CTC 62

From Reformed Forum Wiki

Christ the Center
Episode	62
Guest(s)	Rev. James O’Brien
Panel	Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy, Nick Batzig, Camden Bucey
Puritan Theology

Length: 52:51
Date: March 27, 2009

[edit] Description

Rev. James O’Brien, pastor of Reedy River PCA, joins with the Christ the Center panel for a discussion of all things Puritan. Rev. O’Brien shares his wisdom gained from years of reading and wrestling with various Puritan authors. He highlights how the Puritans should be read, who should be read, and why they should be read. This is an episode you will not want to miss.

[edit] Panel

• Jeff Waddington
• Jim Cassidy
• Nick Batzig
• Camden Bucey

[edit] Featured Guest

Rev. James O'Brien, pastor of Reedy River PCA shared his wisdom gained from years of reading and wrestling with various Puritan authors. He highlights how the Puritans should be read, who should be read, and why they should be read.

[edit] O'Brien meets the Puritans

• John Owen: The Mortification of Sin and Temptation (11:54)
  • How does this man know me so well?

[edit] What other Puritans are exceptional in your mind?

Gallery of famous seventeenth-century Puritan theologians: Thomas Gouge, William Bridge, Thomas Manton, John Flavel, Richard Sibbes, Stephen Charnock, William Bates, John Owen, John Howe, Richard Baxter.

• John Owen was the major one.
• Thomas Manton is wonderful.(13:14)
• John Bunyon-- loved him, especially his allegories.
• Jonathan Edwards-- extremely penetrating and helpful.
• Matthew Mead The Almost Christian "just about killed me".

• Thomas Shepard: The Ten Virgins "just about killed me".
  • But there came a time in my life where I came to understand grace more in an experiential level, and I found Ten Virgins to be "utterly delicious"(13:58)-- just a marvelous book, full of Christ. But it has a reputation for being very severe.
    • E.g., "Rabbi Duncan's" comment that he wishes he were as good as one of Shepard's bad virgins.
  • These books are often read in a legal way and therefore get a legal reputation.
• Spurgeon was a great help getting into the Puritans.

[edit] Thomas Shepard as an example

Nick: tell us about how Shepard was not just someone in a tiny place in a country village somewhere just writing books.

• Who
  • An English Puritan who came to New England to escape persecution under Archbishop Laud, during the same general time period as Thomas Hooker.
    • While in England, Shepard and Hooker were considered two of the greatest among the Puritan brotherhood.
    • They fled West, in contrast to John Brown of Wamphray and William Ames, who fled to Holland.
• Ten Virgins is about the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, showing the difference betweeen the sincere believer and the hypocritical believer/confessor.
  • There are various signs of each one.
  • Jonathan Edwards in Religious Affections cites this more than any other work.
• Very typical of Puritans writings. There is a vast corpus of writings about true vs. false conversions; sincere confessors vs. hypocritical confessors and how to know the difference.(16:05)

Nick: very much in the vein of John Cotton and Cotton Mather and the New England Puritans.

James O'Brien: there's some controversy as to whether John Cotton is where Shepard and, later, Edwards would be. There's some question as to whether he was less for signs of conversion.

[edit] Understanding the context of the Puritans when reading them today

This gets a bad name in our day-- signs of conversion. And yet it can't get a bad name, because 2 Peter 1 is all about making your calling and election sure, by adding to your faith a whole series of virtues and the like.

[edit] Breaking the Icy Hearts

One of the things you find reading Puritans, Nick, is that people read them incorrectly. They don't understand the audience. When Shepard is writing about the Ten Virgins, he's not writing them for the broken-hearted person who's desperately fearing that Christ wouldn't save him because he's been so wicked. On the contrary, he's writing this for cold, formal Christians. People who would never think of being out of church, but also have no vital relationship with Christ. How do you break through that icy heart?? Well, these guys took sledge hammers to it! But if you don't understand that's what they're doing, you can read them as incredibly severe. But if you read them as men trying to break through a formal religion, they're much better.

