Learning From the Puritans Archives

Learning from God’s Giants

By Andrew YoungFebruary 2, 2017Learning From the Puritans

Back in the early 1990’s when our family was living in Australia, a pastor friend came to me one day ablaze with excitement. “There’s a new book in the bookstores,” he said, “which is worth selling your shirt to get.” He was talking about Jim Packer’s A Quest for Godliness – the Puritan Vision of the Christian Life[1]. I duly bought the book and found it was every bit as good as my friend said that it would be. I. Packer, one of the most influential evangelical theologians of the last century (and of this one too), has been an […]

Integrated Living

By Andrew YoungFebruary 2, 2017Learning From the Puritans

It’s worth saying as we begin this new series that it’s important not to idolise the Puritans. We can easily do that by treating them as though they were the ultimate standard and perfect practitioners of life. But of course, that honour belongs to our Lord alone. The Puritans, at best, are people who can teach and inspire us by their efforts to live for God in their generation. J.I. Packer believes we can learn from the integrated character of their daily lives. Two things are implied by this expression – plurality on the one hand, and harmonious unity on […]

Spiritual Experience

By Andrew YoungFebruary 2, 2017Learning From the Puritans

J.I. Packer believes that a second way we can learn from the Puritans is from the quality of their spiritual experience. Communion with God was their passion, the defining characteristic of their spirituality. We can learn from them in this regard. Packer identifies two things in particular worth noting. First was the Puritan commitment to meditating on the Scriptures. They viewed the Bible as “God’s word of instruction on divine-human relationships,” and through it, they sought both to know God himself and how they were to live. To this end, they were not content to read the Scriptures, but they […]

Puritan Activism

By Andrew YoungFebruary 2, 2017Learning From the Puritans

J.I. Packer describes the Puritans as people with “a passion for effective action” (A Quest for Godliness, p. 25). He thinks we can learn from them in this regard. When he speaks of the Puritan “passion for effective action,” Packer is referring to the way the Puritans took action to put their ideals into practice. In this sense, they were thoroughgoing activists. They were men and women with dreams – dreams of what a godly family, society and church should be like – but they weren’t just dreamy idealists. They did something to realise their dreams. Committed as they were […]

Puritan Family Life (1)

By Andrew YoungFebruary 2, 2017Learning From the Puritans

“It is hardly too much to say,” J.I. Packer writes, “that the Puritans created the Christian family in the English-speaking world” (A Quest for Godliness, p. 25). If what he says is true, there’s great value in studying what he calls their “program for family stability.” For much of the foundation, they laid for the Christian family has been eroded in recent times. Packer notes three important features of Puritan family ethics. The first of these is their ethic of marriage. He has this to say on the way the Puritans approached finding a marriage partner, and then set out […]

Puritan Family Life (2)

By Andrew YoungFebruary 2, 2017Learning From the Puritans

Two other strengths of Puritan family life excited J.I. Packer’s admiration. The first of these was their patience under hardship. Life was hard in Puritan times. Packer describes it as an existence “of routine discomforts, rudimentary medicine without pain-killers, frequent bereavements (most families lost at least as many children as they reared), an average life expectancy of just under thirty years, and economic hardship for almost all…” (A Quest for Godliness, p. 26). Yet in spite of such difficulties, he notes that the Puritans “resisted the all-too-familiar temptation to relieve pressure from the world by brutality at home, and laboured […]

The Value of a Soul

By Andrew YoungFebruary 2, 2017Learning From the Puritans

We can learn from the Puritans, J.I. Packer believes, in their appreciation of human worth. They viewed each person as having great value and unique individuality. Their appreciation of the worth of individuals grew out of their thinking about God. They saw each human person as someone God had made in his own image. Moreover, they believed that he had made them for a special friendship with himself, a special purpose, and for a special destiny. This inevitably led them to believe that every human being was of immeasurable value. Packer puts it this way: “Through believing in a great […]

Church Renewal

By Andrew YoungFebruary 2, 2017Learning From the Puritans

In this the last of our weekly insights on lessons from the Puritans, we examine what J.I. Packer calls the Puritan ideal of church renewal. It is fitting to end our series on this note, for it could be said that at heart, Puritanism was a movement of church reform. It began with earnest, spiritually minded members of the Church of England wanting to see their church change. The earliest Puritans (called Brownists) wanted reform in both outward and inward aspects of the Church’s life. They wanted elements of the order and practice of the church brought back closer to […]