A QUEST FOR GODLINESS The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life J.I. PACKER CROSSWAY BOOKS•WHEATON, ILLINOIS A DIVISION OF GOOD NEWS PUBLISHERS A Quest for Godliness Copyright 1990 by J.I. Packer Published by Crossway Books a division of Good News Publishers 1300 Cresent Street Wheaton,Illinois 60187 All rights reserved. No part of this Publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by USA copyright law. First U.S. edition 1990 (Crossway Books) First British edition 1990 (Kingsway Publications Ltd.) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Packer, J.I. (James Innell) A quest for godliness: the Puritan vision of the Christian life / J.I. Packer—1st U.S. trade pbk. ed. p. cm 1. Puritans—England. 2. Puritans—New England. 3. Christian life—History—16th Century. 4.Christian Life—History—17th century. I. Title. BX9322.P33 1944 285’.9—dc20 94–10535 ISBN 0–89107–819–3 In memory of two friends John Gywn-Thomas preacher of grace, sheperd of souls and Raymond Johnston champion of truth campaigner for righteousness, both of whom knew what the Puritans were about and shared their wisdom with me. He was…[a man foursquare], immoveable in all times, so they who in the midst of many opinions have lost the view of ture religion, may return to him and there find it. John Geree, The Character of and Old English Puritane, or Nonconformist Contents CHAPTER 1 : Introduction THE PURITANS IN PROFILE CHAPTER 2 : Why We Need the Puritans CHAPTER 3 : Puritanism as a Movement of Revival CHAPTER 4 : The Practical Writings of the English Puritans THE PURITANS AND THE BIBLE CHAPTER 5 : John Owen on Communication from God CHAPTER 6 : The Puritans as Interpreters of Scripture CHAPTER 7 : The Puritan Conscience THE PURITANS AND THE GOSPEL CHAPTER 8 : ‘Saved by His Precious Blood’: An Introduction to John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ CHAPTER 9 : The Doctrine of Justification in Development and Decline Among the Puritans CHAPTER 10 : The Puritan View of Preaching the Gospel THE PURITANS AND THE HOLY SPIRIT CHAPTER 11 : The Witness of the Spirit in Puritan Thought CHAPTER 12 : The Spiritually of John Owen CHAPTER 13 : John Owen on Spiritual Gifts THE PURITAN CHRISTIAN LIFE CHAPTER 14 : The Puritans and the Lord’s Day CHAPTER 15 : The Puritan Approach to Worship CHAPTER 16 : Marriage and Family in Puritan Thought THE PURITANS IN MINISTRY CHAPTER 17 : Puritan Preaching CHAPTER 18 : Puritan Evangelism CHAPTER 19 : Jonathan Edwards and Revival CHAPTER 20 : Afterword CHAPTER ONE Introduction On a narrow strip of the northern California coastline grow the giant Redwoods, the biggest living things on earth. Some are over 360 feet tall, and some trunks are more than 60 feet round. They do not have much foliage for their size; all their strength is in those huge trunks, with foot-thick bark, that rise sheer for almost half their height before branching out. Some have actually been burned, but are still alive and growing. Many hundreds of years old, over a thousand in some cases, the Redwoods are (to use a much- cheapened word in its old, strict, strong sense) awesome. They dwarf you, making you feel your smallness as scarcely anything else does. Great numbers of Redwoods were thoughtlessly felled in California’s logging days, but more recently they have come to be appreciated and preserved, and Redwood parks are today invested with a kind of sanctity. A 33-mile road winding through Redwood groves is fittingly called the Avenue of the Giants. California’s Redwoods make me think of England’s Puritans, another breed of giants who in our time have begun to be newly appreciated. Between 1550 and 1700 they too lived unfrilled lives in which, speaking spiritually, strong growth and resistance to fire and storm were what counted. As Redwoods attract the eye, because they overtop other trees, so the mature holiness and seasoned fortitude of the great Puritans shine before us as a kind of beacon light, overtopping the stature of the majority of Christians in most eras, and certainly so in this age of crushing urban collectivism, when Western Christians sometimes feel and often look like ants in an anthill and puppets on a string. Behind the Iron Curtain and in the starving, war-torn lands of Africa the story may well have been different, but in Britain and America, the parts of the world that I know best, affluence seems for the past generation to have been making dwarfs and deadheads of us all. In this situation, the teaching and example of the Puritan giants have much to say to us. The ecclesiology and politics of the Puritans, their conscience-bound but reluctant and stumbling transitions from