[edit] Doctrines in Their Perfection, Not Necessarily Minimum Levels of Achievement

There's another thing that's important when trying to read the Puritans and understand them. Often in their treatises they're giving you the perfections of the doctrine-- the doctrine in its fullness. I did not understand this until I read John Owen. He has a discourse on how much conviction is necessary before a person is warranted to come to Jesus. That's a classic case of Puritan conscience, and it's one of the things that gets blasted by a lot of reformed people today as being excessively introspective and the like.(18:12)

Owen's answer is essentially, if you're sick, go to the doctor-- just like any of us would do. He mentions those who are troubled because they don't have all seven of the steps of repentance. Well, that's a reference to Thomas Hooker's great book on repentance. Owen doesn't mention Hooker by name, but he says that the thesis that there are seven steps of repentance-- that's repentance in its perfection, but something much less than that is true and sincere and sufficient. Well, that changes everything. Because you hear of people, "Well, I only had five of the marks of repentance-- I couldn't come to Christ". But that wasn't what the book was designed to do. But the book was designed to show you how far you can go in repentance by God's grace, and to not stop short in your long Christian pilgrimage of seeking deeper and deeper repentance (19:19).

[edit] Bene Esse

You must remember that many Puritan books are about the bene esse-- a well-being of the soul, not what is required to be a true, sincere Christian.

Jeff: Jim, this is excellent, because, I'm afraid, many of us have read even Edwards, and go away thinking, "who of us could measure up to the standard.

James O'Brien: I remember well a man who is now well-known in the PCA, who was at Pittsburgh Seminary. One week with [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gerstner Dr. Gerstner] we read Hypocrites Deficient in the Duty of Prayer -- two sermons by Edwards -- and he walked around the campus that night despairing of being ever able to think of himself as a Christian.

But you also have to remember that Edwards is a classic in this. Sermons that were reprinted in the various four-volume, ten-volume sets, were picked because they spoke to the revival.(20:27) In the Revival, Edwards was hammering hard on those formal Christians in his congregation. So they're not representative of Edwards' entire corpus of preaching, but they do represent a particular emphasis, namely to awaken those who were asleep. And a sermon like Hypocrites Deficient in the Duty of Prayer will most certainly awaken you! I'm not sure that old George Mueller wouldn't have found himself in despair.

Nick: Jim, I remember reading True Grace Distinguished from the Devil's, and thinking how could I ever know if I had true grace or not. But you know, it still drove me to Christ-- not into a hole where I sat there despondent, not doing anything. I wanted to know that I had true grace. I wanted to know that I had embraced Christ. So I think it's helpful for our listeners who have not read as many Puritans to know ... and you taught me this, Jim... that half our our Lord's ministry on Earth was uncovering hypocrisy. (21:42)

O'Neil: It was an enormous theme. The Puritans were very Biblical in that respect.

Nick: Right. So rather than be afraid of that, it was Spurgeon who was once asked "how do you reconcile promises and warnings", and he said "oh, you don't need to reconcile friends." The warnings keep the elect on the narrow path.

O'Neil: That's right, and we need that encouragement. We're prone to wander, Lord I feel it, as the hymn says.

[edit] Warnings and Comfort

But that helps explain why certain Puritans are admired. Richard Sibbes-- the great comforter. He's not writing the "severe" books-- his are much more consoling than Shepard, Edwards et al. But you can't pit Sibbes vs. Hooker for instance. They were brothers who loved each other and loved each other's work. You have to understand the audience. And you can understand the audience by whether the book scares the bejeebers out of you. If it does, then it was written for the cold formalist. Remember, when the Puritans come into the pulpits of England there are a fair number of people who are committed to Roman Catholicism-- secretly-- and as in all general societies the vast middle was like "Um. I don't know what's true. And like I just go to church."

