Dr. Joel Beeke: What is puritanism and is it still relevant today? Dead Men Walking Podcast

Introduction to Puritanism and the Dead Men Walking Podcast

Exploring theology, doctrine, and all of the fascinating subjects in between. Broadcasting from an undisclosed location, Dead Men Walking starts now. Oh, hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Dead Men Walking podcast.

Ah, dead without Christ, but alive now. Raised to priestly places as Ephesians 2 says. Welcome back. For you guys who have been listening for any length of time, you know we've been on a little bit of a break.

We had many episodes of that we recorded down in Knoxville, Tennessee at the Fight Laugh Feast conference. You got to hear from Jared Longshore and Joel Webben and Doug Wilson and some other guys like that.

But we're back now in the swing of things just in time for Christmas. Thank you so much for coming along with us. As always, you can go to dmwpodcast .com to find out more about us and support the show.

Listen to all the back catalog episodes. Well, I'm excited. I'm excited for two reasons. If you're watching this on video right now, you're going to notice I'm holding my phone because normally I can do an intro from memory.

Okay. But this guest that we have on today, I'm going to have to read something because there's just too many, too many words here to fit inside of my brain. I heard him speak at the National G3 Conference, which was phenomenal.

Got to talk to him for a few minutes at the bookstore and then met him again at the Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary and was just absolutely impressed with his knowledge and obviously his theology and he's a man of God.

He's pastored for over 40 years and I believe he's the current pastor of Reform Congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, another Michigander. Absolutely love it. I'm going to slip in Go Blue on the 30th.

We'll see if he's a U of M fan. He might be one of those Sparty fans. I don't know. He's an author, president, professor of systematic theology at Puritan Reform Theological Seminary, editor of the Puritan Reform Journal and banner of Sovereign Grace Truth, editorial director of the Reformed Heritage Books.

I just ordered something off of there for the wife for Christmas. President of inheritance publishers and vice president of the Dutch Reformed Translation Society. Yes,.

It's Dr. Joel Beeky. Dr. Joel, how are you, sir? I am very well, Greg. Good to be with you. Was most of that accurate? That was a mouthful. That was pretty accurate.

Well, I'll tell you, before we get into it, could you just give us a couple minutes? We kind of covered the professional part of it. Give us a little personal bio of yourself, if you will. Married, kids, grandkids?

Sure. Yeah. I was converted when I was 14, came to full liberty in Christ when I was 15, called to the ministry when I was 16, went to Ontario to a seminary when I was 21, and was ordained in Sioux Center, Iowa at 25, and then went to get my PhD at Westminster Seminary as I pastored a church in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey.

Then six years later, I came to Grand Rapids. I've been a pastor in the Grand Rapids Heritage Reformed Congregation now for 36 years, last week, Friday. I'm married to the world's most wonderful woman.

Her name is Mary. She's great. She's as involved in my ministry as I am, actually. She's a writer. She's published a few books. Just a really caring, loving individual. We have three wonderful children, all, by the grace of God, walking with the Lord, and all married to God-fearing spouses.

They were all around our home until one week ago when our youngest daughter, who's married to a man named Isaac, who just graduated from a seminary, he accepted a call to picture Butte, Alberta, and I'm leaving, actually, on Wednesday to ordain him into the ministry on a Friday night this week.

So, that's a whole new chapter in our life, actually having children living away from home. Six years ago, we had zero grandchildren. Today, we have ten. Wow. From the three children. So, the oldest two have four each, and they're very, very young.

And the youngest is expecting the second child next month. What a blessing. Yeah, we're loaded with blessings.

Amen. So, did you say your oldest is going to be ordained in Alberta? So, they're moving to Canada?

No, my youngest daughter is married to Isaac. Isaac is my son-in-law, and he would be, I think he's 30, 32 years old. And so, we'll be going there this week, too. I'll be preaching the ordination sermon.

Oh, that's beautiful. Well, we'll keep them in our prayers, too, because there's a lot of things going on up in Canada right now with any type of pastor or church that kind of stands their ground on what they believe is the word of God.

So, we've seen some persecution up there. So, we'll definitely keep them in our prayers, as well. But so awesome that they're going up there. So, a proud father and grandfather. I love it. The Lord has blessed you.

