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.