Now the Puritans are trying to bring these people to an understanding that they have to have a vital relationship with Christ, inaugurated by faith, and expressed through godly behavior, prayer and worship. So, they're facing a world that is used to the formalities of the Roman Catholic ritual, they're used to the world in which people are still fairly ignorant of their Bibles. It's only a hundred years before that you started getting English translations. And they were hard to come by. So the Puritans have a massive educational project to do and to bring people to realize what's involved in being a sincere Christian according to the scripture require them to touch on many things.

We live in a culture that is very comfortable with Evangelicalism-- we take a lot of that for granted. But the Puritans couldn't.(24:06) And when they visited their people, they realized just how little they knew.

[edit] Puritan Canopy

Camden: Let me ask you about the thesis of [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Noll Mark Noll] in America's God. He's talking about Puritans in America, and he brings up this notion of the Puritan Canopy. And that's related to what you're mentioning. Their world and life view touches on all sorts of things. The Puritan ideal was a massive project. Could you address that or talk about their community and how they saw the Christian life not being compartmentalized but impacting everything they did?

[edit] Manuals of Piety

James O'Brien: Well, the Puritans are remarkable, for one thing, for writing manuals of piety. They're actually provoked to it by a Roman Catholic, Robert Parsons, who writes a treatise on how to live a godly life from a Roman position in the late 1590's. (25:00) Richard Rogers, a great Puritan, wrote a work called the Seven Treatises. This is a magnificent book if it ever gets reprinted.

But they wrote these manuals to give you a comprehensive view on how to live the Christian life.(25:58) We have Robert Bolton's Directions for a Godly Life published by Soli Deo years ago. Sprinkle brought out another one of these books that Owen commended.

[edit] Rethinking the Christian Life from the Ground Up-- Vocation

The thing about the reformation in general and Puritanism in particular, was that they had to re-think Christianity from the ground up. It had become so corrupted and had become so formal -- that's not to say there wasn't vital godliness in the Middle Ages. Absolutely there was. Even in the church of their day. After all, people did join the Reformation. There were godly people running around. But to have to remove the sacramental system, to remove the priestly system, to start to re-think how to worship God, what to believe about God, how to conduct yourself in all your calling. This was so important for the Puritans, you have a variety of callings. You're a man, you're a citizen, you're a father(26:34), you're a son, you're a worker or an owner-- there are many callings. The same for women. And you had to devote a sufficiency of time to every calling that you had. You couldn't neglect one because you had others. And so it brought balance into their lives. It helped them to remember that they had many obligations (27:00) before the Lord, and there's a lot of Puritan work on how to fulfill your callings. So it does touch all of your life. But Calvin, Luther, the post-reformation theologians, and then the Puritans preeminantly -- the great pastors of the Reformation.

Re-thinking the Christian life from the ground up. What an enormous project! And what grace they had from the Lord.

[edit] Good Contemporary Guides on How to Read the Puritans

Jeff: You've pointed out some potential pitfalls in reading the Puritans. Any outstanding volumes to help us today to read them? Being aware of the context into which they were speaking.

James O'Brien: There are two seriously long essays by J.I. Packer that I would consider fundamental. As a preface to the first volume of Richard Baxter's Practical Works [the four volumes were reprinted by Soli Deo, and that portion is now owned by Reformation Heritage] and if there was only one book to buy from a Puritan it would be William Baxter's Christian Directory. It is just phenomenal, but be prepared to be overwhelmed. Packer's essay is on how the Puritans are so valuable.

And then Packer also has a fine essay at the beginning of his volume on essays on puritanism-- The Quest for Godliness. It's a fine article on what makes the Puritans so special.

[edit] And Don't Forget the Westminster Standards

They aren't merely statements of reformed theology. They are a quintessential statement of Puritanism.

When Martin Bucer, the reformer of Strasbourg, the friend and mentor of Calvin, late in his life has to leave Strasbourg, and he goes to England at the invitation of any number of people. He teaches and continually emphasizes that theology is always practical; theology is for life, for living.

