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.