Puritan Portraits

J. I. Packer on Selected Classic Pastors and Pastoral Classics

J. I. Packer

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781781910757

PART 1:

PURITAN PASTORS AT WORK

PURITAN PASTORS AT WORK

I

This book centres upon Puritan clergy and their message. But why, it may at once be asked, should any of that be of interest to us today? The Puritans were arrogant, strait-laced bigots, were they not? And the Puritan era (roughly, a century and a half, 1560 to 1710) was long ago and far away, many moons before industrial technology and, more recently, information technology took over the ordering of civilised life; how then can a voice from so distant a past be of help to us now? It is not as if any element of Puritanism changed Western society in a permanently decisive way; on the contrary, Puritanism as popularly perceived and as a Western cultural memory is currently a reference point for a hidebound, restricted, inhibited way of life that ever since the end of the seventeenth century the West has explicitly rejected – isn’t that so? Is it not then the simple truth that Puritanism, whatever it may or may not have been, is an historical episode best forgotten and that Puritan religion, however well-meant in its time, should be judged irrelevant to modern life?

Well, no. Proverbial wisdom warns us against letting the baby flow away with the bath-water, but that is what most evangelical Christianity has done with its Puritan heritage over the past three centuries, and the results are distinctly unhappy. No doubt there was a good deal of Puritan bath-water needing to be emptied, but the essential Puritan insight into the Christian life as a blend of structured obedience and hope based on freedom in and through Christ and on promises of grace sustaining close communion with God was a precious synthesis that Christians should have prized, and sadly did not. Clergy should have taught it, and sadly did not. So at this point we live in a vacuum today, and it shows. Many ministers are unclear as to what they should tell their congregations about holiness and godliness, and many church people are quite lost when it comes to the specifics of spelling out, commending and living the Christian life. These are shortcomings which a grasp of the heart of Puritanism would cure.

The following pages embody the belief that as Isaac re-dug his father Abraham’s wells which the Philistines had filled in (Gen. 26:18), so we today need to re-dig the wells of Puritan wisdom regarding gospel truth, gospel grace, and gospel life. My plan is to introduce some of the most distinguished teachers of these things. But, to provide a frame for their convictional portraits, I need to begin by sketching out the dynamic reality of which they were part, namely, the Puritan movement as such.

First, let it be said that those who identified with this movement did not call themselves Puritans nor welcome the label when others applied it to them, for it sounded in their ears as what it seems originally to have been – namely, an insult, a term of abuse, implying such censorious Pharisaism as Shakespeare’s Sir Toby Belch detected in Malvolio, along with a lack of loyalty to the Church of England and a hidden wish to separate from it. Beyond ‘the godly’ and ‘the brethren’ these zealous souls had no names either for the movement itself or for themselves as part of it. What they did was form informal, ginger-group networks, united by knowing that the furtherance of God’s kingdom in England, and His glory thereby, was what they all were after. Preaching, prayer, ‘conference’ between themselves on kingdom topics, ordered family life, and Sabbatarianism, marked them out. All walks of life were represented in their clergy-led ranks, all active one way or another in the pursuit of their common goals. Their activism commanded attention, and gave rise to much hostility among those who did not share their goals. But it is hardly too much to say that for 100 years, from 1560 to 1660, it was the Puritan movement that made most of the running in England’s religious life.

The movement had two areas of concern and action. One was the organisational set-up of the Church of England, from its Book of Common Prayer to its episcopal hierarchy; all of which Puritans wanted to bring into line with what other Reformed churches did, and none of which Elizabeth, the Church’s titular head, was prepared to have changed. The second and larger concern was the converting of England to a vital evangelical faith, which they thought could be achieved through effective ministry in the parishes. Most of the brethren seem to have been concerned about both agendas, but active chiefly in one. In this book, the second is our concern.

Elizabethan England was mainly rural and many of the worshippers in its several thousand parishes were illiterate. A tenacious religious conservatism, harking back to pre-Reformation days, was widespread and attitudes towards the current religious settlement were on the whole cool and detached. Yet, providentially as we may think, England’s culture had in it a deep sense of the reality of the holy God who impacts every life; of the authority of the Bible, long locked up in Latin but now available in English for anyone motivated to read it; and of the authority of the clergyman as preacher and teacher, should he choose to fulfil these roles (not all clergy did). Also, church attendance was required by law. All this gave Puritan pastors a large launch-pad from which to take off in their pastoral endeavours.

