The True Story of the Puritans

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Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Today, the word Puritan is widely used as an insult. But who were the Purans? Here’s our own Greg Engler with a story.

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Speaker 2: It says in the dictionary that a Puritan is a person with strict and severe moral beliefs, especially with regards to pleasure. In high school and college, I was told that Puritans were patriarchal, excessively fanatical, joyless, and judgmental, obsessed with making rules. American journalist, satirist and cultural critic H. L. Mankin coined the phrase puritanism the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy. Even the most well known Puritans, the Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower to the New World, the roots of our thanksgiving are now facing the wrath of those who like to show their virtue by demonizing well established heroes from the past. But who really were the Puritans? To begin the Puritans don’t have an exact birth date. They don’t have a specific expiration date either. The term Puritan was first used in the fifteen sixties, and it was not a compliment. For centuries, the Church in Europe had been governed by the Pope from Rome, but John Wickliffe, a fourteenth century scholar at the University of Oxford in England, called for the Bible to be translated from the mandated Latin into a language everyone could understand. Here’s theologian Jeremy Walker.

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Speaker 3: Institutionally, the Roman Catholic Church of that period, for various reasons, is set against this desire to have the Word of God available, accessible for the common man and woman.

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Speaker 2: The church burned Wickliffe’s body at the stake and dumped his ashes in the river Swift, where they would be swept into the sea. Later, in fifteen twenty six, William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament was smuggled from Germany into England. Tyndale was the first to take advantage of the printing press.

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Speaker 3: Luther in Germany is doing there what Tyndale wants to do in England.

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Speaker 4: He wants to.

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Speaker 3: Bring the Word of God into the hands and hearts of the people of the country. And Tyndale, I think you have to say, is to some extent following Luther, but breaking ground in his own territory. So Tyndale is betrayed on the continent, taken into captivity, and eventually sentenced to death.

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Speaker 5: His famous words were, Oh, God, open the eyes of the King of England.

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Speaker 3: That prayer is answered before very long, because Henry the Eighth, who has up to this point being Tindall’s great opponent in the work of the translation and the spread of the scriptures in English, actually fundamentally takes that translation and eventually endorses it, and that translation is the very one that makes its way into English church buildings.

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Speaker 2: In fifteen thirty four, King Henry the Eighth’s parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, establishing that it was Henry, not the Pope, who was now supreme head of the Church of England. When Henry the Eighth died in fifteen forty seven, his nine year old son Edward became king. He was the first English monarch to be raised as a Protestant, and unlike his father, Edward had in Christian convictions. A series of back and force would occur for power in England between the Catholics and Protestants, resulting in more Protestant martyrdom. Ironically, it was this present threat of death and persecution that made Puritanism spring into life. Eight hundred Protestants fled England, where their faith was strengthened in the Netherlands by the writings of reformers such as John Calvin. When the Catholic Queen Mary died and Elizabeth the First became Queen of England in fifteen fifty eight, these exiled Protestants returned home, bringing with them a newly acquired theological depth and a zealous commitment to implement a fulsome robust kind of reform in England. But things got worse. In fifteen fifty nine, the Act of Uniformity was passed by Queen Elizabeth. From then on, anyone who spoke against or refused to Hughes the Anglican prayer book for public worship was subject to fire, as was anyone who refused to go to the government mandated church at least once a week. The Puritans were grieved. Here’s theologian Ian Hamilton.

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Speaker 6: The Puritans, like the Christians in the early Church, feared heresy more than martyrdom. They believed that heresy would damn men and women to a lost eternity. They didn’t simply believe that intellectually, they felt it. Viscerally, it was a reality they lived with.

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Speaker 2: That reality was rooted in the work done by Luther, Tyndale and Calvin what’s known as the Five Solos of the Reformation, the Marks of Puritanism. Here’s Joe Beek, author of Meet the Puritans, Michael Reeves, professor of theology and the featured teacher for the online teaching series The English Reformation and the Puritans.

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Speaker 7: Roll Mcarthola’s as I said and still says, it’s grace plus the sacraments that will save you. It’s faith plus good works Christ plus the Church scripture plus the authority of tradition. And the Puritans were saying, together with all.

