Realism about sin and human nature

I started things off in my first post with an explanation for the title of the blog, and I listed six gifts that the Puritans have left us. My hope is that in working through this list, it will encourage us to rediscover their writings.

The third gift the Puritans left us is their realism about sin and human nature. In The Reformed Pastor, Richard Baxter gives this piece of advice to pastors that I find both sobering and wonderful: "Take heed to yourselves, for you have a depraved nature, and sinful inclinations, as well as others. If innocent Adam had need of heed, and lost himself and us for want of it, how much more need have such as we!" It sobers me because of the problem it describes and the labor that is involved in keeping watch over ourselves. But we should find it wonderful because we only find real freedom and abundant life when we take seriously the reality of our corrupted condition. If we are indeed depraved as Baxter says, and yet we comfort ourselves with books that offer us our best life now or life without limits, then won't we only delude ourselves into thinking that we are happy and thus distract ourselves from finding satisfaction in Christ? Any self-help approach to living that does not begin with the reality of our wretched condition is not really dealing with reality. And all too often, such approaches reduce biblical religion to using God to get what we want.

Perhaps the seriousness with which the Puritans approached sin and sanctification is part of where their "bad rap" comes from. But it is in their seriousness that the Puritans can be so helpful to us. Their view of God is too big to allow us to use Him. And their view of human nature is too realistic to allow us to delude ourselves.

The Puritan work that has most engaged my thinking in regard to sin is John Owen's Mortification of Sin (now more accessible than ever thanks to the volume edited by Kapic and Taylor). Owen patiently works through the biblical text, systematically laying out the need, the nature, and the means of mortification (the putting to death of sin in the life of the Christian). "Be killing sin or it will be killing you," he writes, and presses on us the reality that mortification is a never-ending labor that embraces every area of human life, but that can only be done through the Holy Spirit. Today we tend to want shortcuts and instant gratification. Owen reminds us that when it comes to sin there are no shortcuts. He cares about us too much, and cares about the glory of God in Christ too much, to allow us to deceive ourselves.

Human beings are corrupt in every part of our being. The Puritans will not let us forget that fact. But they do so not to destroy us, but to point us to the source of liberty, Jesus Christ.

A love for the Bible and biblical theology

This is the third post in a series on gifts that the Puritans have left the church today, which helps explain why I love their writings so. In the first post, I identified six such gifts. Today I'd like to write about the second on that list, a love for the Bible and for biblical theology.

The Puritans were a Word-centered people. They hungered after the Scriptures, they studied it's every word and nuance, and they sought to apply it to every aspect of human existence. This worked its way out into the way public life was structured. It certainly affected their preaching. I recently spent two sermons preaching on the prayer of Jesus in John 17. The Puritan Thomas Manton preached 44 on the same chapter (at the time of this posting, I am on sermon 39). And these sermons are marvelous, drilling down deep into the text, integrating related passages from other parts of Scripture, and consistently seeking through it all to know God better and apply His Word more thoroughly and consistently.

The Scriptures also saturated intellectual life. This reality is what make reading Jonathan Edwards' philosophical works both a labor and a pleasure. Reading The End for Which God Created the World or On the Freedom of the Will requires discipline and clarity of thought. It is hard work. And in the end, you may criticize Edwards for being too convoluted in his writing, or you may disagree with the conclusions he reaches. But you will not be able to criticize him for being philosophically shallow or for leaving the Scriptures behind. His writings are soaked in the Bible. So were John Bunyan's. The Pilgrim's Progress stands both as a masterwork of English epic poetry and as a book so simultaneously biblical and practical (perhaps the latter flows from the former) that Charles Spurgeon thought it should be required reading for Christians right after the Bible itself. And the Scriptures saturated personal life and piety. Reading works such as The Diary and Journal of David Brainerd, or the letters of Samuel Rutherford help bring the Scriptures to bear in a most helpful way on the heart.

