Worldly Saints

The Puritans As They Really Were

Book Details

Discerning Reader Editorial Review

Reviewed 03/03/2009 by Ian Clary.

Recommended. An excellent apologetic on the real Puritans.

Those attempting to wade into the vast waters of Puritan writings are understandably trepid. Publishers have been reprinting classic Puritan works in large quantities for over fifty years, so much so that it is hard to know where – or who – to begin reading. The task of studying the Puritans is made even harder when one considers historically the distance that exists between their day and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Theirs was a premodern culture that did not have the benefits or luxuries that we postmoderns enjoy. Puritan thinking was much different than ours today. Even their language, though familiar, is somewhat strange. So what does one who desires to delve into the deep and wide waters of Puritanism do? What resources are available to adequately and fairly introduce the Puritans to a new generation?

Leland Ryken’s Worldly Saints: The Puritans As They Really Were is an excellent – one might dare to say necessary – place to begin. Written essentially as an apologetic for the Puritans, Ryken’s work has done a tremendous service in rescuing them from the shadows of the past and placing them in a clear light so that both their strengths and weaknesses can rightly be assessed.

Ryken has written a number of works, most notably How To Read the Bible as Literature. Although the author is a professor of English, Worldly Saints is primarily a work of practical theology and church history. J. I. Packer, that eminent expositor of the Puritans, contributed the foreword to the book, entitled “Why We Need the Puritans,” which is an excellent plea for Puritan study in the church today. Packer argues that the Puritans can provide a wimpish evangelicalism with maturity and balance. Ryken elaborates on Packer’s encouragement and proves Packer to be right.

The Puritans are victims of historical libel both at academic and popular levels. They have been accused of being workaholic prudes who hated women, sex, sports or any kind of fun. They were allegedly arch-capitalists who strove to enter heaven by the sweat of their brow without concern for those in a condition lower than their own. Because of their emphasis on experience, it is said, they were mystical, anti-intellectual, anti-rationalists who devalued the content of the faith. Yet, oddly enough, they were Calvinists of the strongest sort who over-intellectualized the Bible by applying a rigid logic to it.

In this book, Ryken takes such stereotypes and pulverizes them into dust. On topics such as work, marriage, sex, money, family, the church, education, and social action, Ryken demonstrates over and over again that the Puritans were not who their critics say they were. With copious quotations from a wide variety of English and American Puritan primary sources, as well as scholarly secondary sources, Ryken levels the deathblow to any who would use the word “Puritan” in a derogatory way. Indeed, what the reader learns is that many of the stereotypes (think of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter) are not reflective of Puritan belief and practice, but are in reality the warp and woof of a Victorian religious mindset.

The regular cast of Puritan characters is found in the pages of this book, as well as Puritans who are not as well known. Men such as William Perkins, Richard Greenham, Richard Sibbes, Thomas Goodwin, John Owen, Richard Baxter, John Cotton and Cotton Mather are all well represented. But other names that are not so well known, such as Thomas Becon and William Whately, are also given adequate exposure.

Historically, Ryken sets the Puritans within their embattled context against Roman Catholicism and certain strands of Anglicanism. His regular plea is to keep such controversial background in mind when questioning why the Puritans thought and acted as they did. For instance, their iconoclasm when it came to church décor does not prove that the Puritans hated art. In fact, many Puritans who removed organs from churches later bought the same organs for use in their homes. The removal of the organ was a reaction to the worship style of medieval Catholicism and had nothing whatever to do with Puritan revulsion with the arts.
Moreover, the Puritans elevated the status of women in their societies, valuing the role of a working wife who was seen as the husband’s equal before God. Sex, in the Puritan understanding, was a gift from God that was to be celebrated by husband and wife, and romantic love was just as much a part of marriage as companionship and procreation.

Under the influence of historians like Max Weber and Christopher Hill the Puritans have been accused, to varying degree, of following a money-grubbing form of capitalism (another much- maligned term). As is often the case in most critiques of capitalism, the critic confuses free market capitalism with self-centred, materialistic mercantilism. While it may be fair to say that the Puritans were capitalists in the true sense of the term, they were certainly not what contemporary critics of capitalism accuse them of being. The Puritans saw work as a responsibility first and foremost before God, and not a means of amassing piles of money. God intended money to be used philanthropically for the benefit of the community, even as it was the rightful property of the individual. In the Puritan view, being rich or poor was all in God’s providence and both had its positive and negative aspects. The rich were duty-bound to help the poor, but out of their free response to God’s mercy, not coercion by the state. Neither work nor money were ends in themselves, rather they were means toward the true end of glorifying God. The Puritans were both individualists and communitarians holding the two in balance, unlike the rugged individualist or the collectivist of modern political-economic thought.

However, Ryken’s book is not all aglow with commendation of the Puritans, as his chapter “Learning From Negative Example: Some Puritan Faults” explains. Although Puritan teaching is a model of balance, at times the Puritans themselves would go too far in protecting their views by erecting a seemingly legalistic edifice of rules to protect freedom. The Puritans recognized the value of entertainment and leisure, but sometimes diminished both. Depending on the Puritan one is reading, their prolixity is one of their more “salient traits.”
This chapter is admirable in seeking to portray the Puritans, as the subtitle states, “as they really were” – warts and all. However, at times it is hard to reconcile Puritan faults with Ryken’s overall apologetic. If the Puritans were in the main balanced on these various views, how do we account for their eccentricities and imbalances? At certain points it seems almost as though the faults contradict what earlier he argued for as strengths. We are told that the Puritans were adept at pithy phrasing and getting to the point of an argument or a discourse. Yet, they were also verbose. This can be confusing for one who has no experience reading Puritan works.

One other problem with what is an otherwise outstanding book is that Ryken does not address the Puritan view of the gospel and the cross. While Christ is mentioned in certain quotations from select Puritans, and there is a short discussion related to this theme at the end of the book, the rest of it is silent on this important Puritan theme. For instance, the chapter on Puritan preaching is negligent in regard to “preaching Christ crucified.” While it is good to know how their preaching influenced nations and that they emphasised the intellect in the listener’s understanding, the content of the sermon, namely Christ, is lacking. The Spirit is discussed in the section of affective preaching, but there is no direct discussion of Jesus as the cause of affection. Again, the section on worship deals well with church policy, vestment controversies and the like, but there is nothing on adoring Christ for his person and work. There is a doctrinal discussion of the centrality of the inscripturated Word in worship, but not the incarnate Word. Both of these concerns are significant enough that it makes Worldly Saints a lesser book than it deserves to be. In all other respects it is excellent. With those reservations, I still highly recommend it as an important introduction to and defense of the Puritans.