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Speaker 2: The gray reformers, no scripture.

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Speaker 7: Makes it clear that it’s by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, that we are saved.

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Speaker 8: And they saw how giving that up gives up all the goodness of the Gospel and plunges us into all the hopelessness and despair that Martin Luther had experienced before the Reformation. And they saw, this is the joy and good news we’re made for. And therefore this is truth worth living and worth dying for.

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Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to our own Greg Hangler and a bevy of theological superstars laying out what the root of the word Puritan was and is, and who the people were, and what they were after, what they were searching for, what they were fighting for.

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Speaker 4: When we come.

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Speaker 1: Back, more of the story of how the Puritans shaped and forged a new nation here on our American Stories. Here at our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told. But we can’t do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love our stories in America like we do, please go to our American Stories dot com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s our American Stories dot Com. And we returned to our American Stories and the story of the Puritans. Here again is Jeremy Walker.

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Speaker 3: The Puritans are very conscious that it’s possible to claim to know God without truly knowing God, that it’s possible to be part of an external institution without really belonging to the Kingdom of Heaven, and so It is not enough for them to simply have, if you like, the external label of Christianity. They are concerned for genuine conversion, for the life that is in Christ to be known in the souls of men and women.

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Speaker 2: Here’s theologian Kevin de Young, Jeremy Walker, and Stephen Nichols, author of the Reformation.

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Speaker 9: Many of the pulpiteers of the day were renowned for their oratory and the heaping up of classical illusions and phrases and Greco Roman sources, and it was almost a way to show off the minister’s learning. And the Puritans spoke against that, taught against that, and modeled something very different that they wanted plain style preaching.

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Speaker 3: I think fundamentally, you’d have known that you were in the presence of a man who was in the presence of God. There would have been a true reverence that was evident, not just in his approach, but in the way that he handles the text, that he is concerned not to introduce anything of his own notions, but rather to discover what God has said.

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Speaker 10: There’s also a lot of criticism of Puritan preaching, and one of those criticisms is that these Puritans were long winded. In fact, in the New England churches, the deacons would have these polls, and on the end of the polls would be a feather. And these are farmers, you know, they were already up. They’ve milk the cows, they worked hard, and they set for a few minutes, they’re gonna nod off. And so as someone in these churches was starting to nod off during a sermon, the deacon would send the pole down the pew and just take a little feather and tickle their nose to wake them up.

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Speaker 2: In sixteen o three, James the First became King of England. Like the Puritans, he was known to hold Reformed views, so the Puritans were really hoping their situation would improve. They met the King the following year and were told he would be producing a fresh translation of the Bible, the King James Version, which would be largely based on Tyndale’s earlier work. But when the King demanded all clergy conformed to the liturgy and the government of the Church of England, the Puritans objected. Speaking of the Puritans at the Hampton Court Conference, the King threatened, I will make them conform themselves, or else I will harry them out of the land or else do worse. Over the next five years, nearly ninety Puritan ministers were suspended from office. One of them, who was ejected from Cambridge University, became one of the greatest Puritan theologians of all time, William Ames. Here’s John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church in New Albany, Mississippi.

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Speaker 11: For the Puritan, you know, correct theology was essential. You can’t love a God you don’t know. You can’t live for a God you don’t understand, and nor do you want to live an entire life devoted to Jesus that you imagined and you created. But for the Puritan, theology is never the destination. It was to be an applied science. It was to be something that was understood and then lived upon.

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Speaker 4: And in those.

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Speaker 11: Two things then the experience flows. Now two of Ames’s books show that balance. The first is his Systematic Theology. One historian writes that Ames was quoted more often by the American Puritans than Luther or Calvin.

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Speaker 4: Another book that he wrote was On the Conscience.

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Speaker 11: Now it’s a book where we take the truths of Scripture and we bring them down in Christian ethics to every area of life. So it was a book written by a pastor really to shepherd folks who didn’t understand, how do I live this out.

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Speaker 4: When we take those two books, we really have a well rounded picture of Puritanism.

