A Quest for Godliness

Many lovers of the Puritans posses the cultural irrelevance and kookiness of hardcore Trekies or Renaissance faire nuts. Going to a church led by a Puritan-obsessed pastor can be a bizarre experience as twenty-first century persons try their best to pretend they are in fact living in the seventeenth century with the exceptions of their clothing, sound system, and electric lights. To many more normal people, such practices seem just as disconnected from real life as learning to speak Elvish.  

Although I have long been an admirer of the Puritans from a distance, the bizarre practices of many who emulate Puritan forms as the means to the Puritans’s godliness have long caused me to keep the Puritans at arms length. J.I. Packer’s A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life finally proved to me that both my approach and the approach of the Puritan-ophile are wrong.

Both in secular history and Christian history, there is a tendency to portray the Puritans as being “so heavenly minded that they were of no earthly good.” In my public school education, the Puritans were portrayed as the enemies of Shakespeare, the hysterical witch-hunters of Salem, or the hypocritical victimizers of Hester Prynne. The only primary Puritan source that I recall reading in high school was Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” but even in my conservative school, it was derided as uncouth, judgmental, and, well, Puritanical.

Going to Boyce College was quite a different experience when it came to the study of the Puritans. I learned to better appreciate them and respect them, but even there I got the impression that, with a few exceptions, the Puritans were largely irrelevant. I know this was not the intention of my instructors, but this was the perception I received from the Puritans’s own book titles, which are about as long as the books themselves, and the reports that certain Puritan preachers spent decades preaching through books of the Bible. I thought of the Puritans as great men, great theologians, and great men of devotion, but largely irrelevant residents of an ivory tower.

Packer takes great pains to portray the Puritans as truly earthly saints—men of God who wanted to apply God’s truth to every area of their earthly life. Like Roman Catholic monks, Puritans sought a life wholly devoted to God, but, unlike Roman Catholic monasticism, the goal of Puritan “monasticism” was to live out piously in the context of normal human relationships. Rather than pursuing godliness by escaping the world, the Puritans pursued godliness in the world—in their countries, in their communities, in their churches, and in their families.

For the Puritans, no dichotomy between doctrine and godly living existed. The study of, writing about, and preaching of doctrine was important because right doctrine is the means to godly living. Due to this, the Puritans set a great example for us to follow. They were “physicians of the soul,” masters of application. They were not superficial but were penetrating in the way they applied the Word to life. They understood people—their motives, actions, and processes—much better than we do even with all our studies in psychology.

Because of this, the Puritans can aid us today as we attempt to apply the truth of Gospel to our own day and to the lives of people to whom we minister as Christians. Their wisdom should be valued by us today, and it is my hope to read many more Puritan works myself, not because I want to cloister myself away from the modern world but because I want to reach it. Let us imitate the Puritan heart and not merely their forms in a superficial way. Let us not sin against these brothers—these fathers rather—in the faith either by ignoring them or by making of them the Reformed pastor’s equivalent of nerdy, anti-social sci-fi obsession.