What is Neo-Puritanism?

I suppose the sub-title might be “And why should you care?” Shouldn’t we simply be Christians? Absolutely—just like Joseph Smith. Point made. Now, let’s get back to our discussion. The Puritans are probably the most maligned group of people in a long line of tarred and feathered villains of the Plantation. These are the guys who wore more black than Johnny Cash at a Raider game and chained their women to posts for sport so that the lumber would stay warm for the witches. Or at least that’s what our teachers told us. And you believed them. Even though you have long since discovered that nearly everything else your teachers told you about all the dead white guys, the flat earth and the near stars—all that was historical revisionism. But is it faintly possible that there might be some similarity to the Plantation’s disdain for the Founding Fathers and their disdain for those first few boat-loads of white dudes a few centuries back? Think about it. Now in order to see what could be so “Neo” about Puritanism, we will have to take a closer look at what the originals were really like.

Getting right to the core of things, a Puritan was a member of the Church of England in the late sixteenth century who perceived that Elizabeth’s Protestantism was no less of a compromise than her father’s (Henry VIII). Unlike the Separatists (known by us as the Pilgrims), the Puritans initially sought to remain in the church and reform it from within. A handful of them—actually over twenty-thousand crossed the sea with Jonathan Winthrop a generation later—saw the possibilities of the New World more appealing to be that shining city on a hill that Jesus talked about. At the heart of the Puritan worldview was an utter allegiance to the Scriptures above all and a thorough commitment to the doctrine of God’s sovereignty over every area of life. Thus, the Puritans were Calvinistic to the marrow, though, unlike Theodore Beza and the succeeding generations back on the continent, their Reformed theology was learned strictly from the Bible. That is not to say that they did not have their own developing systematic theologies. And the greatest theologians of the next hundred years were all Puritans—Perkins, Owen, Watson, Burroughs, Boston, Baxter, etc.

If there was something distinctive about Puritanism that sets it apart from so much of modern Christendom, it is this: The Puritans were persuaded that the chief business of the teaching of the church was to prepare the soul for heaven, yet not in the way of Pietism, that separated the soul from the covenant community. The great weakness of Puritanism, we are told, was in their retreat from the cities—at least, it was an effective retreat (no doubt, they desired to construct a culture that could function and triumph in an urban setting)—or, to put it in today’s terminology, their soul-work was less “missional” than it ought to have been. It may be argued that their flight from a crumbling Europe was a charge to the mission field filled with what we now call Native Americans. Be that as it may. Neo-Puritanism differs from its ancestor only in this, that we have the hindsight to correct Modernism and Postmodernism at its roots, and to display their alternative in the city. Neo-Puritanism seeks the way of man’s chief end—to glorify God and enjoy Him forever—in the place where the movers and shakers of the next generation will be. This is how Christianity overran the Roman Empire, by worshiping in the cities, and leaving the country-side to the Pagan. Ever since the Enlightenment (1700s), however, the evangelical Christian has abandoned the city and retreated to the suburbs and country-sides, and has lost influence. Why? What is the connection? It is that if you win the city, you win the culture: since it is the urban institutions that man the nervous system for the rest of society. What are all of the other world religions doing (including Christians in the non-West)? They have their best and their brightest worshiping in the cities. As the city goes, the culture goes. Neo-Puritanism conceives of the church as a subversive, invisible, expanding city that ministers to those who are weak—those who no one else will serve—and it witnesses our faith to those of influence, knowing that our worldview cannot lose in that conversation.

To set forth the basic ingredients of Neo-Puritanism would take a paragraph, though explaining them to anyone unfamiliar with historic theology would take a book, which is why I wrote one called Doctrine & Division. Though it’s not a description of this theology, per se, it is a sort of ground-clearing work that critiques the current landscape to make way for such a description. I am adding a tenth chapter before I send it to the publisher. At any rate, at its most foundational level, this theology is a reunification of the Realist philosophical underpinnings (which Edwards would have undoubtedly stressed as he charted the future course of Princeton University—he never got to, as he died of a smallpox vaccination upon arrival) with Reformed theology. Realist and Reformed together—in other words, Christianity—have never been allowed to walk hand-in-hand together in modern Western culture on an institutional level, and the resurgence of Calvinistic orthodoxy in the current generation seems unaware that its basic assumptions are a patchwork from the debris of Kant’s Critique. R. C. Sproul’s Ligonier Ministries works off of the synthesis we are suggesting—Realist and Reformed—but the vast majority of the “young, restless, and reformed” do not seem terribly interested in those “abstract” issues. We seem blissfully unaware that the basic assumptions about thinking that the Emergent Church holds are no different than the Perspectivalism that the young, conservative Reformed hip church-planters hold. Part of the reason for this is the sheer inability to attend to didactic literature as opposed to more emotive-engaging prose. Very well then, let me summarize my article with a parable.