New book out by Bucer on the Pastoral Calling (??? Concerning the True Care of Souls)

And then you get William Perkins in one of his great books, beginning with this definition: "Theology is the science [look up Richard Muller on 'scientia' i.e., disciplined study ] of living unto God. It's a wonderful definition.

And William Ames picks it up in his Marrow of Theology, and you see it all over the Puritans.

Well, the Westminster Standards are precisely that. They're a confession and a catechism on how we are to live unto God. When you read all the commentaries -- even Robert Shaw, that I like, but also A.A. Hodge and-- well, you just read the various commentaries that are out there. Almost all of them focus on the doctrinal discussions, which are many and weighty, but a good half of the confession and especially the catechisms, with the exposition of the law and the Lord's Prayer, explain how you're to feel-- the affections-- what you are to desire and how you are to desire, and what you are to fear and to avoid.

And they deal with the will. What are you to do. And all of our commentaries focus on what you are to think! And it's why ruling elders in particular and many of our ministers find the standards not to be all that helpful. Ya, we read them, we don't have any problems with them although we don't have a clue what half of them meant, but it certainly isn't relevant.

But this is a great fault in how we approach the standards. They are all about how to feel, and what to desire, and what not to desire, and what to do. They are marvelous in that.

[edit] The Affections

Jeff: Since we're on this track, talk to us about the affections.

James O'Brien: The Pilgrims bring to us, and we desperately need in contemporary reformed theology in my opinion a sound psychology. I don't mean by that something like our modern psychologists. But the old meaning of psychology, which is an analysis of how the soul functions; how the mind functions.

Now, the Puritans will often talk about the mind(32:26) and the affections and the will. In Edwards you get a true synthesis-- that it's one soul thinking, desiring, and then choosing. In fact, it's important to remember that the will is simply the affections, as Jonathan Edwards puts it, in a heightened state of arousal. When your desires are sufficiently heightened, you choose.

There was an important modern historian who has argued that the great contribution of Edwards was to distinguish the will from the affections, but in his great book on the Religious Affections, on the first page he says -- or maybe it's his book on the Freedom of the Will-- that the will is simply the expression of the affections. It is the affections in action.

But so important, Biblical Christianity always starts first with the mind. You know, Paul is always praying that you would have a deeper understanding, but understanding is never an end in itself. Understanding is always meant to fill you with love, which is desire. We desire what we love. And we fear what we hate. And so you have two sides of the same coin. (33:37) So what the Puritans so brilliantly give us is an analysis of how truth is transformed into desire, and desire is what drives us in our actions.

[edit] Puritans on Meditating

The Puritans have written dozens of treatises on how to meditate on scripture. And they constantly say that it's not enough to read the Word and hear the Word. And today people say "I've read my chapter of the Bible for today. I'm a good Christian." They check it off the list and on they go. And they haven't really profited any. But the Puritans emphasized meditating. They used the image continually of a cow chewing its cud. It chews it, sends it down and brings it back up and chews it again to get everything out of it. So for the Puritans' devotional legacy, read your Bible-- however much -- or remember the points of the sermon, and then think about them. Roll it around. Ask questions of it. Just focus your attention on it. Ask 'why?'. Not that you'll learn more, but that your heart will be stirred, and the embers of faith and zeal and love will be kindled and fired and you'll rise up ready to serve the Lord Jesus on that given day.

So, meditation is huge for the Puritans.(35:00) And again, meditation takes knowledge-- reading, study-- and fuels affection. Today, this is so vital because in the anti-intellectualism that's been growing in America for 200 years in the kind of emotionalism of the modern age and the spirit of the age as is so evident in charismaticism, the mind is neglected and we go straight not to the affections, but to the emotions, and emotions are light and frothy and frivolous. They are titillating-- not satisfying. And so you can go into a church where there's great 'praise' music and people are swayin'...

I remember a minister's daughter who had a very troubled marriage and difficult teens who used to say to me (she lived out of town but I would see her occasionally), "Oh, Pastor, when I'm in church and I've got my hands raised and I'm swayin' and singin' I'm so happy. But by the time we get to the car in the parking lot, it's all gone."