A humble father and grandfather.

A humbly proud father and grandfather. No, no.

Oh, just humble. Okay. Just humble. It humbles me to know him. I have to mention, too.

Oh, grace. Absolutely. I have to mention, too. I'm sorry I didn't on the intro, but I did meet your wife when you were in Detroit, and what a gracious, gracious woman. So, yet another blessing. So, let's get into it here.

I don't want to keep you too long, and I know we have a lot to talk about, but I want to talk about Puritans. I'm seeing this revival throughout, especially throughout the Reformed community of, and it's always been there, an undercurrent of leaning, you know, standing on shoulders of giants and leaning on those who came before us, but I'm seeing this interest start to resurge in Puritanism, and I absolutely love it because the two times I briefly met you, you were just so passionate and excited about Puritanism and then theology and had such a knowledge of it, and I want to bring that to the audience, to the people listening today, because I think it's something that the majority, I would say, of evangelicals know nothing about.

You say Puritan, they get them confused with Quakers and pilgrims, and they go, there's people way back then that did something, I don't know, something to do with the faith. So, first and foremost, let's start simple.

By definition, what is a Puritan or Puritanism?

The Meaning of Puritanism and Its Historical Revival

Well, the word Puritan was first used as a derogatory term in the 1560s, and the Puritans, who we call now Puritans, hated it because they said, we're just poor sinners saved by grace. But after a while, the name stuck, and so they embraced the name, just similar with the name Christian.

At first, the Christians didn't like the word Christian, because Christian really means little Christ, and they said, we're not the Christ. But a Christian is one who resembles Christ, and so they finally embraced the name.

So, the Puritans were people from about 1560 to, say, around 1710, so a movement of 150 years, which is a long movement of revival, in which they stressed the reviving of the church, the reviving of the soul, and aimed for purity, purity in worship, purity in family life, purity in your personal walk with God.

So, they really stressed the need to be born again, and then the need to walk godly, and to live wholly and solely for God. So, basically, they were Reformers, much like the Reformers of the early 16th century, embraced all the Reformation doctrines, but then said, how do we apply all these doctrines to our daily lives?

How do we apply them to our marriage? They wrote 29 books on marriage. How do we apply them to our family? They wrote dozens of books on childbearing. How do we apply it to our work life? They wrote a half a dozen books on how you can live to the glory of God at work.

So, they wanted their entire life dedicated to God. They said, we must be white hot flames, burning for the glory of God. So, it's amazing to me that this movement lasted for 150 years with its intense spirituality.

Most revivals only last a couple years, but it was a very bright time in the church. Puritans were very happy people because they were following scripture guidelines for how to live as a head of a home, how to be a happy mother in the home, and how to be obedient children.

They were the ones who actually established as a reality what we take for granted now, which is the happy Christian home where every person is doing what the Bible calls them to do. They're also very scriptural people.

They love the scriptures. They love singing the Bible, memorizing the Bible, reading the Bible, preaching the Bible, loving the Bible, living the Bible, memorizing the Bible, meditating on the Bible. They were very, very word-centered.

And then they were very focused on the triune God, their Trinitarian and their theology, and never tire of explaining the electing grace of God, the redeeming love of Christ, and the applicatory work of the Holy Spirit.

So, they believed in what we call reformed experiential preaching and teaching, which means that you experience the doctrines of grace within you by the Word of God being applied to you by the Holy Spirit.

And therefore, there was a lot of emphasis on growth in grace, emphasis on reforming your own life, your family, your church, society. And so, they really, really were sold out to live for the glory of God.

Now, with saying that, so it sounds like what it was is they said, look it, we have these reformed theologies and doctrines, and we're very focused on the application of those in every aspect of daily life.

That sounds what you're kind of telling me. So, when we look at Puritans from that time period too, in that 150-year revival, is there, did they create any type of new doctrines or theology that maybe varied from orthodoxy or maybe even varied from mainstream reformation doctrines?

I know there's quite a few even within that. But was this something where they set up a new denomination or they had a new way of thought? Or was it, does history really look at it as a revival of, in the sense of getting back to just what the Bible teaches in the daily application of it?