A very nice little church and a very smutty adult video shop built next to each other on top of a very large sinkhole.

No, that’s it. That’s the whole parable.

Pardon My French, but I'm DISTURBED

It was Shakespeare who said that “the pen is mightier than the sword.” I have always found this to be a concrete description of the way that reality works, not at all some metaphorical rah-rah speech for intellectuals to console themselves for not doing anything real in the world. And so I was especially looking forward to this years Desiring God National Conference on “The Power of Words and the Wonder of God.” Before I ever got to the material, I was treated instead to a showdown in the blogosphere between the usual assortment of Fighting Fundies and their new “Axis of Evil,” Piper-Driscoll-and Paul Tripp—Paul who? Well, for those who are not familiar with his work, Tripp is a bit of a counseling authority in the Reformed world, and his books War of Words, Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hand, as well as his brother Ted’s book, Shepherding a Child’s Heart, have been spoken well of by most people I know. In a little sound-byte-size interview to promote the conference, Tripp repeatedly used the “s” word as an example of profane speech versus edifying speech, and used his children (presumably grown up now) as a case study. Long story short, his assignment at the conference was The War of Words: Getting to the Heart for God’s Sake. The upshot was that we live in the mundane, and words are the power to transcend that and live a life that matters. So I watched the promo before I watched anything else. In the story he relates, he remembers his kids responding to his discourse on that particular word by using the word themselves (i.e. “I think this conversation is “s*@#,” were his son’s thoughts.) As I listened carefully, my thought process went as follows:

1. Hmm—he is saying it a lot.
2. Hmm—is that exactly the reaction I would have toward my kids in that circumstance? (i.e. If my goal was to allow them their “cultural space” in order to show them a better way, would my laughter with them have been sustained through the whole of the conversation, etc.)?
3. Passages like Philippians 3:3 and Isaiah 64:6 are certainly relevant examples of strong biblical language here, but Steve Camp’s response on his blog (cf. http://stevenjcamp.blogspot.com/2008/09/paul-tripp-ing-likes-to-say-s-word-has.html ) to that objection was technically correct if the goal is to prepare people’s soul for the most powerful words.
4. So, I’m disturbed.
5. Wait a minute—disturbed—am I? Disturbed: that’s a word too. What does it mean?
6. Come to think of it: How disturbed am I right now? I am ordinarily much more disturbed with how Fundamentalism has eroded both the Christian mind and the Christian’s cultural mandate—leading to the vast majority of what is wrong with the institutional rot in present Evangelicalism.

In other words, where is the sense of proportion here? Please do not misinterpret this. How much attention should be given to profane objects or concepts as the object lesson of the difference between the holy and the profane is a debatable matter and probably a good discussion. I just don’t want the Fundies to be the arbiters of that discussion. For instance, I would not have said things the way Tripp did, and I don’t want to be a part of condoning anyone getting the wrong idea from the way the words were used. In fact, I suppose that I could write a whole paper about the objectivity of words and the Lordship of Christ over every single one of them that role off our tongues (or keypads). But there are quite a few things at stake here. And so I want to be careful that I do not make the word “disturbed” more profane than the “s” word.

One of the unspoken threads that ran through the conference is that, at a very real level, the mundane is the profane. In light of eternity, nothing is more profane than the mundane. It’s about time some Reformed leaders went in that direction! But how does my usage of the word “disturbed” become more profane than our culture’s choice of dirty words? This would be done by inflating my own dealing with words, in relation to my passion for the eternal things behind those words. The biggest casualty in this general loss of proportion is manly speech from the pulpit that cannot say the same thing that Jesus and the disciples did when calling men to their rightful King. In this way, the Victorian English and the high-brows of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth-century were the most profane people who ever lived, as they bowed and curtsied and shed tears over Wagner, while they heated up the ovens for human flesh. And make no mistake: that is usually how these things relate. Those with the tightest wads usually stash the most corpses.

Because of the lack of eternal proportion that Fundamentalism has cultivated, the vast majority of Christians cannot stomach to be in any conversation with unbelieving potty mouths, and, if we’re honest, we all know why. Our skin is crawling because the lewdness of speech is a form of polemic that makes the Christian subconsciously cower out of any real interaction. Anyone who doesn’t see this has probably never been in any significant cultural warfare—especially at the college campus—where the designation “Prude” is much more significant than “Incorrect.” Incidentally, it also turns back genuine seekers who run into Christians who are itching for want of a bow or a curtsy from pagans who, for all we can be assured, want to kill us anyway. There will be time and place for showing our youth a better way to speak, and to instruct that people only use foul speech when they are not witty enough to reach for something deeper and stronger. All in due time.

