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 was 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. In this week, we're going to focus on some of the doctrines that kind of fueled the revival, right?

Yeah, we're going to. Well, actually, we're going to have to talk about something before we get to that. We're going to 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 got to know it in your heart. And so head knowledge versus heart knowledge.

That's a pretty common dichotomy, a contrast. You know, 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.

Right. 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, you know, there's another side. And, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, church member.

And everybody was basically a church member because 90, what, 94, 96 percent 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. 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 want to 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 want to imitate the way they lived, that zeal, that sacrificial, you know, 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 Barrage, that we will mention again and again.

Barrage, 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. Barrage 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's 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. Then 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.

You know, 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 fellow 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, you know, 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 with, you know, 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 1, 2, and 3.

These are chapters on doctrine. Chapters 4, 5, and 6, 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 1. So chapter 1, 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 2 and chapter 3, more doctrine. End of chapter 3, 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. Not love the truth just because it's truth. 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.

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 going to 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 are 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. Right, right. All of us is affected.

The Anglican tended to have, the non -Puritan and the non -Evangelical, tended to have a bit more of an 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're being, 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

Evangelical is 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 going to 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. 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.

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 is 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 is crying out to God for the first time and opening the

Bible and saying, I do not even know who this Jesus is. Our need never lessens on this side of faith.

It never diminishes. It never lessens. And that we are just as needy today when we open the scriptures as we were, you know, 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 had been influenced by Whitefield, was now a pastor.

And Wesley did not 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 have been reading some of your sermons and you just got all this stuff from Calvin.

You are 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 are disagreeing over a text and you both say Scripture is important, then you come down to the next two and you have the evangelicals 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 -evangelicals saying, no, no, no, all we need is the law of nature, kind of a philosophy, a worldly wisdom that everyone has.

I was going to 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. 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. 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,

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Mediagratia .org or click the link in the description of this episode. So John, we've talked about epistemology.

We've talked about really two different types of knowledge. How can we be sure that we do have the right kind of knowledge, that 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 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. 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 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 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.