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Speaker 11: We have people who have a high and holy view of God, the kind of view that makes them want to be careful with doctrine, but also to take those doctrines and to bring them down into every aspect of the human life.

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Speaker 2: It was in this climate of government encroachment that the first English Puritans, known today as the Pilgrims, left England and sailed to the New World. Here’s Albert Moehler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Speaker 12: And so you can say, in one sense they came for religious liberty. It was their liberty that they cherished, to have the freedom to seek to live before Christ in a church purified in doctrine, and to demonstrate lives purified in in obedience to Christ, and a civil order that would reflect those theological convictions.

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Speaker 2: For the Puritans who remained in England, things got worse. In sixteen twenty five, Charles the First became king and married Henrietta Maria, a devout Roman Catholic. In sixteen twenty nine, King Charles took the unprecedented step of dissolving Parliament altogether, and in sixteen thirty three Charles appointed his advisor William Laude, an Anglican with strong sympathies to Roman Catholicism, as the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Puritans interpreted these moves as hostile acts towards themselves and their religious freedom. Here again is John Snyder.

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Speaker 4: Well, they were persecuted. Now.

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Speaker 11: Some of them left England, others stayed and were imprisoned, and some suffered a worse fate. We have accounts of godly men who, because of disagreeing with Laude, had their ears cropped or had a brand put on.

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Speaker 2: Their face, hounded by laud. The Puritans left England in droves. Many went to the Netherlands, others went to New England. In sixteen thirty John Winthrop led the first large scale immigration of Puritans, settling in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Over the following decade, some of the most celebrated preachers in England, including John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepherd, and John Elliott joined thirteen one thousand immigrants who sailed to New England.

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Speaker 11: He migrated to Boston and took the pastorate of a church in Roxbury, and he was pastor there for sixty years. Elliotts and other pastors were concerned about evangelism with the Native Americans. In fact, the Massachusetts Charter had statements in it that declared that one of the reasons they settled in the region was to reach out in evangelism. The real problem was the language barrier. The Indians in the region did not speak English. They spoke Algonquin, and so elliot took it upon himself to learn Algonquin, using the assistance of a young Indian man.

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Speaker 4: He eventually became proficient.

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Speaker 11: He even wrote a grammar for the Algonquin language, because at the time it was only a spoken language, not a written language. Now he describes his first effort to preach in their language without a translator, and he says, the first sermon in the Algonquin language was pretty.

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Speaker 4: Much a failure.

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Speaker 11: The people were distracted, they weren’t interested in what he said. As soon as he finished the sermon, they dispersed, but he wasn’t discouraged, and he said the second time he preached in their language, a very different result. They hung on his words, they stayed after the sermon, They asked questions about the living God, and they wanted to know how to find a cure for the disease of their souls. It was the beginning of a great missionary effort. Elliott devoted ten years of his life to translating the Bible into the Algonquin language, and when it was published, interestingly, it was the first Bible published in the New World.

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Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to our own Greg Hengler in a host of theological experts on this subject, telling the story of the Puritans in America. And to understand that, you had to understand the Puritans in Europe, the Puritans in England, and those that went to the Netherlands, as we learned after Charles the first took power, and those that came here to New England and teen thousands selled here back when sailling here was no simple thing, and there wasn’t a lot to sell too, and a whole lot that these Puritans left behind. The simple question. There was this question about theology, and for the Puritans, it wasn’t the destination the theology. It was something to be understood, but then to be lived and to develop the relationship with Christ. These were fundamental aspects of the Puritan creed. In addition that it was faith alone, and not faith through works, or faith through sacrament, or faith through any other thing. But faith, there was salvation. The story of the Puritans continues here on our American stories, and we returned to our American stories and to our own Greg Hengler telling the story of the Puritans.

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Speaker 2: In sixteen thirty six, these New England Puritans founded Harvard College, making it the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Here again is Stephen Nichols and Albert Mohler.

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Speaker 10: Puritans get a bad rap. They come to us through Nathaniel Hawthorne Scarlet Letter, they come to us through Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, and they come to us from the intellectual elites, who basically saw these as backwoods, superstitious, anti intellectual people.