By the turn of the sixteenth century, the church-reform activists in the movement had effectively shot their bolt. Energetic clerical propagandists had campaigned with vigour for the revision or abolition of the Prayer Book, Presbyterian church order countrywide, freedom to not use ceremonies that in their view tended to maintain unbelief, and public funding for ministerial trainees at the universities. They had tried to establish local Bible teaching meetings (‘prophesyings’) as a regular part of church life, and, wisely or unwisely, some had joined in a venture to see what satirizing the hierarchy might do (the Marprelate tracts). And they had lost every battle they fought. Now they lacked resources, energy and morale for further fighting. But as reformism wound down discipling endeavours had begun to take off. The torch had been lit in 1570, when a young don named Richard Greenham had chosen to leave Cambridge and become vicar of Dry Drayton, a country parish just outside the city. The high standards of ministry that Greenham maintained as preacher, pastor and personal counsellor had caught imaginations and made his name something of a household word in East Anglia. Also, he had developed an apprenticeship system for ministerial students, who lived with him and learned their trade by involvement in his work, under his direct supervision; then they took his wisdom with them into pastoral posts of their own.

Thus Greenham, as we say, had started something, and others were beginning to make the same sort of waves as he did. One of his students, Henry Smith, became a devotional preacher who for years was the talk of London. Meantime, a Cambridge contemporary, William Perkins, a learned godly man with a flair for speed and clarity as a writer, began in the 1580s a long series of practical devotional books to lead ordinary people into living the life of faith in Jesus Christ. These filled a gap; nothing like them had existed before, and they sold widely, thus establishing the Puritan principle that a helpful, desirable and indeed necessary habit for literate believers was to read ‘good books,’ as they were called. The vision of a literature covering all aspects of the Christian life caught on, and in that pre-dust-jacket age individual title-pages reflected it. Thus, in 1603 Richard Rogers published a folio announcing itself as Seven Treatises, Containing Such Directions as is gathered out of the holie Scriptures, leading and guiding to true happiness, both in this life and in the life to come; and may be called the practice of Christianitie, profitable for all such as heartily desire the same; in the which, more particularly true Christians may learne how to leade a godly and comfortable life every day (8^th ed., 1630). In a surprisingly short time Puritanism created for itself a whole library of smaller instruction books, usually courses of sermons now written up for the press, covering doctrinally and homiletically all the many aspects of the warrior-pilgrim Christian life as Puritanism understood it, and as Bunyan classically pictured it in Pilgrim’s Progress. When in 1673, in his massive Christian Directory, Richard Baxter set himself to recommend ‘the poorest or smallest library that is tolerable’ for a preacher, he named fifty-eight ‘affectionate practical English writers’ and urged the would-be preacher to collect their works – ‘as many as you can get.’ ‘Affectionate’ here meant, arousing motivational feelings through the use of imagination and dramatic rhetoric; ‘practical’ meant, as it means today, making clear what should be believed and done. It was the popular Christian literature on doctrine, duty and devotion which Puritanism had produced that Baxter was recommending, and it is through this literature that we today are able to appreciate the special excellence of Puritan pastoral ministry.

II

Puritan Christianity was serious business: witness Richard Rogers’s reply to the lord of the manor’s complaint that his religion was over-precise – ‘O sir, I serve a precise God.’ Many Puritans, lay and clerical, journalled in order to achieve inner honesty, avoid self-deception in spiritual things, and keep close to God. Puritan pastors took their calling very seriously: witness the plaque that stood on William Perkins’s study table, thus inscribed: ‘Thou art a Minister of the Word: Mind thy business.’ And Puritan pastors were down-to-earth realists in fulfilling their responsibilities to the members of their congregations. Salvation in Christ through faith for each one was their goal, and they shaped their parochial strategy to this end. They put their preaching of the gospel first, because they believed that in God’s economy this was the prime means of the grace by which God saves souls; but they buttressed their preaching ministry with catechizing on the one hand and counselling on the other, and thus made it immeasurably stronger in its impact.

Catechizing was for them a distinct discipline of teaching basic Christian beliefs by question and answer. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all Protestant church leaders were agreed that catechizing from childhood through adulthood was an essential element in church life, without which the church could hardly survive, or hope to survive. The syllabus of virtually all catechisms from that era centres upon the doctrines of the Apostles’ Creed, the duties indicated by the Ten Commandments, and the parameters of prayer, according to the pattern set forth in the Lord’s Prayer. The Prayer Book of the Church of England had in it a children’s catechism that clergy, along with parents and godparents, were required to teach, and children were required to learn before being confirmed and entering into the Church’s communicant life. Also, after 1570, as tools for further instructing teens and adults in the basics of faith and practice, the Church had available both longer and shorter versions of a fuller, semi-official catechism by Alexander Nowell. In addition to these resources, however, Puritan clergy used an abundance of orthodox catechisms of their own devising, which shows how necessary and important they took competent catechizing to be. For faith, to the Puritans, started with factual knowledge – knowledge of who and what God is, who and what Jesus Christ is, and what the gospel is – and the purpose of catechizing was to open the door to the life of faith by laying faith’s cognitive foundations.