Puritan Doctrine, Covenant Theology, and the Westminster Standards

Yeah, that's a wonderful question, Greg. And the answer needs to be nuanced a bit. So, give me three or four minutes here. Absolutely. First of all, if you're a church historian, you probably know that there's a phenomena called the second generation phenomena.

So, a movement springs up like the Reformation, and the second generation, the kids grow up kind of taking it all for granted. And then somebody comes along and says, wait a minute, we've got this rich heritage, and people are lukewarm, and we need to revive it.

Well, that's what happened here. So, to answer your question directly, no, there's nothing, not a single new doctrine that the Puritans developed that wasn't at least in seed form in the 16th century Reformation.

But what they did do was they enlarged in an applicatory way on a lot of these doctrines. So, for example, if you think of the Westminster Standards in the 1640s, that's the heyday, that's the apex point of Puritanism.

So, what did they do? Well, there's a lot more stress on sanctification, living a godly life. There's a lot more stress on assurance of faith. How do you get a full, robust assurance of faith? How do you live fully for God?

There's more emphasis on adoption, spiritual adoption. They have a whole chapter on it. That's unusual. It's the first chapter in Reformed confessional doctrines, doctrinal statements, where a whole chapter is devoted to adoption.

And they developed covenant theology. If there's one doctrine they really developed, you could almost say in a new way, it would be covenant theology. It was there in seed form already with Calvin and Sinus and Olivianus and so on.

But with these men, they brought it much more into the foreground. And they did everything covenantally. If you joined church, you had to swear to a covenant. Marriage they viewed as a covenant. And just covenant was in their thinking.

Agreements between God and man or between people and people.

Regulated how we are to live. So, really, even this interests me a lot as someone who absolutely loves and believes in covenant theology. So, you would say by taking that, putting it at the forefront, and then applying it in their daily lives, kind of grew that seed into how you actually apply covenant theology and kind of expand the explanation of it through that 150 years?

Covenant theology grew from an acorn into an oak tree, the Puritan thinking.

Puritan Preaching, Soul Care, and the Means of Grace

Beautiful. So, let me ask this then. If someone's listening right now, and we have a wide range of audience, we have Reformed folks, I have people that are evangelical and maybe non-denominational and even in Pentecostal.

So, we have a wide range of listening folks. If they're listening right now and they go, I don't know a whole lot about this, but what he's saying sounds familiar. Is the application of what the Puritans did in that 150-year revival, is that still applicable today?

Is there room for Puritan theology and application in life today in 2022 when we have anything from, you know, your regulative worship to smoke machines? I mean,.

What is that? Of course, of course, it's still relevant today. Doesn't mean that we're called to preach exactly like the Puritans today. I mean, they had points, sub points, sub sub points, sub sub points, sub sub sub points, but that's the way they did their Christian education also.

That's the Romistic method. You break a truth into two, then you break both of those truths into two, and you break all four of those truths into two. And so, they could follow in their mind, even elementary children could follow sub points and sub sub points and sub sub sub points.

So, we shouldn't preach like that today. People can't follow that. But in terms of substance, what they excelled in is just exactly where we're impoverished. Today, a preacher gets up and he speaks to his whole congregation as if they're all people of God, even the boys and girls and the young people, and doesn't distinguish between his hearers.

The Puritans distinguished several different groups in their preaching. Sometimes they'd speak just to God's people and to the unsaved. Other times they'd break that up into beginners in grace, assured believers in grace, or for the unconverted, the unconverted but impressed people who are searching for God, and then the indifferent people who just wanted the minister to say amen and couldn't care less about church.

They'd preach differently to all these different groups. They'd preach sometimes to backsliders. They'd preach sometimes to those who weren't using the means of grace and were therefore sluggish, the lukewarm.

And so, they were physicians of souls. And the people felt like they did about Jesus preaching. The common people heard him gladly. Unlike the fellow Anglicans who use flowery phrases and all kinds of Latin expressions, they were plain preachers.

They aimed for three things. They aimed to address your mind with clarity, to convict your conscience pointedly, and then to allure your heart compellingly, so that the whole man, head, heart, and hands, would all be put to work for the glory of God.

Now, when you say they preach differently, are you saying they would preach in different, would they divide them up into groups, or they would preach those subjects, all of those subjects to the same congregation?

