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.
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.
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