Counselling, to use the modern word that covers what they were doing, was a form of one-on-one ministry which the Puritans described as ‘comforting afflicted consciences’. They meant by this giving troubled souls help in a way analogous to the physician’s service to one who is weak or sick: that is, diagnosing what is wrong and prescribing the way to bring about a cure. For this, the pastor needed a knowledge of spiritual pathology, the malfunctioning of the soul under both the external and internal pressures to which it may be exposed; and for that, he needed to be clear from the start on what constituted inward spiritual health. The Puritans grasped the New Testament notion of spiritual health – Christ-centred faith, hope and love expressed in good works; assurance, peace, and joy; a heart and mind constantly engaged in praise and thanksgiving; and zeal for God’s kingdom and glory, leading to purposeful and energetic action. Spiritual malaise, by contrast, appeared in doubt, despair, fear, hatred, apathy, tormenting temptations to allow oneself bad habits; lack of courage, of backbone, and of zeal; pride, lust, greed, bitterness, discontent, self-absorption, self-pity, irresolution and indiscipline and such like. The various modes of what we today call depression, for which the rough equivalent during the Puritan years was melancholy, also raised their heads either separately from, or together with, the failings listed above.

The Puritan resources for restoring these spiritual sufferers to peace, hope, joy and renewed energy to serve God were, first, deep empathy with and insight into their inward distresses, in their physical and mental as well as their directly spiritual dimensions; second, deep understanding both of the radical corruption of fallen human nature, which makes meritorious action impossible and of God’s free grace in Christ, who by dying absorbed sin’s guilt and now in risen power rescues sinners from sin’s perverting effects in their lives; third, deep perception of the ways of God, whereby in and through Christ He restores His image in us, and the ways of Satan, who by every means in His power seeks to keep us from enjoying the life of God with God here and hereafter; and fourth, shrewd clarity about the lineaments of true and false religion, as both were being practised in England during the Puritan era. The pastors saw themselves as set in place by God to help needy souls keep clear of Satan’s control, its allurements notwithstanding, and to stay under God’s control, despite the temporary pressures and pains of doing so. The recognition and renunciation of unbelief and disobedience, the constant practice of fellowship and praise, with avoidance of self-absorption and solitariness, and regular returning to God’s promises in Scripture, were the basic formula for the afflicted soul’s recovery: the pastors, as wise spiritual physicians, would ring the changes on it as particular cases of distress required. In all of this Richard Greenham was both the pioneer and the pundit, whose example, method, and success rate led to his being treated as a model by an entire generation of Puritan counsellor-pastors.

On the third and fourth of the resources listed above, something more needs to be said.

The pastors’ vivid sense of ongoing conflict between Satan and the triune God within each believer led them to picture the Christian life as very often and very much a battlefield, on which God was always manoeuvring to make sure that His child heeded His commands, promises and warnings, while Satan endlessly counter-manoeuvred in hope of blunting the impact of God’s words by distortion or distraction, and eventually of reclaiming the sinner whom God by regeneration had wrenched from his grasp. The trouble of the troubled souls regularly revolved round uncertainty as to whether they would finally be saved; the proof that they were among God’s chosen and called, who would be kept safe till they reached heaven, was that they wanted God’s forgiveness through Christ for the past and they wanted to live lives of godliness in the present and for the future; and the best help the pastor could give them was to enable them to discern and embrace the change that God had already wrought in them, and to focus their determination, come hell or high water, to live it out consistently.

By false religion the Puritans meant, in general, any and every combination of external observances and superstitious beliefs that did not lead to faith-fellowship with God through Christ or to inner regenerative transformation by the indwelling Holy Spirit. When they spoke of false religion, however, they regularly had in mind Roman Catholicism as they knew it, or thought they knew it, as the great exemplar of what they were talking about. A good deal of popular Papistry, to use their word, still survived as a mind-set at grass roots level in rural England, and it should not surprise us that anti-Papistry was a note that Puritan preachers – like other English preachers, only more stridently – often struck. Rightly or wrongly, Puritans generally saw the Roman Catholic Church as embodying the principle of justification by meritorious works, and denounced it on this basis. Like Luther, they believed that justification by works is fallen mankind’s natural religion, which everyone needs to be directly winkled out of if ever they are to appreciate the saving grace of Jesus Christ the Lord.