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Speaker 12: The reason Harvard College was established was to make sure that an orthodox Christian ministry would be perpetuated in what they called the New England in the New World. Very shortly thereafter, in a frighteningly short amount of time, Harvard lost its orthodoxy, and heterodoxy began to move in, first in the form of an incipient theological liberalism, and.

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Speaker 4: Already by the next generation.

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Speaker 12: By seventeen oh one, you have very concerned people in New England, and Puritans, again largely in order to replace Harvard with a more orthodox college, formed what they called the Collegiate School, which later became Yale College later Yale University. But in both cases it was Puritan love of learning, but not love of learning abstracted just as an academic discipline, but love of learning first of all to make certain that the word of God was rightly preached.

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Speaker 2: Here’s Jeremy Walker with a story about two famous Puritans. John Owen, who was an academic advisor at the University of Oxford, a simple tinkerer, meaning a man who fixed his household utensils. John Bunyan, author of the book that for centuries was second only to the Bible in popularity and even today is number one on The Guardian’s one one hundred Best Novels of all Time, The Christian Allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress. Here’s Jeremy Walker.

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Speaker 3: Perhaps my favorite Owen story is from later on in his life. When Charles the Second is now on the throne, John Bunyan is coming down from Bedford to preach early in the morning outside of London, and John Owen is going out to listen to Bunyan preach. Now Owen moves into exalted circles. And it is said that King Charles the second asked Owen, why do you go to hear that Tinker prate? Why do you go to listen to that manual laborer chatter? And Owen replied, your majesty, if I could preach Christ the way that Tinker preaches Christ, I would willingly relinquish all my learning, And that, I think shows you the heart of the man I want to exalt Christ. That’s what he consecrates his learning too. And the better he can do that, the more ready he is to sacrifice anything else he is and has.

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Speaker 2: In sixteen sixty two, a new Act of Uniformity was established. Puritans were compelled to use the new Anglican Book of Common Prayer in its entirety, or else leave the ministry. More than two thousand Puritan preachers refused to take the oath and either resigned or were expelled from the church. Of England. Here’s theologian Stephen Lawson.

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Speaker 5: The trouble with preachers today is nobody wants to kill them anymore. The Puritans were so strong in the faith and willing to stand against the current of the day that they they were a different generation. They were willing to die if need be, for what they believed.

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Speaker 2: Jeremiah Burrows was one of these Puritan pastors who suffered persecution. Here’s Gloria Furman. She is the wife of a pastor, mother of four, missionary blogger, and author of four books.

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Speaker 4: It’s really easy to.

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Speaker 13: Pretend that you have a quiet and gentle heart, and it’s easy to pretend that you are content. All of these things are easy to pretend to be. But Jeremiah Burrows cuts straight to the heart when he talks about contentment, and he does it with such practical life illustrations that really stick with you and little things. Little illustrations that he uses throughout his book. The rare Jewel of Christian Contentment have stuck with me and they’ve been very easy for me to pass on to others, to my kids, to my friends when we talk about deep spiritual matters. One of my favorites is this one. A shoe may be smooth and neat outside, while inside it pinches the flesh. Outwardly, there may be great calm and stillness, yet within amazing confusion, bitterness, disturbance, and vexation. He goes on to say, if the attainment of true contentment were as easy as keeping quiet outwardly, it would not need much learning.

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Speaker 2: Born in East Windsor, Connecticut, Jonathan Edwards is widely considered the greatest theologian and philosopher of the Puritans. His preaching throughout New England, especially his famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, was the stimulator of the religious revival that became known as the Great Awakening. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God became so power popular and transformational in the American colonies that to this very day it is included in most American history textbooks. Here’s Stephen Nichols and pastor John Piper.

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Speaker 14: So.

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Speaker 10: Jonathan Edwards was a colonial minister’s life span from seventeen oh three to seventeen fifty eight.

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Speaker 2: He ended his life.

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Speaker 10: Very briefly for six active weeks as president of what was then the College of New Jersey.

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Speaker 4: Today it’s Princeton University. Remember, Martin Knowell.