Well, if the benefit you get from worship is gone by the time you get to the parking lot, it wasn't nothin'! It's stimulated by artificial means, bypassing the mind, not connecting to the affections, that are like the furnace that burns long rather than a match that burns quickly.

We need to get back to truth, truth pressed home to the conscience, so that the heart is stirred so that people have a continual fire for the Lord Jesus when they face temptation, when they face the myriad of disappointments and painful things in this life.

[edit] Christology

Nick: Could you tell us about some of the volumes that the Puritans produced on christology? The Puritans didn't break up their "sciences of theology" quite the same as we do. But they had a robust Biblical theology and Christocentricity. Could you tell us about some of the better volumes about Christ which would help stir up the emotions for him?

James O'Brien: When you talk about Biblical theology, I remember Jim Dennison. He was the librarian at Westminster West, brought us the Turretin volumes and is a great proponent of Biblical theology. I remember Jim when he preached like the Puritans-- elaborate sermons on half of a verse when he was much younger. He has moved more into a Biblical theology perspective. And they've started a seminary up in Seattle. But I remember Jim saying to me very clearly one time, that some of the best Biblical theological exegesis he ever found was in Matthew Henry. And that's what you'd expect. The Puritans were fully acquainted with the fact that the Old Testament was thoroughly full of Christ. And so I think Matthew Henry is fabulous, and of course his father Phillip was in the very heart of the Puritan movement, and Matthew comes a generation afterwards.

John Owen's first volume, on the glory of Christ, is unsurpassed. It's just magnificent. And then Volume two deals with communing with the Father and the Son and the Spirit, and the special communion you can have with each person of the Godhead. So that's a nice balance of things.

Frankly, Thomas Goodwin on Christ the Mediator, and that shorter work that Soli Deo brought out is just the most healing, soothing thing. When I read Thomas Goodwin-- and I can be a bit morose; the legal spirit is never far, always crouching at the door, ready to devour me -- I just know that Jesus is willing to forgive you. You can trust him; you can come to him, and that he will in no wise cast you out.

Now you can get that in Shepard and Hooker and some of the so-called "severe" Puritans, but Goodwin is phenomenal. Of course, anything by Sibbes on Christ-- and there are all sorts of things in his works.

[edit] Puritan Works Available Free and Online!

James O'Brien: Do your hearers know how much Puritan literature is available free online? If you go to Google Books, you can get everything published by the Scottish 19th century publisher Nichols. And all of the sets brought out by Banner of Truth.

Also, archive.org was once Microsoft's answer to Google. Microsoft has turned it loose and it's now a non-profit. It has many works that Google doesn't. The Librarian of the Princeton Theological Seminary Library brought in archive.com. Now you can get, for instance, all the the books that were owned by Warfield and Hodge. There are also some websites with lists, but they don't come close to having everything.

[edit] Authors Online

David Clarkson.

All of Manton

All of Edwards

All of Bunyon

If you don't like reading Baxter's four volumes in double-column, small-font print, his 25 volumes of Practical Works are available online.

Oliver Heywood. What a lovely writer. If you're just beginning Puritanism, Thomas Watson is great, but Watson isn't all that disciplined as a writer. It's as if he looks in his kitchen and finds whatever is left over and throws all of it in and cooks it. It's lovely, but all over the place!

Camden: He's like a proto-blogger!

Nick: A really good proto-blogger!

O'Neil: A really good one, yes, indeed!

Olive Heywood is wonderful. 5 volumes which you can find online. It's not going to be reprinted I guess in our life times. Very accessible, and like Watson, very pithy-- good at turning a phrase (like Dr. Gerstner's saying that we're justified by faith alone but not by a faith that's alone).

If you want something a little more awesome-- Ezekiel Hopkins. Three volumes available online. Wonderful. Clear. Unimaginative but eminently clear summaries of discussions of theology. (E.g., standard discussion of covenant of works, covenant of grace, etc.)

