Puritans and Revival I: Defining Puritans | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to the Beholder God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Grazie and joined with John Snyder, host of the Beholder God study and pastor of Christ Church New Albany. John, we spent the last couple of weeks talking about hermeneutics and this week we're beginning a new series where we're focused on, okay, now the title is a little long so I wanna make sure that I get it right.

The Puritan Influence on the Early Leaders of the 18th Century Evangelical Revival in England and Wales.

Why Puritans and Revival Matter

Yeah, so we're gonna shorten that for our purposes. Puritans, the Puritans and Revival.

So throughout this series, what we're gonna have to do, we've got some work to do before we really get into it. One of the things that we have to do is define what a Puritan is. We've talked about it before but we're gonna go a little deeper into it.

So John, first, before we even get into that though, why are we talking about Puritans and why are we talking about the Revival?

Well, both of those movements have significantly impacted our country as well as England, Scotland, Wales and others. But, and they've impacted us in really beneficial ways which I think if we can get to the heart of the movement, so we're not just interested in what happened in the year 1662 or what did George Whitefield do when he preached, what were his methods?

But if we get kind of beneath that initial layer to talk about the heart of Puritanism and the heart of the Evangelical Revival or the Great Awakening, which is what we call it in our country, I think then that there are so many significant lessons for us.

And one of the lessons that we're gonna be looking at is the fact that Puritanism is not just a group that, you know, it's not a movement that was merely interested in being really, really, really precise.

And then you get this kind of impression that that's a bit of a dry, academic, armchair kind of, you know, theologian kind of thing. But actually the Puritans were very activistic. They wanted to bring the doctrines that they were learning from the Reformation and apply it in their day in a way that would revolutionize or revitalize or reform the British Church.

And so that has a lot to say to us today. We're gonna be seeing as we look at this throughout the weeks and months that at the heart of the Puritan doctrines, these doctrines became the fuel for the preaching of the Great Awakening and the Evangelical Revival, which is a little surprising to us because we tend to think that if I were invited to a conference on revival, even by reformed guys, you know, pretty careful guys, you would expect to hear a lot of sermons on the nature of revival.

But if you look back at the early leaders of the Evangelical Revival, of the Great Awakening, very few sermons were preached on the nature of revival. The sermons were primarily on the great doctrines of redemption.

And it was a focusing on the person and work of Christ that God used in that century to really bring about an extraordinary season of grace. So preaching on revival isn't necessarily what the revivalists have always done.

So we're gonna look at those doctrines from the 1700s and again into the 1800s. But another reason we're doing it is because this is a topic that's pretty close to my heart. And it's the topic that I did my research on for the PhD.

And I'm also teaching a class on it through Grace Bible Theological Seminary. So I don't know if the guys are enjoying it as much as I am, but I'm enjoying it. You know, I even bring props, show and tell.

You know, so I think that I, they must think I feel like I'm teaching fifth graders, but you know, I like props, so it's been going okay.

We did a bonus episode a couple of weeks ago where you had some woodworking tools laid out.

Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to grow up, but not yet.

Banner of Truth and the Dangers of Hagiography

So John, as we're talking about the Puritans, the 18th century revivals, all of these different things, a lot of where we get a lot of our information about these things is from an organization, a publisher called the Banner of Truth Trust.

And we've mentioned them several times on the podcast before, we've linked to them. But we also, we really like the Banner of Truth. We trust what they're doing and we appreciate the ministry that they have.

So I wanted to just, at the very beginning of this, take a few minutes and just say they have a conference coming up. Right now is early registration, so you can get a little bit of a discount if you register now.

It's a minister's conference, so it is for pastors and youth pastors, associate pastors. But if you're thinking of giving your pastor a gift, let me encourage you personally to send them to the Banner of Truth Minister's Conference.

Last year, I had the opportunity to go to many, many conferences across the country. Hands down, this was my favorite. As far as, you know, the others were great, don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed them.

But there's something about the Banner of Truth Conference, the fellowship, all of the men are together, you eat together, you spend all day together, and it is, it's really, really just a great conference.

