TEXT: I Thessalonians 5:21

SUBJECT: The Puritans #11: Faults

This is the third Sunday afternoon of the month, and with the Lord’s help, we’ll move on in our study of the Puritans. The book we’re using to guide us was published in 1986; the author is Leland Ryken; the title is Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were. If you’re interested in the Puritans, but fear the long and wordy books they wrote, read this one. The author did a masterful job of simplifying Puritan theology and practice—without dumbing them down! Highly recommended!

Thus far, almost everything said has been positive, if not worshipful. But the Puritans were not perfect. And the book admits it. Chapter 11 is called Learning from negative examples: some Puritan faults.

The first quarrel Ryken has with the Puritans is also the most obvious. I don’t believe their most fanatical supporter would disagree with this one: The Puritans were too wordy!

Ryken says,

If you’ve read the Puritans very much, you know what he says is true. Not all are equally guilty, of course. Matthew Henry and Thomas Watson are fairly concise. But some wear me out trying to read them! Some of these men feared periods more than they feared the devil! In many Puritans, no assertion—no matter how obvious it was—could be left unproven. In trying to be exhaustive, they often ended up being exhausting.

Ryken gives some examples of their long-windedness. At his ordination to the ministry, Cotton Mather prayed for one hour and fifteen minutes and followed it up with a sermon of one hour and forty-five minutes!

But that’s nothing. Listen to this one: In 1625, members of the House of Commons sat through a nine hour church service, featuring seven hours of preaching!

Their sermon series’ were endless. Anthony Burgess preached 145 sermons on John 17. Another man preached four months on Joseph’s coat of many colors. Joseph Caryl spent decades expounding the Book of Job from the pulpit. About the sermons, Charles Spurgeon quipped,

The author of our book is a professor of English, a fine writer, and a competent judge of style. He says,

If I counted correctly, Sibbes used 41 words to say what he could have said in five: God wants us to work!

Long-winded preachers think extra words add to their sermons; in fact, they take away from them! Besides wearing their congregations out, they also encourage slipshod hearing. And why not? If the preacher’s going to say the same thing over and over and over, there’s no need to listen carefully the first time!

Here I cannot avoid a couple of short stories. Neither one is made up. One day while driving home from school, I was listening to a lecture on pastoral theology (and it was very good, by the way). But the teacher was a little too Puritan to suit me. He was telling his students how to quote books in their sermons. One thing he warned against was saying the same thing over and over, like "Calvin says" or "Owen writes" or "To quote Edwards" and so on. Here’s what he replaced it with,

He thought this was a good alternative to "Luther said"!

Ten or twelve years before, I attended this man’s church and one of his co-pastors preached one solid hour on the Third Commandment. The problem is, the first forty minutes of the sermon were spent telling us what he was not going to tell us!

The Puritans were famous for memorizing Bible verses. I wish they had spent some time on Proverbs 10:19,

One more thing here: In defending the Puritans, someone is likely to say that the reason we can’t listen to two hour sermons is because our minds are shaped by TV. There’s a long of truth in that, but we’re not the only ones to complain about their wordiness. Robert Baillie was a Scottish Presbyterian pastor who attended to Westminster Assembly and nearly lost his mind at the Puritan long-windedness,

What was the cause of this long-windedness? I don’t believe it was pride. I sincerely think it was the desire to get things just right. But they forgot the law of diminishing returns. What can be explained very well in forty minutes often becomes a mess if it’s expounded for three hours.

The Puritans were too wordy. That’s Number One.

The second problem with the Puritans is somewhat similar to the first: too many rules.

One of the striking things about life under the New Covenant is how few laws there are. There are some, of course, but most of our lives are directed by principles, what my friend calls sanctified common sense.

Let me give you an example: The Lord commands Christian women to dress modestly. But He doesn’t give a long list of rules about it—the skirt cannot be shorter than this, the neckline cannot plunge lower than that, heels can be no higher than this, lipstick can be no brighter than that, no dangling earrings, no diamonds over half a carat, and so on. Most godly women know the difference between attractive and sexy. Those who don’t, rarely need more than a few minutes with an older woman to set them straight.