Or were they separatists in the idea of, well, we have the assured over here, we have the indifferent over here, and we'll preach separately to them? Expound on that a little bit. All right. They would always preach out of the.

Text, of course. So, they were very, very concerned that you won't wander from the text at all. It's real biblical preaching. But let's say you have a text from Jeremiah 3 about, you know, return unto me, O house of Israel, for you have backslid from me, and I will be your God.

Well, 90 of that sermon is going to be directed specifically to backsliders, and they're going to preach about how does it go in someone's life when they start to backslide, and what does it lead into?

And so, these are all things that people experience, you see. They related to the reality that there are backsliding believers in their midst, and they would warn them lovingly, and then they would allure them to return, saith the Lord, for I am married unto you.

They talk about what it means experientially to be married to Christ, to have him as your husband, and what a wonderful thing that was. Oh, backsliders, return to him now. You know, that's the way they would preach, with passion.

Yeah. Yeah, I love it. But they wouldn't preach to backsliders in sermons where there's nothing about backsliding in them. Right. I'm just saying that over a course of time, everyone would feel like the Puritan preacher was standing that individual before Almighty God, and they would convict your conscience, and they would allure you to Christ.

They love to preach Jesus. One Puritan said, my two favorite things in life are knowing Jesus and preaching him.

Wow. I love it. Yeah. So, here's something that I find interesting, and I want your opinion on it. Over the last two years, I feel like I've heard the word Puritan and Puritanism more in just common conversations in the last years than I had in my previous 20 years of life.

And I don't know I'm surrounding myself with people that are like-minded. So, I had a hunch, and I went, there's a website where you can go, and you can see what people are Googling, and it'll give you the rank of that word over time.

Over the last two years, Puritan and Puritanism has jumped almost 1 ,000 in word searches on Google. So, I went, hmm, maybe my kind of hunch that I'm hearing it more isn't just in my little circle, but either nationally or globally.

Why do you think we're kind of seeing a resurgence, or we're seeing an interest in Puritanism overall in Western America.

And globally? Well, our society is almost self-destructing, and it's become so worldly, so ungodly, so almost like the book of Judges, right? Every man does that, which is right in his own eyes. The Puritans bring order to society.

They bring depth. They bring beauty. They bring fulfillment. They bring purpose of life. They bring one goal in life. You are to live for the glory of God. You're to worship exactly the way God commands you to worship.

And so, there's something attractive for discombobulated mankind that here is a really, really, really happy group of people in the Lord, not a joyless Puritan. Those were few and far between. They were godly, happy people obeying the Bible, convicted by the Bible, allured by the Bible, and that's becoming attractive to people in our society.

Now, is that the work of the Holy Spirit? Of course. So, this is not the only explanation that people are just attracted, but that is part of it. That these other people who are still—people who don't read the Puritans, of course—are still saying, oh, they were this, and they were this, and they were unhappy people.

It's just absolutely crazy, the caricatures about the Puritans. They weren't perfect. They had their blind spots. Of course, we have our blind spots, too. I mean, can you imagine 100 years from now, looking back on this generation, people would say, you mean there were Christians who hardly spoke out against murdering a million babies a year in America?

Yeah. Oh, they must have been such dead, joyless people, and so living contrary to God that they weren't burdened with this day.

And night. Yeah. So, anyway. No, absolutely. Well, your comment kind of leads me into my next question, which I find a fun one. What are some of—and I think you touched on a few of these—what are some of the common misconceptions of Puritans or Puritanism?

Because I think you touched on a few. I think one of the big ones is, like you said, joyless. Anytime I read a Puritan, I don't find anything but joy in God in that book, and it's absolutely beautiful.

So, what are some of those?

I don't know of a single Puritan—a reader of Puritans, I should say—who thinks the Puritans are joyless. I have a friend who studied the Puritans recently for a dissertation. He actually studied Matthew Henry, and the word happy and happiness and joy and joyful became so predominant that he actually had a teacher's aide look for that word in Puritan writers and then write out the quotations of what happiness is in the Puritan mind.

And the teacher's assistant wasn't working long on it when he handed him 1 ,200 quotations from all kinds of Puritans on happiness. I mean, it's crazy. It's the same thing. People say, well, the Puritans were prudes.