So that being said, when we talk so much about Puritans, when we talk so much about the era of the evangelical revival, Great Awakening, John, there's some dangers we need to be aware of. What are some of those dangers?

One of the dangers is what we call hagiography, holy writing. So it's, so think of the field of biography. So we're gonna be talking about some key figures. And especially when you get into the Great Awakening and the evangelical revival, it's easy to think of like Jonathan Edwards over here, or in England, you think of George Whitefield.

And it's easy to kind of put these guys in a unique category of super saints. And you forget that they were men like us, and God used men like us in that day for his honor. If you put them in a unique category, then the next thing that you're left with is the lie that, well, you're not like them.

God can't use people like us. He only uses these super people. And that comes from biography where people that admire them only emphasize the positive aspects of their walk with the Lord, and perhaps de-emphasize the struggles they had.

So it's easy. In the 18th century itself, these men, when they talk about what God was doing, they always connected what God was doing in their century with what God had done in a previous century. So Whitefield and those men loved to point to the fact that the doctrines they were preaching were the same doctrines the Puritans were preaching.

And those were the same doctrines that the Reformers were preaching, and we got that from the scripture. But a century later, those people that look back to the previous century and with great admiration spoke of the revival as if it just sprung out of nowhere.

It was just God, like creation. From nothing, God created a revival. And the truth is that while things were pretty dark at times leading up to the Great Awakening and the evangelical revivals, there was a greater movement that they're a part of.

There was a stream, an underground current of spirituality. There were, you know, God was at work. And seeing where God was at work leading up to this is really a very encouraging thing for us because we might feel like we live in a dark day.

Well, perhaps, but God is at work and things that God does today may be leading to, you know, a more extraordinary day. So when we study these things, it's always good to connect them. And even the labels we've used for the work here and the work in Britain, in the 18th century, the revival that took here is called the Great Awakening, first Great Awakening.

And in Britain, it's called the Evangelical Revival. But really they are different elements of one overall movement that historically we call evangelicalism. You know, so we talk about people being evangelicals and we might think of that denominationally right now.

That's not the way we mean it historically. We mean that there were a group of people that shared similar experiences and held to similar core doctrines, very much like the Puritans, who, as this movement spread throughout the 18th century, they may have been in different countries and part of different localized movements, but really, as we look back over 200 years, we can see that really there was a greater work that the Lord was doing that connected all of them.

Puritan Origins: Elizabeth I, the Great Ejection, and the Act of Toleration

We don't have particular dates of particular years that we can say, yes, this is definitely when Puritanism began. This is definitely when Puritanism ended. But we do have some general dates. Now, for a beginning, we kind of look to 1558.

And for an ending, we might look at 1662. We might look at 1689. What are those dates and how are they helpful to us?

1558 is when Queen Elizabeth I comes to power. And that means Mary, Bloody Mary, who really cracked down on Protestantism and attempted to turn the nation back to Catholicism after Henry VIII, in order to have the wife that he wanted, to have the heir that he wanted, throws off the Roman church and decides that he's the head of a new English church.

So Mary brings a lot of persecution on the Protestants. English, Scottish, Welsh reformers often flee, go to the continent, are greatly influenced by men like Bucer or Calvin. Then they hear that Mary is now no longer queen, Elizabeth is queen, and she promises a nation that is friendly to Protestantism.

So they come back full of hopes, a little bit disappointed once they arrive because they realize there's a thing in place now called the Elizabethan Compromise, where Elizabeth doesn't want any more strife in the nation.

She's very pragmatic. We don't want any more bloody civil wars. We're going to have a church that's going to have a little bit of what everybody wants. So in some ways, she thinks everybody will be pleased.

In other ways, nobody's pleased. So you have a church that remains on the outside. It keeps some of kind of the Roman Catholic exterior. At the heart, it's main documents, it's articles of faith. At the heart, it's Protestant.