We are in a war to rescue the word from the terrorists of Image, yet the word was first captured and sold to them by the hijackers of Practice. There is a long history to this “humiliation of the word.” The answer, of course, is not to match dung slung for dung. The answer is to carpet bomb the crowd with a steady diet of truth claims that is high enough to be invincible but low enough to bring the mob from what is both similar and dissimilar between pop rocks and prime rib. Just as a beautiful woman who is still clothed (there still are some) has the allure of mystery, so a Christian who can have a beer, throw a hail-Mary further than he can pray one, and hold out in a gutter conversation without changing his mind-diapers after every sentence, is a curiosity to an unbeliever. Language is analogical and so must our levels of comfort. In this way, the missionary is really like an intelligence officer or part of a special ops invasion. He will rub shoulders with some sordid characters, just as he was and is. He must, as Kipling said in his famous poem about growing up as a man, “walk with kings nor lose the common touch.” If we do not grasp this, then we will never be world Christians because we’ll spend all day shivering and waiting for the “ly” at the end of a mere word.

To Vote or Not to Vote?

Actually, that is not the question. Nor is the question the lesser of two evils. Those who know better know very well that another victory for Rockefeller Republicanism is merely the latest drop in the IV of our slow march toward global totalitarianism. It may buy us another half decade of time, but at the cost of a potential wedge into a real, substantive reversal. Much like the nobles in Braveheart, we must choose between one more amicable concession or else a much more threatening, courageous step forward. And so we content ourselves with another lesser evil. We are unaware that the ground behind us is inching ever closer to the cliff. The same thing must be said, incidentally, to all those who talk so romantically about secession from the union. Not yet, my friends. The only way out is forward. Such a step out of the mainstream will not be without its own cost—just as everything else worth doing in life comes at a price.

We are not suggesting that the only option is to vote for Ron Paul, or some third party’s candidate in a few weeks. What we are saying is that, no matter who the Christian votes for, we have to stop treating politics like some disassociated item on an all-you-can-eat buffet table, as if there are no clear, straight inferences from theology that demand right reasoning in the public square. This is just as unbiblical as to inflate the role of politics in the Christian life. Both extremes—political messianism and pietism—are unacceptable, given the freedom that we have been granted by God, and the relative peace and prosperity in which we live.

If a particular believer is persuaded (as I would like the opportunity to persuade you) that the welfare state is designed to spitefully destroy the inner-city and the immigrant and subject them to chains in exchange for their permanent vote, that abortion is the taking of a life that is made in God’s image, that the plantation school system has succeeded in dumbing down upwards of four generations now who are disconnected from the intellectual tools requisite for the maintenance of civil liberty, and that the present United States government is a rogue institution in violation of the ninth and tenth amendments of the Constitution, and its perpetrators should be brought to justice—if you are a conscientious believer who is convinced of those facts, then that same conscience dictates that you act accordingly. No people in history have been granted so many blessings and have done so little to preserve them. That is to our everlasting shame.

The opposite track from thinking in “bits and pieces,” as Schaeffer called it, for four solid years, and then pulling the lever for the walking slogan with the ‘R’ one Tuesday afternoon, is for the church to begin cultivating a unified program of education that moves from the university down through adult education (Sunday school and weeknight Bible studies), then down into Christian schools, homeschooling curriculum and networks, as well as calculated infiltration onto the secular campuses. When we speak of a unified education, we are speaking of the inculcation of our worldview. And there are many good beginners’ books on the subject that will help any layman who wants to take the first small steps in that direction. Just to name a few: Voddie Baucham’s Family-Driven Faith, Charles Colson’s God and Government, Al Mohler’s Culture Shift, Nancy Pearcy’s Total Truth, James Sire’s The Universe Next Door, R. C. Sproul’s Defending Your Faith, are some good places to start.