medieval solidarities to the individualism of their nonconformist and republican stances, have often been studied, but only recently have Puritan theology and spirituality (that is, to use their own word, godliness) begun to receive serious scholarly attention. Only recently has it been noted that a devotional quickening occurred throughout the divided Western church during the century after the Reformation and that Puritanism was a foremost expression (the foremost expression, I would contend) of this stirring. My own interest in the Puritans has, however, always centred here, and the essays in this book are the fruit of more than forty years’ pursuit of it. Nor is my interest merely academic, though it is not, I hope, less than academic. The Puritan giants have shaped me in at least seven ways, and the thrust of the following chapters may be clearer if I list at the outset these items of conscious debt. (Any reader whom this personal stuff wearies may of course skip it; I do not claim for it any intrinsic importance.) First, at something of a crisis time soon after my conversion, John Owen helped me to be realistic (that is, neither myopic or despairing) about my continuing sinfulness and the discipline of self-suspicion and mortification to which, with all Christians, I am called. I have written about this elsewhere,1 and shall not rehash the matter here. Suffice it to say that without Owen I might well have gone off my head or got bogged down in mystical fanaticism, and certainly my view of the Christian life would not be what it is today. Second, some years after that, Owen, under God, enabled me to see how consistent and unambiguous is the biblical witness to the sovereignty and particularity of Christ’s redeeming love (which is also, of course, the love of the Father and the Holy Spirit: the Persons of the Godhead are always at one). The theological implications of ‘he loved me and gave himself for me’ (Gal 2:20), ‘Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her’ (Eph 5:25), ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us’ (Rom 5:8), and many other passages came clear to me, after some years of dalliance with what I now know to call Amyraldism, through a study of Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, out of which five years later grew the essay on that title in this book. I have found since that I could have learned the same lesson in 1 1.John Owen, Sin and Temptation, abridged and edited by James M. Houston (Multnomah Press: Portland, 1983), introduction, pp xxv-xxix. substance from Spurgeon’s sermons or Toplady’s hymns or Bernard’s discourses on Canticles; but in fact it was Owen who taught it to me, and it has marked my Christianity ever since, as decisively as did the kindred realization, which came to me some years earlier, that biblical religion is God-centered, not man-centered. To get the love of Christ in focus changes one’s whole existence. Third, Richard Baxter convinced me long ago that regular discursive meditation, in which as he quaintly put it you ‘imitate the most powerful preacher you ever heard’ in applying spiritual truth to yourself, as well as turning that truth into praise, is a vital discipline for spiritual health. This was the unanimous Puritan view, and it is now mine too. God knows, I am a poor practitioner of this wisdom, but when my heart is cold I do at least know what I need. In much current teaching about prayer, contemplation is ‘in’ and talking to yourself before God is ‘out.’ I am Puritan enough to think that this contemplative fashion is largely a reaction against devotional formalism, and that it owes as much to twentieth-century anti-intellectualism and interest in non-Christian mysticism as it does to Scripture, and that in cutting loose from the meditative manner of the Psalms, the Fathers, and specifically the Augustinian heritage of which the Puritans are part, it loses without gaining. The contemplative style is not the whole of biblical prayer. At this point Puritan influence puts me out of step with my time, but much, I think, to my advantage. Fourth, Baxter also focused my vision of the ordained minister’s pastoral office. As Warfield said of Luther’s Bondage of the Will, so do I say of Baxter’s Reformed Pastor: its words have hands and feet. They climb all over you; they work their way into your heart and conscience, and will not be dislodged. My sense of being called to preach the gospel, teach the Bible, and shepherd souls could have been learned from the Anglican ordinal that was used to ordain me, but in fact it crystallised out through my study of Baxter’s own ministry and his Reformed (we would say, Revived) Pastor.