So the Puritan arrives, and really you should think of a Puritan as a reformer, second-generation reformer, who is now in a situation that's unique. I'm not being persecuted by the state, but nor am I being allowed to complete the Reformation.

So as a pastor of a church, I can preach, I can write books in hopes of influencing the church to move toward a more biblical and a completely reformed stance. But the powers that be are inhibiting that.

So that's why we call them Puritans. They're inside a church that they want to purify. They're not really given freedom to reform, and they're not really put in prison and their heads aren't being cut off.

So it's 1558 Elizabeth. 1662, well, years later, we find that the Puritans fall out of favor. Government changes a lot that's going on at the end of the Civil War and things. And so the Puritans are now out, kicked out by a thing called the Act of Uniformity.

Now, when you say Civil War, it's not the American Civil War.

No, we're talking about the British.

Yeah, Cromwell and the Brits, right? So the English Civil War. Now, we have the restoration of the monarchy. Charles II comes back. It comes, his dad is dead. He had his head chopped off. Charles II is now put in power, and he promises to be friendly to everybody, to be tolerant, but he certainly is not.

That was a lie.

When he comes to power, quickly there are laws set in place that will eject Puritans from their pulpits, the Act of Uniformity. The Act of Uniformity required those people who were in positions of spiritual leadership to agree to kind of a uniform view of the English church.

So basically you agree to toe the company line, right? Well, they

Before you lose your church.

Yeah, and it was drafted in a way that they knew that any conscientious Puritan would say, I can't say yes to that. So it was a way of booting out about 2 ,000 Puritan pastors. So that's called the Great Ejection.

What's up with 1689? 1689 is the year of the Act of Toleration. Now there were some other acts close to this, but this is the year that we kind of focus on. So 1689, there's the bloodless revolution. William of Orange is now king, and he is much more lenient with religious toleration.

So he says to those Puritans who have been kicked out of their churches and have suffered some persecution from 1662 to 1689, he says to them, you may now have legal churches again, not within the Church of England, but a dissenting or a nonconforming, where we get the title, a dissenter or a nonconformist.

These are really just the grandchildren or the children of the Puritans. So Baptist, Congregationalist, Presbyterians, you can now form your own individual churches, and you have legal protection. But they were kind of B-class citizens.

There were still many things that if you weren't Church of England, you weren't allowed to do certain things within the nation, but they were given religious freedom. So no longer are these people Puritans.

They're not trying to purify the Church of England. Now they are dissenters. They have dissented from or nonconformists. They refuse to conform to the Church of England. So now they're separatists. They have their own churches, and they still carry on those same doctrines at the heart of their religion, but they're outside the church.

What a Puritan Is: William Perkins, Scripture, Conversion, and Voluntary Faith

All right, so John, we've talked about dissenters, separatists, nonconformists, 1558, 1662. Okay, John, give me a simple definition that I can grab hold of. Whenever you say Puritan, what can I have in my head to say, okay, this is a Puritan?

It's kind of hard.

Yeah, well, I mean, you can define a Puritanism by what they stood against, and that's kind of what people think, like, well, Puritans were just against everything. The Puritan was afraid that somebody was having fun somewhere.

Or you can define them by kind of the external ecclesiological, unique things that they argued for. So the Puritans would not generally kneel at the taking of the Lord's Supper because they said, we're not venerating the body and blood of Jesus.

That's not the actual body and blood of Jesus, and when we kneel, it looks too much like the Catholic and the Catholic doctrine. So you can think of those kinds of things, or you can define Puritanism by what it is at its heart.

Now, one funny, one of my favorite bad definitions of a Puritan comes from King James I. All right, the King James Bible. King James says this. He was king in Scotland. You remember James VI. He becomes king of all Britain, James I.

And this is what he says. Escaping Scottish Puritans, moving down to London, he's disappointed to find that he still has to deal with Puritans in England. And he says, a Puritan is a Protestant strayed out of his wits.

All right, so like he's a Protestant who's gone nuts. Well, that's not such a good one. Here's what William Perkins, really the father of Puritanism in England, here's what William Perkins said. A Puritan is one that endeavors to get and keep the purity of heart in a good conscience, and these people are branded with vile terms like Puritans or Precisions.