They didn't have much of a sex life. It's just the opposite. The Puritans said we're to enjoy the breasts of the wife of our youth, like the Bible says, and we're to enjoy having sex with our wives, and they did.

And they were one of the first groups of people, by the way, that very, very few had mistresses on the side. In fact, that was considered a terrible sin. So J .I. Packer says it's the Puritans who have bequeathed to us the happy Christian home where the husband is satisfied with his wife, and the wife's satisfied to live under the leadership and headship of her husband.

Beautiful. Yeah.

There's other things, of course. Some people say, oh, the Puritans had slaves. Well, okay, 1 of the Puritans had slaves, maybe not even 1%. Slavery is mainly an 18th century phenomenon. Puritan movement ended at the beginning of the 18th century.

Some say it's 1689. I like to think of it as 1714 when Matthew Henry died. But Jonathan Edwards was sort of like a post-Puritan. He had a couple of slaves. Okay. Is it wrong? Absolutely wrong. Did he treat them incredibly well, brought them into family worship, kept them together as husband and wife, brought them to church, gave them a home to live?

Yes. Is it wrong? Yes. Is it a blind spot? Yes. But don't forget, it's just 1 of the Puritans. So don't tar brush them all as if the Puritans were slave owners. Richard Baxter and other Puritans wrote strongly against owning any slaves.

Yeah. And there's an argument that I've heard made, and I think a pretty good one, that it was biblical Christianity that helped us move us out of, in this country at least, a global phenomenon of slavery.

Sometimes we like to look at it in our little 400 or 350-year window in this country when, in fact, the word slave comes from Slavic. There were so many Slavs being enslaved, and there were white people.

Globally, it was something that we needed to deal with. Not that we're going to get off on that subject. So if someone's listening right now, I need to learn more. I need to get my hands on some books.

We have an audience that loves to read. I'm always getting book suggestions. Both times, I met you in person. And actually, if you look over here, up here, I think those three on the top, that systematic theology looks a little familiar.

Working my way through that, which I'm thoroughly enjoying. I believe that was you and Smalley, I think. What are we suggesting to people if they want to get their hands on something that you've written, that someone else has written?

Where's a website they can go to learn more? Where's a place they can get some books as well? Yeah, I get this question a lot,.

Greg. So let me just answer it briefly this way. First of all, when it comes to secondary sources about learning about the Puritans, Michael Reeves and I, Michael Reeves from Wales, and I just co-authored a little book, came out about six months ago, called Following God Fully.

It's taken from Caleb. The subtitle is Introduction to the Puritans. This is a real simple introduction, 150 pages. And all these books, by the way, you can get from Reformation Heritage Books, heritagebooks .org, at the lowest discount prices because we're non-profit.

And that will give you a basic intro. Then you'd want to move from there, maybe to G .I. Packer, The Quest for Godliness. He's got a book of fascinating chapters on the Puritans. Or Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints, the Puritans as they really were.

By worldly, he doesn't mean that they were guilty of worldliness, but they lived in this world and they wanted to renovate this world. And then there's two books that I co-authored with other people.

I've got one right here. Actually, I got them both here. This one is called Meet the Puritans with a Guide to Modern Reprints. So what this book does is it gives you a summary of the lives, which you can read as a daily devotional, of all 150 Puritans that had been reprinted since the 1960s.

And it also gives you a little mini review, a summary, usually one or two paragraphs of every one of the 700 books that have been reprinted by the Puritans since the 1960s. So that book gives you the biographies and the bibliographies of the Puritans.

And this book is a Puritan theology, which I co-authored with Mark Jones. And this book is subtitled Doctrine for Life. And it looks at 50 major areas of doctrine. It's a hefty book. Every chapter is standalone, but it looks at 50 major areas of doctrine where the Puritans built on what the reformers taught and carried it further.

And then the last eight chapters of the book show you one chapter at a time, how the doctrines penetrated their conscience, their prayer life, their meditation life, their worship, how it impacted their marriage and their family and things like that.