Jeremiah Burroughs of course, when you want to move up to something a little more weighty but still accessible. (43:30)

Most people don't know about William Bridge. Five volumes for Soli Deo but also online. Bridge is so full of Christ that you just burst reading it! William Bridge MAY be my [O'Brien's] favorite Puritan.

Thomas Manton. He's extraordinary.

Richard Sibbes.

People don't know how wonderful Swineg (?) is. I've had his volumes for 25 years and I've just started to read him on the incomparableness of God. It's an incomparable treatment of God!

William Bates-- a great Puritan, universally regarded. 4 volumes. Again, every treatise has this magnificent digest of a large discussion, and you just can't imagine how clear... He's a lot better than Hopkins. He's more profound than Hopkins. How clear, and how full in a very small space!

I've got to mention one more. A lot of people know Joseph Alleine for [http://books.google.com/books?id=Kp9JAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=An+Alarm+to+the+Unconverted&ei=W1HTScveB4eyyQTS5fG_Cg&client=firefox-a#v=onepage&q&f=false An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners. Banner has it out. His brother Richard Alleine-- an amazing writer. Soli Deo brought out his Instructions for Heartwork. Anyone reading Richard Alleine will be astounded at how profound he is.

Actually, any of these men. Full of Christ, just full of Christ!

[edit] Lesser-known and harder-to-find

Nick: Tell us some of the hard-to-find, the lesser-known Puritans. Some of our listeners have Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Camden: If you're a seminary or college student, you probably do have access to EEBO through your school.

James O'Brien: Not in South Carolina!

A lot of people don't know about Spurgeon's (46:25) Commenting and Commentaries. It was a book he published on recommendations. A fabulous book. If you want to know what the Puritans wrote on the books of the Bible, get C&C. It has been republished by Solid Ground. It's also very funny-- Spurgeon is very witty.

Nick: That's also available on Google Books and on other websites.

O'Brien: I think Ambrose is a very fine author. Wonderful treatment on Christian warfare. The Life of Christ, A wonderful treatise on looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith (47:15) and on regeneration. And some stuff on angels that's quite nice.

Joel Beeke recently said that at the moment his favorite Puritan is Anthony Burgess. Major works on justification and original sin and 2 volumes on the Spiritual life.

Nick:  ? A Glimpse of Christ??? ??? William Dyer??? (Nick, please help me here.)

[edit] The Sabbath

[edit] Nicholas Bownd

[edit] Sabbatum Veteris et Novi Testamenti

James O'Brien: Nicholas Bownd Sabbathum Veteris et Novi Testamenti. The Puritans were strict sabbatharians. They called it a delight. They didn't think it a burden to spend the whole day with God. They thought it marvelous and fabulous that they HAD TO put away everything and be with God. Bownd was the son-in-law of Richard Greenhouse, the great grand father of Puritanism wrote on the Sabbath.

(Is this true? Am I spelling correctly? Did Greenhouse write on the Sabbath?)

[edit] All following books build on Bownd

All the following books on the Sabbath are just commentaries on Bownd. He makes an elaborate case for the O.T. and N.T., fully conscious of continuity and discontinuity between the covenants, for sabbath keeping.

[edit] They Lost the War But Won The Sabbath Battle in the Anglosphere

It generated a fair amount of opposition and defense, but what was so remarkable was that even though the Puritans lost (e.g., 1660, Charles II and 1662, the Great Ejection, where Charles II gets them to leave the Church of England so they don't violate their consciences), Sabbath keeping was embraced in the English-speaking world.

[edit] Owen

If you can't find Bownd, there's Owen's Dissertation on the Sabbath. He says there are 18 difficult questions you have to answer to come to a Biblical view of the Sabbath. (Owen's first 2 volumes on Hebrews are discourses on various topics so he doesn't have to deal with the topics in the commentary).

[edit] Thomas Shepard

Thomas Shepard on Theses Sabbaticae. Very penetrating. Highly readable.

Sony eReader will be able to use Google Books.

[edit] Notes

<references />