So the name that they were given, the Puritan name is actually an insult in the same way that Methodists, you know, you're so methodical. So Puritans, you think you're so pure. You're trying.

Yeah, these were slurs that were made by their opponents, but they just stuck. So the early days of Puritanism, no Puritan would have said, we're the pure people. But you know, after 20 or 30 years of being mocked as Puritan, they just, the label stuck.

And so, you know, they quit fighting it. If you want to define Puritanism in a more helpful way, though, you need to look at, you know, what we have is a series of key focal points that all these people from different so-called, you know, we would think of them as different denominations, even though they didn't exist so much yet.

So people with Presbyterian leanings, people with Baptistic leanings, you know, Congregationalist, or Church of England, Anglican leanings, they looked around at the state church and they realized, you know, I don't have a lot in common with the rest of the ministers in this state church, but I do have a lot in common with this small group.

We have these fundamental things, these great key truths. We hold these in common. And we also have some similar experiences, the new birth, for example. And we have these in common. And holding these truths and having these experiences in common, we are much more like each other, even though I may be a Baptist and this guy's a Presbyterian and this guy's a Congregationalist.

We have a lot more in common with each other than we do with the rest of the Church of England. So these isolated them, distinguished them. And that's what we want to talk about today.

Yeah, because these are the core values where they could just, you know, really kind of fellowship around and unite around. So what was the first of those?

The first we could say is that like the Reformers, the Puritans strictly adhere to the authority and the sufficiency of Scripture. Now, let's not like set up a straw man and attack an enemy. We are not saying that other Anglican men didn't believe the Bible, right?

But there was really in a sense, there was a unique sense in which the Puritans pursued this. They were particularly strict about this. And their opponents felt that they were being literalistic, kind of childish, a literalistic biblicism.

You know, okay, if the Bible doesn't say it, I'm not gonna do it. In a way that was, you know, they felt was, you know, that lacked academic or, okay, we can cut that off, let me see. So the enemies of the Puritans felt that they were being literalistic, too strict.

Really, the difference is not that, you know, the non-Puritan wasn't going to say, well, the Bible's not the Word of God. He would have said the Bible's the Word of God. But here's the difference. Following Calvin's emphasis on the impact of the fall of man, what we call depravity, that every part of us is in some measure influenced by sin's ruin, that that affected the intellect as well as the emotions, the desires, the heart.

The non-Puritan Anglican tended to think that the intellect was unaffected, that God, we had an intellect, and we could approach the scriptures, and we could approach the big picture of the Christian life.

And through common sense, we could make good decisions. You know, we don't have to go to the Bible for every question in Christianity. And so God has given us a mind, and we're to use it. And the Puritan would say, yes, but we don't trust the intellect because it too is influenced by our sin.

So we hold ourselves strictly accountable to the principles of scripture. So that kind of drew, that ended up becoming a dividing line between Puritan and non-Puritan. To what degree did they feel they were bound to the scripture?

So, John, I think one of the things that we need to say is that we're gonna do in kind of defining Puritans is say, here's the non-Puritan view, and here's a Puritan view. So when we're talking about the sufficiency of scripture, the depravity of man, the Puritans had a different view on that than other people.

Well, in the same way, the centrality of conversion is different than how other people viewed conversion because it was taught, particularly by the Anglicans, once you're baptized as a baby, you're done, you're good.

But the Puritans said, no, there's a earth-shattering conversion, the work of God in the soul of man, that moved forward, that did the work.

Yeah, I think we could say that the Anglican, I don't think any good Anglican would say once you're baptized, you're good as in that's it, but you're in. And now there needs to be maturation, there needs to be growth under the care of the church, and later, confirmation and taking.

So you have the twin sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper. But the Puritan, while, I mean, many of the Puritans, they were Anglican. So, but the view of the efficacy of these things, okay, so they would baptize their children, but did they believe that that necessarily made them regenerate?

