Puritan Punching Bag

[VirginiaHuguenot]

A good antidote to Puritan-bashing: Puritanism: The Real Thing

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Another antidote: Everybody Knows the Puritans Were...

 

[LadyFlynt]

I unfortunately found this in one of the children's books on the Huguenots. There is a Puritan gent in the book who is portrayed as staunch, serious, and humourless "like most Puritans were". For crying out loud...I heard an excerp from a journal once that pretty much showed that they knew how to eat, drink, and be merry (with consequences from feasting in the barn...the chickens I think came back to reclaim their territory if I remember correctly).

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Joel Beeke, Gisbertus Voetius: Toward a Reformed Marriage of Knowledge and Piety, pp. 26-27:

Thus for Voetius, faith must become visible. The Christian must strive to please the Lord in every circumstance and detail of his life. He serves a holy and precise God. A key word in Voetius' vocabulary of the Christian life is "precision," which he defined as "the exact or perfect human action conforming to the law of God as taught by God, and genuinely accepted, intended, and desired by believers."[5] In other words, the believer desires to do nothing less or other than the will of God expressed in His law as a rule of life. Such precision compels the believer to live carefully, and to obey God exactly; or, in Paul's phrase, "to walk circumspectly" (Eph. 5:15). If this means being ridiculed with false labels, so be it. It is more important to please God than man. Voetius wrote: "The labels of being a precisionist, a zealot, a pigheaded person have always been applied to Christians whenever they have refused to be lukewarm and compromising.... We must not pay much attention when devotion is decried as superstition, soberness as hypocrisy, tenderness of conscience as strictness, puritanicalness, obstinacy, etc., in order to try to make us seem ludicrous."[6]

Voetius did not deny that one can adhere to a precise form of piety out of legalism, hypocrisy, or superstition. All errant forms of precise living, however, should not detract from living in a biblically precise manner, being zealous for good works, with a heart that is earnestly devoted to the fear of God and a conscience that is intent on obeying His commandments. This kind of precisianism God regards as a "heroic excellence of virtue."

Voetius proceeded, in a scholastic manner, to explain what biblical precisianism is. He listed all the synonyms in Scripture that promote precise living, defined them carefully, and concluded that precisianism is the outworking of internal holiness. In the inner recesses of the soul, the believer makes decisions coram Deo—decisions which demonstrate themselves by an outward lifestyle that reflects heartfelt obedience to the law.

Voetius cited numerous Scriptures, Reformed doctrinal standards, and a large number of Reformers and Puritans to support his case for precisianism. He concluded that Scripture and all sound Reformed confessions and divines "speak in unison that the outcry against real [biblical] precisianism lacks all foundation entirely."[7]

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

The Puritans Behind the Myths