The Puritans were not satisfied with principles. They wanted rules, a clear-cut list of do’s and don’t’s. But because the Bible doesn’t provide many of them, they had to infer a whole bunch of them!

Ryken says

Let me give you a few examples of rules run amok. The first is from a book by Henry Scudder; it’s called The Christian’s Daily Walk. I’ve read the book and there’s a lot of good in it. But he overdoes it terribly. Here are some headings from the table of contents,

Without criticizing the man’s motives, does God really have rules about going to sleep?

Richard Baxter even goes further, giving a set of rules on…Dreaming.

But my favorite is from Cotton Mather.

Ryken adds to this,

This Puritan—at least—drew up rules to regulate going to the bathroom! He may have been more extreme than others. But not by much. Many Puritans abounded in rules that weren’t in the Bible, but were implied from inferences extrapolated from the Bible.

This is never healthy for yourself or for others. These rules make you live in constant fear of doing something wrong. When you apply them to other people, you become a Pharisee,

The Puritans were notorious rule-makers when it came to the Sabbath. They distinguished the freedom of the Lord’s Day from the servitude of the Hebrew Sabbath in theory, but you couldn’t tell it by the way they acted!

I believe the Puritan motive was good. They wanted all life lived under the Lordship of Christ and for His glory. But you don’t achieve that by robbing us of the liberty by which Christ has made us free.

Too many rules. That’s a second Puritan fault.

Puritanism sometimes equated good with perfect. If something wasn’t perfect, it was wicked. Ryken says,

Because the Book of Common Prayer had some semi-catholic things in it, one Puritan said it was

If you read the Prayer Book, you’ll see that 80-90% comes straight from the Bible. We could quibble here and there with a few things, but overall, it’s a good book. But because it wasn’t up to their standards, the Puritans condemned it!

Since nothing in the world is perfect, however, we have to be a bit more charitable. The very spirit they turned on Anglicans and others, later men turned on the Puritans. Instead of being what they really were—godly men who went wrong on some points—they’re now portrayed as mean, narrow-minded, self-righteous hypocrites.

This spirit lives on in some people who admire the Puritans. I’ve heard people talk about church choirs as though they were Pagan altars! A man told me what a terrible church he visited on his vacation. What was wrong with it? The pastor wore a backward collar! A professor of church history told me he wouldn’t sing a hymn, but only Psalms! I read a book in which a man said that if you use multiple cups during the Lord’s Supper, you’re going to hell!

I can’t wade in on all these controversies, but surely these things aren’t wicked, are they? They’re not willful affronts to the Majesty of God’s Name!

Black and white thinking is required on black and white issues. But on other things, we have to remember,

The last fault that I can mention today is the Puritan tendency toward intolerance. This is a word that is terribly abused today. When people say we ought to be tolerant, what they really mean is approving. If I don’t cheer on homosexuality, for example, I’m intolerant. Leaving them alone isn’t enough; or being kind to them as neighbors won’t do. I have to approve of them or I’m a bigot and a hater.

Tolerance, however, doesn’t mean that. What it means is that—though I don’t approve of what you’re doing—I also don’t persecute you for it.

By this definition, the Puritans were not tolerant. Though they themselves were harassed—and worse—under the monarchy, when they came to power under Cromwell and, especially in Massachusetts, they treated their opponents no better than they were treated.

The Diary of George Fox (who founded the Quakers) is a heartbreaking read. He and his people—though not without blame—were terribly mistreated in the Commonwealth.

In America, things were much worse. My old hero, Obadiah Holmes, was publicly whipped for baptizing someone by immersion.

The reason for this intolerance, of course, came from combining the Church and the State. If heresy is a sin, then it’s also a crime. You punish heresy with excommunication; you punish crime with fines, whippings, banishment, prison, or death.

If you accept the premise of a Holy Commonwealth, then it makes perfect sense. But sense no commonwealth is holy—not even Puritan New England—then citizens have to be allowed freedom of conscience. We can punish them for murder or theft, but not for kneeling before an altar or preaching Arminianism.

These are some of the faults of Puritanism. In studying them, we have to remember, that they too had feet of clay. Admire them? Yes, of course we should do that. But call no one on earth rabbi, for you have one Master, Christ.