And well, no. And later in the 18th century, you find George Whitefield and John Wesley, both Anglicans who baptized children. They agreed with baptizing children, but they did not agree with the implication that some of the language of the Anglican liturgy would have them say, like, thanking God for the regenerating work in this child.

Well, Whitefield didn't feel that he could say that, that the water didn't regenerate the child.

Well, he even had a sermon who was the almost Christian.

Yeah.

And who was he talking about? He was talking about people who were baptized in faith.

Yeah, yeah, they did evangelism. Their primary field for evangelism was the church member, which totally infuriated the Anglican church. You know, why don't you go talk to these, these like heathen in other countries?

Why are you trying to convert good Englishmen who've already been brought into the kingdom? But for the Puritan, the difference, we could think of it as an epicenter. So for the Puritans, it was, conversion was like an earthquake.

You know, it shattered everything. It remade everything. It reshaped everything. And conversion, not baptism, conversion, not the Eucharist and confirmation, becomes the great starting place of the Christian life.

And it's also what historians call, or theologians call, voluntarism. So that is that you voluntarily, you volitionally embrace Christ, and that's how you become a part of Christ.

So more to that point, the Puritan Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye wrote this. It hath been one of the glories of the Protestant religion that it revived the doctrine of saving conversion and of the new creature brought forth thereby.

But in a more eminent manner, God hath cast the honor hereof upon the ministers and preachers of this nation who are renowned abroad for their more accurate search into and discoveries hereof. What does that mean?

What are the, what is, what is Goodwin and Nye saying there?

I think that what we find is that the Puritans emphasizing the experiential application of the reformed doctrine. So the reformers deal a lot with these mountain-sized external objective facts. You know, who is Christ?

What is the work of the atonement? You know, and what is justification? But when it comes to the Puritans, these things have already been laid out for them by the reformers. So it's like taking those truths and then trying to apply it in the local church setting where a lot of people have been told they're Christians, which the Puritan minister would have doubted that they were Christians.

So they're trying to apply that in a very experiential way. You know, in other words, do you really have Christ? I mean, have you really exercised faith? And so a lot of emphasis on the responsiveness of man.

And so in a sense, we could say that the Puritans are the first great experts on the experience of conversion. Another thing we can say about Puritanism is that it is a movement that focused on true piety.

So in a sense, which means holiness, in a sense, the Puritan movement is a pietistic movement, but there are other movements that are pietistic. And there's even, we even use the term Pietism with a capital P, not to refer just to the quality of a focus on holiness, but historical movements that have focused on holiness in a particular way.

Now, what distinguishes the Puritan from what we would consider historically the Pietist or Pietism is that the Puritans experiences were very strictly bound to the scripture. Whereas if you read some of the pietistic writers from the 17th and 18th century, you find them describing a lot of wonderful experiences that when you read it, you're not so sure that really came from scripture or that that came from God.

I mean, maybe that it got worked up within the individual, you know, and kind of imagination a bit run wild. And so, you know, kind of what in our day, maybe kind of what smacks of kind of a charismatic approach.

And you think, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you say you're having these great experiences, but I don't see this in scripture. So is it valid? And the Puritans were very careful to make sure that what they're talking about when they talk about Pietism, the focus on the interior aspects of the Christian life, the focus on holiness, and the experiences that are a part of these, the Puritans were careful to make sure that scripture was the origin of that experience.

So I'm studying these passages, and yes, there are wonderful experiences in the Christian life, but they're coming from what I'm studying in the scripture. And not only do they flow out of my study and application of the scripture, but then they are tested by the scripture to make sure that in that experiential aspect that I am holding them accountable to the Bible, and I'm not kind of getting off on some side path where I think it's Christian, but it really doesn't have anything to do with the Lord, it's just me.

Precise Morality and Experiential Calvinism

So another core value that the Puritans kind of circled around was precise morality. Now, how is that different than piety?

Yeah, well, a piety kind of is an approach to holiness and the interiority of the Christian life that I would say experience is at the heart, and self-centeredness in a sense, you become very focused on you, introspection.