The bottom line is that to the Puritans the Scriptures mattered for all of life. Therein are found depths of piety and love, breadth of application, and heights of intellectual vigor in studying the Scriptures. Scripture should be studied, believed, obeyed, and allowed to speak. That's the essence of what Josh Harris calls "humble orthodoxy" and the reason so many young Christians are being drawn to Reformed theology, the writings of the Puritans, and their theological children such as Piper, Spurgeon, A.W. Pink, and others. We want more Bible. The Puritans did too.

Sources from Previous Post

Someone suggested that I provide the sources used in my previous post. That's a great suggestion, and something I should have done and gladly do now.

Jonathan Edwards, The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader, eds. Kimnach, Minkema, Sweeney.

John Owen, "The Mortification of Sin," in Overcoming Sin and Temptation, eds. Kapic & Taylor.

Robert M'Cheyne, Memoir and Remains, ed. Andrew Bonar.

John Piper, Desiring God.

I hope that helps. Enjoy!

The glory of God in Jesus Christ

In my first post, I briefly discussed why I'm a wannabe Puritan, and I listed six gifts the Puritans have left us that I would like to explore. The first of these gifts is a consuming passion for the glory of God in the person of Jesus Christ.

You see it regardless of whom you are reading, from Richard Sibbes to John Owen to Stephen Charnock to John Bunyan to Jonathan Edwards. The Puritans are tough to follow sometimes, with their run-on sentences and their vocabulary that is at times unfamiliar to us. But it's there. And you see it in their theological descendants such as C. H. Spurgeon, D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, J. I. Packer, and John Piper. There is a sense of wonder at the glory of God, a simultaneous reverent fear and an awestruck joy at standing before the consuming holiness of a God who took on human nature and died for us so that we could share His holiness and joy. The same Jonathan Edwards who preached Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God also preached a sermon entitled Heaven Is a World of Love. The same John Owen who wrote, "Be killing sin or it will be killing you" also wrote of Christ, "Consider his mercifulness, tenderness, and kindness, as He is our great High Priest at the right hand of God." Robert M'Cheyne wrote, For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief! Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in His beams." The Westminster divines wrote that the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. John Piper modified that ever so slightly to say that the chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever. I would like to think that the Westminster divines would have agreed.

Getting distracted comes easy to most of us. Entertainment options abound. Hours spent at work climb. Family obligations call. Even in the church, we can drown in a sea of programs and services and meetings. But in the midst of my busyness, the words of Psalm 73:25 echo in my mind: "Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you."

A consuming passion for the glory of God in the person of Jesus Christ. I want to settle for nothing less. I hope you will settle for nothing less. And the Puritans can help guide us.

Why Should Anyone Want to be a Puritan?

Some of the dictionary definitions of words such as "puritan" or "puritanical" are not kind: "a person who is strict in moral or religious matters, often excessively so," "someone opposed to sensual pleasures... a person excessively concerned about propriety and decorum." It's according to those definitions that the words are most often used today. As H.L. Mencken once put it, "Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." If that is what it means to be a Puritan, then why would anyone want to be one, let alone advertise such a desire with the title of a brand new blog?

All that most high school students read regarding the Puritans comes from four sources: the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, snippets from Jonathan Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Nathaniel Hawthorne's distortion in The Scarlet Letter, and Arthur Miller's appropriation of the injustice of the Salem witch trials to critique McCarthyism in The Crucible. Hardly a representative and fair selection of materials with which to judge an entire religious movement and historical period.

The Puritans have gotten a bad rap. They were hardly perfect. But many of the things that "everyone knows" are true about the Puritans have been debunked by books such as Leland Ryken's Worldly Saints. More recently, a new generation of young Christians have rediscovered the writings of the Puritans and their theological descendants and have fallen in love with them. Count me among that number. So what I would like to do in the next few posts is tell you why I love the Puritans, and in the process tell you a little bit about myself too.

I plan on writing about the following gifts the Puritans have left us:

1. A consuming passion for the glory of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
   
2. A love for the Bible and for biblical theology.
3. Realism about human nature and sin.
   
4. A love for preaching.
5. An appreciation for the power of words.
6. Pastoral concern for the real needs of the soul.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to beginning this blogging adventure.