, the non-evangelical, tended to say, you're being a bit extreme there.

You have this tunnel vision. It's just, you only believe in one book? That's not really what the Puritans were saying. But they would say, of course the Bible is our guide. Of course it's our authority.

But reason has been given to us by God. And our reason comes to scripture and understands it and applies it in a reasonable way. When Puritans and non-Puritans, when the evangelicals and non-evangelicals a century later argue with each other, they're arguing over biblical passages.

So what you really find is, in practice, the Puritan is saying, we have to hold ourselves, the evangelicals saying, we have to hold ourselves strictly to scripture. And those that oppose them are saying, look, let's be reasonable.

And so rationalism tended to be raised above scripture in some of those that oppose Puritanism and oppose the evangelicals. And that's a bit of a stereotype, but that's a pretty accurate picture of how they approach these things.

When we talk about, do we really know these things? Let me give you one example of what a historian has called the Puritan scriptural totalitarianism. It's a quote by Richard Baxter. Baxter, really a leading Puritan.

He writes this, he that will walk uprightly must have a certain, just, infallible rule and must hold to that and try everything or test everything by that. And this is only the word of God. Neither the learned, nor the godly, nor the good must be our rule, our guide.

So a highly educated man is not my guide. A really good man, a really good Christian is not my guide. A really godly man is not my guide. Scripture is my guide.

You know, and the thing that amazes me is we still see this today. We still see people saying, you know, I'm smart. I can look at this and I can figure the scripture out. Or, you know what? I was listening to this podcast by a guy who's just really good, really smart.

I'm gonna follow that guy. And the thing is, we're not saying don't quote smart men and women. We're not even saying don't read and don't listen to them do. But it does come down to what is the final and ultimate authority.

Would you submit everything that you hear, even the things that, John, that you and I say on the podcast, would you bring that to scripture and say, okay, what I hear I think is good and it does make sense to my mind.

But we have to bring that to the scripture because ultimately that is the final authority.

The Spirit and the Word in Puritan Knowledge

Yeah, certainly. When the Puritans and later the Calvinistic Methodists or the Evangelicals, when they talked about what they were looking for in knowledge, they often spoke of the work of the spirit in conjunction with the word.

And let me give you two examples from the Puritans. John Owen writes that the spirit must impart to the scripture virtue, power, efficacy, majesty, and authority. Now, that ought to be a little bit shocking to us.

Apart from the work of the spirit, the Bible to you has no virtue, power, efficacy, majesty, or authority. Richard Sibbes, another Puritan, wrote this. The word of God is nothing without the spirit. It is animated and quickened by the spirit.

Now, when the Puritans, who were so biblically-minded, say those kinds of things about their Bibles, they are not conveying a lack of confidence in the scriptures themselves. They are conveying a lack of confidence in the Christian or in mankind.

We cannot come unaided to the scriptures and gain what they have to offer us. It takes the work of the spirit and the word. And that's not just for conversion, but a seasoned Christian needs the work of the spirit every day to help us understand the scriptures, just like a person who's crying out to God for the first time and opening the Bible and saying, I don't even know who this Jesus is.

Right, our need never lessens on this side of faith, right? I mean, it never diminishes. It never lessens in that we are just as needy today when we open the scriptures as we were as a lost sinner opening the scripture for the very first time.

Let me give you an example of an evangelical view, just kind of a summary of what was needed for knowledge. John Newton received a letter from John Wesley. Wesley lived a long time, outlived Whitefield by a good bit.

And Newton, who'd been influenced by Whitefield, was now a pastor. And Wesley didn't like the fact that Newton was so reformed in his thinking. So Wesley, as was kind of a character trait, was very bold to tell everybody what he thought about their errors.

So he writes Newton and tells him basically, look, I've been reading some of your sermons and you just got all this stuff from Calvin. You're just parroting Calvin. And so Newton wrote him back. And Newton really is just the king of letter writers for that century, mild, calm, but clear and doctrinally helpful.

And Newton wrote back and basically told Wesley that he had not mimicked Calvin's writings. He admitted that he had benefited from the Puritan doctrines, Puritan books, and from the writings of Jonathan Edwards.

And they were Calvinist, yes. But he defended his own theological stance by stating that it was, and this is what he wrote, it is consonant to scripture, reason when enlightened by the spirit and experience.

So let's take those three things,.

Scripture, illuminated reason, and experience. And those were the three things that the evangelicals felt, look, we need all three of those. Now, another man in the same century named Theophilus Evans was a very anti-evangelical man and considered men like Newton to be fanatics.

He said, no, no, no, all we need is scripture, the law of nature, and right reason. But now, if you're disagreeing over a text and you both say scripture is important, then you come down to the next two and you have the evangelical saying, the mind of man illuminated by the work of the spirit, a regenerated, a newborn man with the work of God within, and experience of these things, taking those truths and living on them.

And you have the non-evangelical saying, no, no, no, all we need is the law of nature, kind of a natural, like a kind of philosophy, you know, a worldly wisdom that everyone has.

I was gonna say, I mean, it almost sounds like, you know, we have today college and even seminary professors who are atheists, but they're teaching New Testament.

Yeah, and Theophilus Evans would definitely consider himself a Christian. He would just say, all we need is scripture and then the law of nature, like, you know, common sense and right reason. And so as long as we have these three things, we can figure it out.

And so the evangelical was distinguished by the emphasis on the need of the word and the spirit to be working together.

Scripture, Reason, and Experience in Evangelical Knowledge

There are many ideas about God in our culture today. Many are not grounded in scripture and some are actually the opposite of what scripture teaches and the best way to identify these ideas is to go back to the Bible and allow God to speak for himself.

Learn how God describes his character, his work in salvation, his definition of repentance and much more through the 12-week Multimedia Bible Study, Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically. The heart of this study is its daily devotional workbook participants study at home in preparation for the small group session.

Each session is led by a video containing three segments. First, a biographical sketch of an individual from Christian history who was gripped by the reality of God you were studying that week. Second is a sermon from Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church, New Albany.

Lastly, are interviews from contemporary Christian pastors and authors who help apply the lessons from the week. To learn more or to see what others are saying about Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically, visit mediagrazie .org or click the link in the description of this episode.

So John, we've talked about epistemology, we've talked about the really two different types of knowledge. How can we be sure that we do have the right kind of knowledge and we're pursuing the right kind of knowledge?

If you take John Newton's three things there, I find them really beneficial. It's just a good, you know, it's a good path marker to make sure I'm still on the right path, that I haven't used a library to substitute for what the scripture considers the right way of knowing God and knowing the truths of God.

And, you know, so you have those three things, you have scripture, and we want to make sure we're in the scripture. But we also have illuminated reason, and that is when I open my Bible every morning, I ought to be conscious of the fact that I am not, you know, sufficient for this task, that I tremble before the Word of God because without the work of God helping me, I will not rightly understand or rightly apply these truths.

So I'm asking God to stoop down like a father to a child and to teach me again. Or I'm asking the Spirit to do what Christ said He would do, to take the things of Christ and give them to us. But then the third thing, experience.

These are wonderful truths, but I don't want them to remain up in the kind of the atmosphere of concepts only, where they become hollow words for us and they no longer carry any weight. What I really want is I want to take those truths, and by the guidance of the Spirit, I want to find ways that they fit into my life so that I can live them out.

And in that living them out, I am experiencing the things that I'm reading. And so it's not just that Paul said these things are true, I've read Paul, I studied Paul, I understand Paul, the Holy Spirit has helped me to take those things and find ways to apply it here.

And I am living on the same path that Paul lived on. I'm walking that Christian common path. So all three of those together.