But the Puritan morality is external, that this is the will of God, and I need to bring myself in line with that. But there are these objective things that I'm held accountable to, rather than focusing on like, in our modern language, we'd say like how I'm doing today becomes the measure of my Christianity, which is very easy, especially when you are concerned about holiness, it's very easy to become introspective and to forget that the fuel for that has to be the objective fact, and the path is already laid in the objective word of God, and I'm not free to kind of detach myself from that and become introspective and kind of set my own course.

So a precise morality is that they wanted to make sure that all of Scripture found room for application in all of life. And so nothing is kind of, nothing is sectioned off, nothing's, you know, outside of the Scripture.

And so their opponents looked at that and thought, you know, you're overly strict.

Right, so it goes right back to, you know, the opponents would say that they were reading Scripture too literalistic, or that, you know, so it really does come down to a view of Scripture, is that a fair way of saying it?

Yeah, yeah, a view of Scripture and a view of how God works in us so that we can be responsive to Scripture.

Sure.

Well, the last core value really in Puritanism is that when all these things come together, what you end up having is an experiential Calvinism. All right, I know that some people don't like the word Calvinism.

I mean, it's really not a great word. You know, you could call it experiential reform theology. You could just call it experiential biblical theology. But what you have in Puritanism is they held intention.

They held things that try to kind of pull apart. Really careful doctrine, really strong experiences, you know, head, heart. They held those together. They kept those bound together in their Christian life.

And that really is at the heart of what makes the Puritan movement so valuable to us. Good truths, but applied aggressively, you know, so you're not erring on the side of kind of the armchair theologian who just loves to think great thoughts, and you're not getting over here onto the activist side who a person that says doctrine isn't important.

All that matters is how you live. Well, both of those would be erroneous. The scripture holds them in balance, and the Puritans did a good job of doing that as well.

A Modern Example of Puritan Conviction

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.

We spoke to one family who'd come out to see the film. First, the father, Scott, and then two teenagers, Claire and John.

I was glad they got exposed to that, but I needed it more probably than as much as they did because a lot of it I didn't know. So hearing the history and the devotion and the work of God and God's done in a Puritan's life is convicting and inspiring, and we'll encourage each other to follow their example, not to be Puritans, but to be true Christians.

For me, I just think the whole thing was very convicting, and I got a sweet taste of just what it's like to be spiritually minded again because it's so easy to just kind of fall into, I don't know, I'm just getting caught up in things of the world.

And so I just think like to be encouraged in their devotion and their just seriousness was just convicting in my life, and just I know it's gonna motivate me in my walk with the Lord to be more careful.

It's convicting to our community especially that we Puritans were what we could call what a Christian should be, and we faith in comparison so much to them and to think that what does that mean we are?

Are we good Christians if we aren't what they were and what we believe to be? They weren't good Christians, so it is convicting, of course.

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

Why Scripture, Not the Puritans, Is the Final Authority

John, this is the beginning of what's probably gonna be a fairly long series for us. So as we wrap up this first episode of it, why is it that we are, why are we spending so much time thinking about the Puritans and their impact on the 18th century revivals?

Well, I think the simplest answer would have to be this, and if it can't be this, then we're wasting our time, and that is it's really not the Puritans or the revivalists, it's really the scripture, that the things the Puritan emphasized were gotten from scripture, and the things that the 18th century men were held in the grip of were gotten from scripture, and we are benefiting from these brothers' centuries prior to us and how God worked in them, but the reason it's of any value to us is because it's the timeless word of God being brought down into average people's lives, and as we watch that unfold, there's a lot of guidance for us.

Absolutely, and what we hope and what we pray is over the next couple of weeks, as we have these discussions, as we talk about the impact of the scriptures that were on the Puritans and were on those who came after, and even on us today that God uses their view and their writing and their preaching of the scriptures in our lives, we pray that it's a blessing and an encouragement to you, so stick with us for the next couple of weeks as we continue this series, and we'll see you then.