Puritanism: A Legacy Disdained by Historians and Sullied with the Devil’s Victory in Salem
Notes
1 Ironically, the modern appreciation of Jonathan Edwards and the whole Puritan legacy was triggered by the masterful work of the Harvard historian (and unbeliever) Perry Miller. He began writing on the Puritans during the first decades of the 20th Century with great insight and evenhandedness. See especially his masterful work: Jonathan Edwards (New York, William Sloam Associates, 1949).
2 Hellenization refers to the melding of Greek philosophy and attitudes into the Gospel. This produced an over emphasis on doctrinal/philosophical definitions, and over emphasis on celibacy as a primary virtue. Hellenized Christian theology inflated the meaning of heresy to include any philosophical deviation from the norm, as for instance claiming that Coptic Christians were heretics because they affirmed a differing philosophical understanding of how Jesus was both man and God. For a scholarly anthology of Hellenization in Christianity see: Wendy E. Helleman, (ed.). Hellenization Revisited: Shaping a Christian Response Within the Greco-Roman World (Lanham: University Press of America, 1994). The seminal work contrasting Hebrew and Greek (Hellenized) ways of thought is: Thorleif Boman’s Hebrew Thought Compared With Greek, Translated by Jules Moreau, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961).
3 Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans As They Really Were (Zondervan, 1990). Preview: books.google.com/books?id=M0_ktxTHhdkC
4 J.I Packer. A Quest for Godliness, chapter six, “The Puritans as Interpreters of Scripture.”
5 For this view, and a wide variety of pro-Jewish, prot-Zionest views of Puritan theologians and writers see: Richard W. Cogley, “The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Restoration of Israel in the “Judo-Centric” Strand of Puritan Millenarianism,” Church History, 72:2 (June 2003) 304-332. It may well be that the Jewish state will have a major role in overthrowing Islam, which would make the Puritan writers acutely prophetic. Stay tuned.
6 On Cromwell’s view of the Jews see: George Drake, “The Ideology of Oliver Cromwell,” Church History, 35:3 (Summer, 1966), 259-272.
7 On this topic see: Keith l Sprunger, “English and Dutch Sabbataranism and the Development of Puritan Social Theology (1600-1660), Church History, 51:1 (March 1982), 24-38. For a contemporary view of why Sabbath rest is a “good” that should not be skipped see: Judith Shulovitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (New York: Random House: 2010).
8 Most readers will remember the movie “Chariots of Fire,” which documents how the Olympic contender, and later missionary, Eric Liddell, would not run his event on a Sunday.
9 See Amy Julia Becker, “Secular People Need Sabbath, too.” Her Meneutics, Nov. 18, 2010. Becker cites secular articles and books that laud different forms of Sabbath rest.
10 On this issue see Leland Ryken’s Worldly Saints: chapter 3, “Marriage and Sex,” and Daniel M. Doriani, “The Puritan, Sex, and Pleasure,” Westminster Theological Journal, 53:1 (Spring 1991), 125-43. See also, Edmond S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religious and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England, rev. ed . (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), chapter 2 “Husband and Wife.”
11For example, the great Catholic cannon law codification done by Gratian (12th C.) cites instances when normal sex between married person may be venially sinful, see “On marriage” at: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/gratian1. How times change! Thankfully, in the last decades the Catholic Church has developed a splendidly biblical theology of sexuality which in many ways is more insightful and balanced than anything in the Protestant and Evangelical camp. On this surprising turn see the article the recent issue of Christianity Today, the lead American Evangelical magazine: Matthew Lee Anderson’s “God has a Wonderful Plan for Your Body,” (posted, August 12, 2011).
12 Ryken, Worldly Saints, 47.
13 See: C. S Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: the Clarendon Press, 1936), and Ryken, Worldly Saints. 50-51
14 John Milton, Tetrachardon 2:597
15 John Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk 4, lines 741ff.
16 Cited in Morgan, Puritan Family, 61-62.
17 This section is mostly derived from the excellent study by Louis B. Wright, “The Whole Duty of the Citizen,” in: Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935.). See Also Perry Mill, “The Protestant Ethic,” in: Michael McGiffert, Puritanism and the American Experience, (Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1996).
18 Wright, “Whole Duty,” 161-162.
19 Ibid., 247.
20 On how Puritan theology morphed from Medieval anti-merchant to pro-merchant see: Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandise: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
21 William Perkins, A Treatise of the Vocations or Callings of Man, in: The Works of William Perkins, ed., Ian Breward, (Applefond: The Sutton Courtney Press, 1970), 450.
22Deirdre N. Mccloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economists Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
23 The relationship between Puritanism (and Calvinism) and the economic blossoming of Northern Europe and the United States was first recognized by the German sociologist Max Weber in his seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
24 See the discussion of Miller’s distorted analysis fully described in: David C. Downing’s excellent articles, “The Mystery of Spirit Possession” parts 1 and 2, Books and Culture, Jan. 1, 1997.
25 Jeffrey Burton Russell, “Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany,” Church History, 76:2 (June, 2007) 411-413.
26 Peter Jenkins, “Notes From the Global Church,” Christian Century, 125 (Dec. 2, 2008), 45.
27 See the multiple works by Jeffrey Burtan Russell, especially his Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1972).
28 Russell, Witchcraft.
29 Isabel Iribarren, “From Black Magic to Heresy: A doctrinal leap in the pontificate of John XXII,” Church History, 75 (March 2007), 32-60.
30 Many of the saints and mystics had the gifts of the Spirit, including discernment of spirits, although that Pentecostal terminology was not used. See the classic work by the Jesuit theologian Augustin Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1910), modern editions available. Unfortunately, the gifts of the Spirit were unknown in normal parish life, nor were they understood as a repeatable and normal gifting for Christian life, as in discerning witchcraft.
31 Irving Hexham, “The Invention of Modern Witchcraft,” Books and Culture (Jan/Feb 2004).
32 Chadwick Hansen, Witchcraft in Salem (New York: G. Braziller, 1969). Available in paperback. Hansen passed away in 2011.
Category: Church History, Pneuma Review, Summer 2013
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