Here is the catch, though: short of a consensus on doctrines—including often divisive doctrines—such unified worldview inculcation is just another pipe dream. That is what the parachurch groups do not seem to understand. There is a reason why God ordained the local church to be this advancing army. Unless we are permitted to think coherently about the biggest, most central, eternal things, then we cannot unify our knowledge about the diversity of other things. That is the way worldviews work—the foundations come before the shingles, the moons revolve around the planets, which, in turn, revolve around the sun. And the church is “the pillar and bulwark of truth” [1 Tim. 3:15]—the biggest truths concerning eternity and redemption and the kingdom. These truths are the stuff of doctrine—God, Christ, Scripture, Salvation and the Second Coming. Try as they may, the various cultural movements that arose from Neo-Evangelicalism’s attempt to reduce dogma to the lowest common denominator could never have succeeded in anything but to create a lot of sound and fury that left the core of the mind simmering on the backburner along with those “backburner” doctrines for “theological pin-heads.” So long as culture warriors mock the monks who asked how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, their own heads will remain the same size and no genuine worldview can ever emerge. In other words, so long as we think that social justice is bigger than justification by faith alone, no rational public philosophy can occur. The biggest things in realty shape the smaller things. The smaller things are about the bigger things. As C. S. Lewis put it, “Aim at heaven and you get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”

Beyond the convictions we may feel about domestic politics, we also have to understand that the various enemies of what is left of Western Civilization hold the last nail for its coffin. I am pointing this out merely to remind that the good times are running out fast. What kind of a faith are the churches cultivating in the life of our sons and daughters that will face such enemies? When are we going to get more alarmed at that prospect than the “offensive” implications of that last question? Men are not men when the only thing that will make them excited is outrage at the crude interruption of their suburban bread and circuses that these spiritual realities bring.

WHY I AM WRITING AN “E-NEWSLETTER”

Many of you have written from out of town expressing appreciation and inquiring about current or future projects. Those contacts have been encouraging to be sure, but I would be remiss if there was no honest expression of where things stand. Getting right to the point, while American Christianity suffers under an effeminate, anti-intellectual malaise, the Treasure Valley in southwestern Idaho may be the ultimate microcosm of that phenomenon. There is not much spiritual health here. It’s the sort of place people move to get away from it all. Yet the consumers of apologetic, doctrinal, and other instructional material are disproportionately high. If we believe the numbers, then there is a significant chunk of most churches where thinking is actually a priority, but where the sources are expected to come from outside the local congregation. Thousands of believers in every town now treat their “meat” as a kind of product that can be disassociated from the life of the church, and those who minister in the parachurch justify this by saying that they are “equipping the body” more effectively from their independent positions. The trouble with this is that the whole reason to engage in parachurch “thinking and doing” is that the local church is ill-equipped and, quite frankly, uninterested; but then who are these equippers equipping if such activity is not a churchy thing? When does all this artillery translate into a sustained military campaign? The more one looks at it, the more the parachurch, whether it has intended to or not, looks a little bit like a pyramid scheme. It simply creates an army of consumers and producers, hacks and peddlers, who will always be disaffected from the local church. In part, I am writing to you to recognize this, put a halt to it, and recapture your passion for the local church, no matter where you live in the country (or the world).

A recent bit of reminiscing has also gotten me writing. I just got finished reading a book entitled Upstream: The Ascendancy of Modern Conservatism, by Alfred Regnery. The author is the son of the founder of Regnery Publishing that printed many a conservative tome, and so was well qualified to write such an account of the movement. One particular thing that struck me was the power of a handful of clear thinkers—and even clearer communicators—to take profound truths from the ivory tower to man on the street. If this can be done for a temporal movement concerning things which are passing away, how much more can (ought) it be done by those aflame with the Spirit to take the whole of the biblical worldview seriously. And to do so where it was meant to be done: the local church [cf. Eph. 3:9-11]. It pains me to recall all those nights on the college campus spent solving all the world’s problems—though it was a pipe dream—and to know that it was the closest thing any of us will ever see to some of the scenes in the book of Acts. That scene should be true about the church.

Finding other comrades in arms may be the biggest initial challenge. Like any of the more everyday elements of the church, this requires our time, our talent, and our treasure. But if we care about these things then we are obliged to support the cause. To be a Christian is to be a world changer—each person in his or her own vocation. If only a dozen rebel thinkers could start a movement of ideas that eventually captured the majority of the American electorate, then why shouldn’t a dozen or more Christian thinkers do the same? A number of objections just popped into my mind, which are easy enough to anticipate. There is no time or space to answer them all here; but one such answer does move me very nicely into my last point about why an e-newsletter. Whatever peculiarities of secondary doctrines each reader may have, I take it that one thing we can all agree on is this: that anti-intellectualism in the church is scandalous and harmful. Much study over the past eight years has gone into discovering the causes of that condition. I want to make that case in little sound-bytes, as that’s all I have at the moment. I want to suggest to you—and beg your patience to be convinced—that God’s design for the local church is still authoritative; and that design is universal. The church is the city of God expanding within the city of man. Nothing is left out, and no one is exempt.