On Monday, June 4, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 in favor of Colorado cake artist Jack Phillips in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

Image: Marcie Douglass

Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Kristen Waggoner said this about the June 4 ruling:

Jack serves all customers; he simply declines to express messages or celebrate events that violate his deeply held beliefs. Creative professionals who serve all people should be free to create art consistent with their convictions without the threat of government punishment. Government hostility toward people of faith has no place in our society, yet the state of Colorado was openly antagonistic toward Jack’s religious beliefs about marriage. The court was right to condemn that. Tolerance and respect for good-faith differences of opinion are essential in a society like ours. This decision makes clear that the government must respect Jack’s beliefs about marriage.

For the full press release: http://www.adfmedia.org/News/PRDetail/8700

As Appearing in Pneuma Review Summer 2013

The American journalist and satirist, H. L. Mencken, most famously quipped that Puritanism was “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy.” In many quarters of American life the Puritans are still dismissed as prudes and killjoys that have nothing to teach the modern world. Very often, the infamous Salem witch trials are cited as proof of Puritan fanaticism, barbarism and irrelevancy. Unfortunately, even many well informed Christians have absorbed these myths and misunderstandings about the Puritans from misinformed secularists.

However, evangelical scholars would agree that Puritan theological and devotional writings are among the greatest gems of Christian literature. They have come to appreciate and read their writings, as for instance, the superb revival analysis of Jonathan Edwards, or the theological writings of Richard Baxter. Evangelical seminaries are now requiring appropriate Puritan writings as an essential part of Christian education.¹

Here we will first sketch a history of the Puritans and outline their titanic contribution to Christian literature and faith; and then tackle the wide spread mythology about the Puritan witchcraft trials of Salem, Massachusetts. The widespread misinformation about these trials greatly harmed the Puritan reputation, and indeed that of all of Christendom.

Who were the Puritans?

The Puritans were the first major renewal group within the English Reformation. Puritan pastors, writers and theologians recovered much of the Hebraic “earthy” perspective that accentuated the goodness of life on earth. This is in contrast to the predominant pre-Reformation theology of the Western Church (Catholic) which was heavily “Hellenized” and “other-worldly,” and often slighted the role of the layperson in Church life.² The Puritan’s rejection of Christian Hellenization was not a conscious goal, but rather the natural result of reading the Bible, including the Old Testament, without the allegorical and ascetical traditions that were dominant in Christian theology since the 4^th Century. Puritan writers and theologians made Reformed theology into a practical, and biblically centered way of life that looked heavenward while valuing of life on earth. A recent book by the noted Christian scholar, Leland Ryken, calls the Puritans “worldly saints” because of their concerns with practical living.³ All this is contrary to their current caricature, which paints them as glum killjoys focused on avoiding earthly temptations.

The Puritans were originally a faction within the Church of England (the Anglicans) who wanted their church “purified” and to be more like Calvin’s Reformed Church in Geneva—and less like the Church of Rome. Most Puritans stayed within the Anglican Church and worked for reform from within. Among these were some of Puritanism’s greatest theologian/pastors such as John Owens, Richard Baxter and William Perkins. A minority were “separatists” who could not tolerate the “papist” ways of Anglicanism (such as vestments and fixed liturgy) and chose to separate from Anglicanism, often at considerable cost—as in losing their salaried pastoral offices.

The Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock fame were Puritan Separatists, but the majority of America’s Puritans came to New England a decade later, during the “Great Migration” of the 1630s, and were technically Anglicans. However, since there were no Anglican bishops in America they developed a “congregational” type of church government where the local church was governed by its members. They ultimately separated from the Anglican Church.

N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, Volume 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 741 pages, ISBN 9780800626822.

Dr. Wright approaches his study of Jesus as a Christian, a New Testament scholar, and as an historian. While his conclusions challenge many popular evangelical conceptions of Jesus, his teachings, and his mission, they also provide what I discovered to be a significantly more integrated picture of Jesus—one that “made sense” in the light of sound biblical, cultural and historical contexts, and brought new insight upon the church’s own mission and message.

Wright begins with a thorough examination of the recent “quests for the historical Jesus,” chronicling (and critiquing) scholars from Hermann Samuel Reimarus and Albert Schweitzer to Robert Funk, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and others. Wright then offers a new direction for the “quest” that brings together both serious historical research and coherent theological reflection.

It is impossible to compress Wright’s comprehensive examination of the evidence into one simple statement. His is a well reasoned hypothesis offering a coherent conclusion that is consistent with the data, and helpful in understanding the implications of the data for the believing community.

Wright locates Jesus fully in his first-century Jewish context, and shows the reader how his message, his miracles, his public actions, and parables would have been heard in that context. Illuminating the first century Jewish expectation about the return of Israel’s god, in its various forms, Wright identifies Jesus as a prophet who is not only critiquing their practices, approaches, and expectations, but is suggesting, radically, that their expectation for the coming kingdom of God is taking place in and through himself.

The climax of Israel’s story, and indeed humanity’s story, was taking place in the life of Jesus. Because of this, or rather as an expression of this, Jesus message and actions challenged many of Israel’s traditional identity markers, such as Temple, Torah, land, and ethnic/national identity. Jesus was redrawing theses around himself. Israel was in exile, but her God was acting then and there to deliver her—and this was taking place through Jesus. As Wright comments in a section on the Last Supper, “the meal brought Jesus’ own kingdom-movement to its climax. It indicated that the new exodus, and all that it meant, was happening in and through Jesus himself” (p.557).

Wright closes this work with an examination of the crucifixion of Jesus. He explores not only the reasons for Jesus’ crucifixion (a subject of much controversy in recent months), but also a radically fresh suggestion about what Jesus believed his crucifixion meant. Jesus’ death was not simply God’s messy way of “paying” for the sins of human beings, but the means by which Israel’s God was going to conquer her enemies. Wright says in conclusion, “Unlike his actions in the Temple and the upper room, the cross was a symbol not of praxis but of passivity, not of action but of passion. It was to become the symbol of victory, but not the victory of Caesar, nor of those who would oppose Caesar with Caesar’s methods. It was to become the symbol, because it would be the means, of the victory of God” (p.610).