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Speaker 15: Said Edward’s piety lived on in the Revivalist tradition, and Edward’s theology lived on in academic Calvinism, but his this or his phrase, his god entranced worldview didn’t live on. Well, that may be a little bit overstatement, but a god entranced worldview, And even for me, the word worldview doesn’t quite capture it. That sounds good, academic and head oriented. It’s a God entranced heart, and a God in trans stomach, and a God entranced ears and eyes, and all of life and experience is God in trans if.

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Speaker 2: Jonathan Edwards was the greatest American theologian. George Whitfield is America’s greatest preacher. Whitfield died and was buried on September thirtieth, seventeen seventy, according to his wishes, in a crypt under the pulpit of Old South Presbyterian Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Here’s Stephen Nichols.

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Speaker 10: One of the sermons that Whitfield preached a number of times is a great sermon called the Almost Christian. And being an almost Christian is not being a Christian at all. You can be baptized, you can be in a church and be a member of a church and not be.

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Speaker 4: A true Christian.

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Speaker 14: You’re just an almost Christian.

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Speaker 10: And that’s no Christian at all. It was about the Gospel. It was about preaching the Gospel with passion, because how does the hymn writer put it, wash me Savior, lest I die without the Gospel, there is no hope.

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Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Greg Hengler and some of the best theologians and historians in the country and in England tell the story of the Puritans. Particularly interesting the founding of Harvard College is a place to teach and study the Bible, and of course Pilgrim’s Progress, Jonathan Edwards Ascension and George Whitfield. And when we come back more of this remarkable story, the untold story of the Puritans. Here on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories and our own Greg Hangler telling the story of the Puritans, along with several renowned theologians and historians. Let’s pick up with Jeremy Walker.

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Speaker 3: Martin Lloyd Jones is one of the most recent people to have been described as the last of the Puritans for the same was said as Spurgeon, and perhaps of others before. Then Why are they called the last Puritan? Why do people in their day think that here you’ve got the Puritans reborn, at least temporarily. It’s not because they’re living in the past, but because they’re animated by the same spirit and committed to the same principles, and that His being and doing conditions all that we are and all that we do. And where you have a man who is governed by that principle, who is possessed of that spirit, you’re always going to have the last of the Puritans.

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Speaker 2: The Puritans were like all of us, deeply flawed. They had weaknesses, and they had blind spots. Here again is John Piper, the man who is most often considered a modern day Puritan, and Stephen Nichols.

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Speaker 15: Is discouraging when you’re heroes are found to have serious slave feat I love Edwards and read so much about Edwards that I know that Edwards owned at least one slave. That’s discouraging because you could wish that the principial issues that in the New Testament eventually overcame the temporary allowance of slaveholding in the New Testament. Nobody was kicked out of the church for being a slaveholder in the New Testament. That’s a serious issue. But seeds were being sown by the apostle Paul in the way he spoke to slave masters, and by him when he spoke to in the Book of Vhi Lehmann. Seeds were being sown that, together with the neighbor, love, command and do unto others as you’d have them do it, you would eventually become any sense that slavery was a Christian ideal or to be tolerated. And Edwards didn’t go there. I think the effect that should have on me is not to say, oh, nothing he wrote of any value anymore. I could get really bad out of shape right now start talking about today’s blindness. I’m going to be indicted.

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Speaker 4: I lose sleep over this.

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Speaker 15: What should I be doing more than I am doing for the cause of life and justice towards the unborn. So all that to say, I hope that the volumes of John Piper’s writings someday will not be thrown in the garbage dump because of my sense. I think I’ve seen some true things. If they haven’t gone as deep in me sanctified me as fully as they should. Then let that posterity say that, let them right the dark side of John Piper. But oh, I hope they’ll see that there were true things he said. Now that’s the way. I then go back and look at Edwards. I cannot deny that Edwards saw glory. That seeing glory did not produce a fully formed image of Christ in him discourages me. But when I look in the mirror, who am I to say? Well, people should listen to me right now while I’m talking, because I’ve been fully formed. You know, even if I am less tolerant of slavery than he was, I think Edwards outshines me in holiness in so many ways. You know, I don’t know if it helps, but I think of sanctification as kind of like an octopus eight arms, and each of those arms a different spiritual quality or virtue or fruit. And you can have a wonderfully mature arm of kindness and a really shriveled arm of discernment with regard to other people’s stupidity because you’re way too generous. And as you look at everybody’s octopus, some arms are really really growing and wonderful, and other arms are not and so when I think of Edwards, that arm was not well formed, but oh my, what he saw and what he was in so many areas was remarkable.