III

It has been said that the essence of tragedy is waste of good, both actual and potential, and by this definition the demise of Puritanism was tragedy in its purest form. It had truly been a movement: that is, an association of people banded together and active to bring about some form of change for what they saw as the better. Puritanism was for a century, as we have seen, a headline-hitting holiness movement on two fronts: under Elizabeth, mainly a quest for pure worship through a purging of the Anglican church order; under James I and Charles I, mainly a quest for godly parochial communities; through the Civil War and under the Commonwealth, a quest for both goals together. But when the English monarchy and the Church of England returned at the Restoration, the Puritan movement was deliberately and systematically snuffed out by governmental action. The reason, no doubt, was officialdom’s understandable fear of renewed civil unrest; the effect, however, was to demolish in twenty-five years what the Puritans had spent 100 years building. Public opinion, egged on from the top, swung against the Puritans, viewing them as disruptive eccentrics and greeting the return of the old order with joy and relief. The 1662 Act of Uniformity required all clergy who would serve within re-established Anglicanism to abjure rebellion against the king in all its forms (that included, of course, retrospective condemnation of the Parliamentary cause in the Civil War, which many clergy had backed); with that, to declare that the Book of Common Prayer, now slightly revised (though not as the Puritans wanted), needed no further change; and also to receive episcopal ordination if they did not have it already. (It had not been available since Anglicanism was abolished in 1645.) Nearly two thousand Puritan pastors could not in conscience accept all this, and so perforce vacated their parish ministries. Further Parliamentary legislation then restricted their movements and forbade them to gather congregations of their own, while forbidding layfolk to join such congregations in any case. Over a period of twenty and more years some twenty thousand Puritans, mostly layfolk, saw the inside of gaols for breaches of these enactments. This was the last period of religious persecution in England, and its length made it the worst.

When in 1689, William of Orange having become England’s king, the Toleration Act was passed, the Puritan constituency had lost its power to be a movement in any meaningful sense and became a mixed bag of independent nonconformist congregations scattered up and down the country, marginal both to the Church of England and to England’s national life.

One of the marginalising factors was the exclusion from Oxford and Cambridge, the two English universities, of students who would not profess the same wholesale assent to the restored Church of England as was required of its clergy. Some of 1662’s ejected clergy, however, opened schools, and out of these grew academies that matched university standards and could offer a full academic preparation for pastoral ministry. Through this source of supply of pastors, nonconformist church life became sturdily self-sustaining, in parallel to, though wholly separate from, the Anglican parish network that covered the country. It is a fact, arguably an unhappy one, that when the great renewal of godly Christian experience under Whitefield and the Wesleys took hold in the 1730s nonconformists were deeply suspicious of it, doubted its stability and stood largely aloof from it. They were, however, able to keep themselves going without revivalist help.

IV

Puritanism’s most significant contribution to the ongoing life of the church was, and is, without doubt its literary legacy. As has been already indicated, Puritans appreciated both the power of the press and England’s need for devotional reading, and those of their number with writing skills laboured hard after the turn of the sixteenth century to supply that need. The pioneer was William Perkins, but he had no lack of followers. We now round off our sketch of Puritan pastors at work with some discussion of this mass of material.

The first thing to say is that since the mid-nineteenth century, spasmodically perhaps but with recurring enthusiasm from one and another, the church has been generously provided with Puritan reprints. Richard Baxter, John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Richard Sibbes, Stephen Charnock, John Bunyan, Thomas Manton, John Flavel, William Gurnall, John Howe and Matthew Henry, are among the authors whose works have been made available to us in modern dress. The reprinters have regularly seen it as part of their job to sanitise the material orthographically and grammatically, and though this forfeits surface-level authenticity it makes these Puritans a great deal easier to read, so we should be grateful that it has been done.

These full editions make possible something not possible before, namely assessment of each writer’s total output, and of key themes permeating it, and substantive cross-references within it – tempting raw material for doctoral dissertations, of course, and in fact many such are nowadays written.

Valuable as this kind of study is, however, it overshadows the fact that most of the writing is occasional, the work of men for whom it was, if not exactly a spare-time activity, then at least an incidental item in a life in which preaching the gospel, caring for a congregation, and responding to pastoral emergencies, came first. Puritan pastors were not professional authors, but saw the writing they did as essentially back-up for, and sometimes extension of, their ongoing ministry to living souls.

The second thing to say is that the bulk of Puritan devotional writing appears on inspection to be lightly edit...