Puritanism, Admirable Or Foolish?
Today's picture of the Puritan, painted by modern liberals who sneer at puritan piety and ethics, is bleak indeed. According to them the Puritans were inhibited, profit loving, black-dressed hypocrites. (The black dress steeple-crown hat image is patently inaccurate as Puritans liked bright colors.) Religious liberals prefer our day of immoral permissiveness where man need not fear God and may choose his own forms of religious expression, if any.
The Puritans were morally self-disciplines. The resulting tranquility, lacking today, allowed the use of their vast energies and talents to be used constructively to everyone's benefit. Also, their religious expressions were very simple, shunning the empty ostentation so pleasing today. But there were reasons for such service:
"If the Puritan rejected the ancient pageantry of Catholic worship, it was not because of any dislike for beauty. He loved beauty in women and children and, as his works prove, achieved beauty in silverware, household furniture, and architecture. He rejected ritual as a distorting screen erected by man between him and his maker. Stained-glass windows, images of the saints, organ music, and Gregorian chants, he thought, threw a jeweled, sensuous curtain between the worshippers and the almighty" (Morrison, The Oxford History of the American People, p. 62).
The Puritan rejected organ music in worship, vast organization, and great ceremony not because of cantankerousness, but because of worthy aims; to emphasize what God has done, rather than what man can do. Jesus had emphasized spiritual worship (John 4:24), and the physical was de-emphasized in the New Testament worship (Acts 17:24-25). The Puritans proposed to worship as early Christians did:
"Their learned men combed through the Epistles and Acts of the Apostles to discover exactly how the primitive churches were organized...Their aim was to restore 'the church unspotted, pure'...to get back to Apostolic times when the men who had seen Jesus plain were still alive" (Ibid, pp. 61-62).
Rather than sneer at puritan "inhibition," we would do well to realize we are its debtors. "Puritanism was a cutting edge which hewed liberty, democracy, humanitarianism, and universal education out of the...American wilderness. (Ibid., p.74)
So, the Puritans were morally strict, and simple and spiritual in worship. They were seeking to restore in their lives the ancient virtues and practices of the New Testament, the will of Christ. The immoral and impious of today seek neither, though they may profess to be religious. Some content themselves with the moral precepts of Christ while ignoring the conduct he ordained for collective service, supposing the latter inconsequential. One might as successfully try to worship as he directs without living as he directs. Since he has spoken on both subjects, the puritan aim was consistent; to restore both the life and the service of the New Testament. Though there were practical and beneficial consequences from puritan practices, we find principally admirable their aims. How pusillanimous the modern concept of religion: "You believe what you wish, I'll believe what I wish, and we'll all please God anyhow somehow." Such will never be able to lead men back to what saves, the gospel of Christ.
If what Jesus revealed to the world was valid in his day, and an attempt to restore it was valid in the days of our Puritan ancestors, it is no less valid today simply because men so soon forget and think they prefer otherwise. What men prefer does not establish truth, what God prefers, does; in moral practice as well as in worshipful expression. We seek not to restore puritanism, but to be what it sought to restore, the church of Christ.
— P.O. Box 95, Zion, Illinois 60099