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Speaker 10: We see that Jonathan Edwards, Junior Edward’s son, who also went on to be a college president and a minister. He’s one of the writers, one of the first writers of anti slavery literature in New England, and so we see that as he grew up in Edwards and was impacted by Edwards, we see some of that. The doctrines of understanding nature of humanity and just compassion, we see that coming out even in Jonathan Edwards’s son.

00:33:18
Speaker 2: Here again is John Snyder and Rosaria Butterfield and Puritan author and theologian Mark Dever.

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Speaker 11: They cultivated a depth of understanding, a biblical depth, and a sensitivity of soul that only comes through a lifetime of concentrated devotion to God and paying the high cost of really applying that regardless of the cost to yourself. It’s that crystocentric holiness that I find invaluable.

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Speaker 16: They had a robust understanding of sin along with a comprehensive understanding of Christ’s mercy.

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Speaker 14: And what the Puritans had was a kind of superpower that we just don’t have. It’s called patience. They could stare and stare and stare and stare and stare at something in a way that we’re not used to doing in our intellectual, fast food age. We want to know, can be cash value? Can I have this in one sheet? You know, just pros and cons? What’s the bottom line? Well, you know, you could have the bottom line of the relationship with your wife and really miss the whole thing. There’s something about that relationship with your wife. There’s somebody in relationship with a friend. There’s some about your relation with God. And the Puritans, because of their patients, they expressed that in warm devotional language that’s clear and moving, and that’s been found by generation after generation after generation.

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Speaker 2: The Puritans were notorious for their ability to always keep eternity in view. They believe that being ready to die was the first step in learning to live. They knew they were pilgrims on a journey to a new world. Let’s conclude this story with these final words from John Piper.

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Speaker 15: I’d love to see an upsurge of passion for holiness. I think it’s there in a lot of younger pastors. But I think another branch are much more eager to look hip, look cool, look like they’ve watched the latest thing. They can use the latest lingo. And frankly, while that makes audiences laugh and think you’re kind of cool, it doesn’t do much eternal good. It won’t make any difference in five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years. What will make a difference in people’s lives when they’re dying that you were cool, give me a break. That will not make any difference. They will want you at their bedside if they know you’ve been walked with God, if you’ve been spending time in the presence of the living God and could say something to them in their need when their kid is dying or their wife is dying, when you can say something because they’ve seen you authentic in the pulpit, dealing with the Bible faithfully. And I just think the Puritans they tasted like that.

00:36:18
Speaker 14: They just tasted like that.

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Speaker 15: And they weren’t glib, they weren’t trying to be fitting in to their culture.

00:36:29
Speaker 1: And terrific work on the editing, production and storytelling by our own Greg Hangler and so many terrific contributors and theologians to hear from John Piper, one of America’s great theologians, Christian or not. To know this story of Christianity in America is to know the story of America, and not that it’s a Christian nation, but that it was a nation founded with many Christians among them, and of course great DEAs like Jefferson and Franklin, And of course religious tolerance pushed as first and foremost by the great George Washington writing that letter to the congregation in Rhode Island. Religious tolerance, but of course religion being the center of the foundational notion of self governance, How could a nation govern itself? John Adams said without religion. And by the way, the things that are covered here John Piper, looking back, of course at this great Jonathan Edwards, and yes he owned a slave. But presentism is what we try and get after here in our American stories. To judge people out of their times, well, we can only hope that one hundred years from now people aren’t judging us out of ours. And always we’re trying to contextualize and bring to life history. These were real people living in their times. They didn’t know future days. They were trying to make future days happen. My goodness, The story is about this cultivation of the biblical depth of understanding and the sensitivity of the soul, and in the end, the robust understanding of sin and Christ’s mercy. The story of the Puritans, the story in the end of how America got its beginnings. Here on our American stories.”