Greetings All,
This week's "thought" has to do with a
group of people who are often wrongly maligned and accused of being or
doing things they did not do (or at least not to the degree people
say). They are the Puritans. We've been studying them for a couple
weeks now in our adult Sunday school class and approaching our
study from the standpoint of, "What the Puritans were really like, as opposed to what people often say or think they were like." What
we've found is that the gap between the two is often huge. I
discovered that same thing when I did my doctoral dissertation on the
Puritans and actually started reading them, instead of what others (like
Nathaniel Hawthorne) said about them. 
In this regard I highly recommend Leland Ryken's book: "Worldly Saints: The Puritans As They Really Were."
If you love history as opposed to fiction, it's a treasure trove of
quotes from actual Puritans sermons and books showing what they really
believed. And with Thanksgiving coming up shortly (for those of you in
the U.S. anyway!), it would be a great way to clear up many of the
common misunderstandings (both secular and religious in origin) and at
least give them a fair shake -- especially since the Pilgrims were
themselves Puritans. 
These thoughts come from two sources: J.I. Packer's book, "A Quest for Godliness - The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life," and from Edmund S. Morgan's book, "The Puritan Family."
The quotes (I believe) rightly sumarize the Puritans, though you (if
you've swallowed Hawthorne's warped perspective hook, line, and sinker)
may find what they say a bit surprising. If so, maybe its a good time
to go out and purchase a few books! In addition to Ryken's book, J.
I. Packer's
list of other authors (stated below) would be a good place to start. I
offer these thoughts to challenge common modern day misconceptions
often held by people who have interestingly never once read a Puritan
author!
Enjoy.
"Taught by Perry Miller, William
Haller, Marshall Knappen, Percy Scholes, Edmund Morgan and a host of
more recent researchers, informed folk now acknowledge that the typical
Puritans were not wild men... The belief that the Puritans, even if
they were responsible citizens, were comic and pathetic in equal degree,
being naive and superstitious, primitive and gullible, super-serious,
over-scrupulous, majoring in minors and unable and unwilling to relax,
dies hard. (Knowledge, alas, travels slowly in some quarters.)
What do the Puritans have to offer us?
"The answer, in one word, is
maturity. Maturity is a compound of wisdom, goodwill, resilience, and
creativity. The Puritans exemplified maturity; we don't. We are
spiritual dwarfs. A much-travelled leader, a native American (be it
said), has declared that he finds North American Protestantism,
man-centered, manipulative, success-oriented, self-indulgent and
sentimental, as it blatantly is, to be 3,000 miles wide and half an inch
deep. The Puritans, by contrast, as a body, were giants. They were
great souls serving a great God. In them clear-headed passion and
warm-hearted compassion combined. Visionary and practical, idealistic
and realistic too, goal-oriented and methodical, they were great
believers, great hopers, great doers and great sufferers. But their
sufferings, on both sides of the ocean (in old England from the
authorities and in New England from the elements), seasoned and ripened
them until they gained a stature that was nothing short of heroic. 
Ease and luxury, such as our
affluence brings us today, do not make for maturity; hardship and
struggle however do, and the Puritans' battles against the spiritual and
climatic wilderness in which God set them, produced a virility of
character, undaunted and unsinkable, rising above discouragement and
fears, for which the true precedents and models are men like Moses, and
Nehemiah, and Peter after Pentecost, and the apostle Paul.
Spiritual warfare made the Puritans
what they were. They accepted conflict as their calling, seeing
themselves as their Lord's soldier-pilgrims, just as in Bunyan's
allegory, and not expecting to be able to advance a single step without
opposition of one sort or another. Wrote John Geree, in his tract, The Character of an Old English Puritan or Nonconformist
(1646): 'His whole life he accounted a warfare, wherein Christ was his
captain, his arms, prayers and tears. The Cross was his Banner, and
his word [motto] was, Vinicit qui patitur [He who suffers conquers].' 
The Puritans lost, more or less,
every public battle that they fought. Those who stayed in England did
not change the Church of England as they hoped to do, nor did they
revive more than a minority of its adherents... Those who crossed the
Atlantic failed to establish a New Jerusalem in New England; for the
first fifty years their little colonies barely survived. They hung on
by the skin of their teeth.... [Yet] It was out of this constant
furnace-experience that their maturity was wrought and their wisdom
concerning discipleship was refined. George Whitfield, the evangelist,
wrote of them as follows: 'Ministers never write or preach so well
as when under
the cross; the Spirit of Christ and of glory then rests upon them. It
was this, no doubt, that made the Puritans such burning and shining
lights... Though dead, by their writings they yet speak; a peculiar
unction attends them even to this very hour."
Edmund S. Morgan writes:
"In a thousand sermons they repeated to their congregations that religion was not morality, that righteousness in society was not righteousness before God, that salvation, not
civilization, was the chief goal of man, and that salvation was
unattainable by good behavior. Only faith in Christ could bring
redemption from the sin of Adam, and faith was the free gift of God, not
to be won by human
efforts. 'Not man, but God alone is the author of regeneration,' they
insisted, 'so men are altogether passive in their conversion, and the
Eternal Spirit is the only principal Agent therein.' ...
[God] provided not only salvation
but also the faith for which salvation was the reward. Faith was not
attainable by mere human volition. It was a belief inspired by the
Almighty in those whom He wished to save. And with it came
sanctification, a gradual restoration of the faculty for obedience. As
long as a man remained on earth, the restoration must be incomplete, but
as soon as it began, the man would demonstrate the fact in his outward
behavior. He would, so far as possible, love his neighbors and endeavor
to obey the laws of God. He would be, in Puritan terms, a 'visible
saint.' "
With
prayers that you'll take the time to research such statements more
fully, and if you disagree with them, then prove them false by actually
reading Puritan authors such as Richard Sibbes, Thomas Watson,
Christopher Love, William Gurnall, John Bunyan, Thomas Boston, William Bridge, Thomas Brooks, Stephen Charnock, John Owen, Jeremiah Burroughs, and the like,
Pastor Jeff