Because for the Puritans, of course, these two things belong together—doctrine and life. That they define doctrine often as those truths that help us live to the glory of God. Now, when it comes to other books written by the Puritans themselves, what I say is go to heritagebooks .org and look up Puritan treasures for today.

These are all very small books, 100 to 150 pages, where we have edited every single sentence. So it reads like it was written yesterday. A 13-year-old had no trouble reading these books. Very common.

That's your on-ramp. To reading, to getting on the highway of the actual Puritans themselves. I love it. And if you get a book, say, for example, like Triumphing Over Sinful Fear by John Flavel, or Stop Loving the World by William Greenhill, you will immediately feel, by the time you're to page two, that these books have real substance and read very easy, and it will grip you.

And you'll say, wow, there's no fluff here. Every sentence counts. So you move from those, then, to actually reading the original Puritans. And I always recommend starting with Thomas Watson, especially his book, Heaven Taken by Storm, how to use all the different means of grace to revolutionize your whole Christian life.

And then move from Thomas Watson to John Flavel, and then to John Bunyan, Thomas Brooks, and work your way up gradually over a period of five to 10 years, and then start reading Thomas Goodwin and John Owen, which are the more challenging ones.

So let me say this, too. We are by far the largest publisher of Puritan titles in the world. We're presently in the middle of a program of Puritan reprints, and we're doing a lot of them from scratch.

We're doing 12 Puritan titles a year, one a month, plus one major set a month per year, one major set per year. And so this is a seven-year program set out, so in the next seven years, you can expect to see another 70, 80 Puritan titles, and a lot of the old sets of works are brought out.

We're also working in the Scottish Puritan area. We're working right now doing the complete works of Samuel Rutherford. We're working on New England Puritans. We're doing a complete set of the works of John Cotton, and we're doing the complete works of Thomas Watson.

So those are three major projects we have coming down. And we just finished doing the first reprint of the father of Puritanism since the 17th century, the complete works of William Perkins.

Wow. Very exciting. Dr. Beeky, thank you so much for being here with us today as we put bookends on this and wrap it up. We will definitely link all those up to, for anyone listening or watching, you'll have it on YouTube, you'll have it on your pod chaser, wherever you get that.

You'll see the links there. I highly, highly recommend you click on those links. I've not only has Dr. Beeky written, but also has at the Reformed Heritage, is it Reformed Heritage Bookstore? Reformation Heritage.

Yeah, Reformation Heritage. So guys, we'll get those all linked up as well too. Did you have any closing words, doctor, as we head out here? We have just a few.

Minutes left. Sure, sure. I just want to give a quick summary of some of the things that reading the Puritans will do for you. They will shape your life. They will help you shape your life by scripture.

They'll really take you into the scriptures. I would suggest reading them slowly so that you look up the texts that they reference. They are as at home in Micah and Habakkuk as they are in Romans. I mean, they know their Bibles well.

Let them shape you by scripture. They also marry together doctrine and practice. And that is so important for Christian living in ungodly worlds that people notice that they see Christ in you. They also focus on Christ, like no other group of writers I know in church history.

They also teach you how to handle trials. They wrote a number of books on trials. The average Puritan family had nine children, and they lost four or five of them, half of them by the time they reached adulthood.

And they also show you true spirituality. They really probe the depth of your soul. They don't let you off the hook easily. They want you to be godly. And finally, they show you how to live in two worlds.

They always keep one eye on eternity and one eye on time. And even the eye they have focused on time, they do so in the light of eternity. So happy reading. I've been reading them since I was nine years old, and reading them in earnest since I was 14 years old.

I always have a Puritan book going alongside my other books. And I always feel like the Puritans feed me more than modern books or my own spirituality.

Absolutely. Dr. Beakey, thank you so much for being with us. And, you know, I have some friends that are in Ada, Michigan. We go out and visit them every year for a couple of days. We might have to schedule something on a weekend.

So maybe we drop in and say hello to the congregation up there in Grand Rapids. I appreciate your time. As always, guys, we thank you for listening. Going to dmwpodcast .com, checking out more about us, supporting the show through the merch site and bringing glory to God and everything that we try to do.

As always, we appreciate you guys, and God bless. Be sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Dead Men Walking Podcast for full video podcast episodes and clips or email us at deadmenwalkingpodcast at gmail .com.