Church History Since the Reformation CH507 ormation ef e the R … · 2019-09-13 · Church History Since the Reformation Greetings once again in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,

Church History Since the Reformation

Transcript - CH507 Church History Since the Reformation © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 07 of 24CH507

The Age of Puritanism, Part 1

Church History Since the Reformation

Greetings once again in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and let me invite you to join me at the beginning of our class in prayer. Let us pray. Good and gracious God, we ask you once again to be with us in this time. Open our minds to that which you have to teach us today. Through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.

In lecture number 5, two sessions ago, we examined the emergence of Puritanism in England as a kind of second wave of Protestant reform in that country. The broad Anglican tradition reflected in the Book of Common Prayer and the 39 Articles, while deeply satisfying to many, was not sufficiently reformed for many others. These folk who came to be called Puritans wanted the church to become more fully reformed, biblically purified as they would like to express it, and their impact within England and here in the Americas, to say nothing of many other parts of the world as well, was absolutely enormous. As R. H. Tawney phrases it, “The growth, triumph, and transformation of the Puritan spirit was perhaps the most fundamental movement of the seventeenth century. Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from Rome, was the true English Reformation and it is from its struggles against the old order then in England which is unmistakably modern emerges, but immense as were its accomplishments on the higher stage of public affairs, its achievements in that inner world of which politics are but the squalid scaffolding were mightier still.”

The revolution which Puritanism wrought in church and state was less than that which it worked in men’s souls and the watchwords which it thundered amid the hum of parliaments and the roar of battles had been learned in the lonely nights when Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord to wring a blessing before he fled.

Those of you who would like to explore more fully the story of Puritanism in England may want to refer to Antonia Fraser’s wonderful book Cromwell, Our Chief of Men, published by Panther Books in 1976. There are many other wonderful sources for us

Garth M. Rosell, PhD Experience: Professor of Church History

and Director Emeritus, Ockenga Institute at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary



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for the study of Puritanism. One of my favorite is Alan Simpson’s Puritanism in Old and New England, University of Chicago, 1966.

Those of you who want a general survey of American Religious Life as we enter the New World will want to turn to Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, Yale University Press, 1972. This is perhaps the most comprehensive survey that we have of American religious development and religious life, and I highly commend it to you for your reading.

There are other wonderful resources for Puritan studies as well. Leland Ryken’s Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were by Zondervan, 1986, is a good source. A classic source is William Haller’s The Rise of the Puritan Spirit, Columbia University Press, 1938, or Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed, Yale Press, 1974, or Perry Miller’s classic Errand into the Wilderness, Harvard University Press, 1956.

Among my favorite writings are those of Edmund Morgan, who taught for a good many years at Yale. His Visible Saints and The Puritan Family, both published by Harper & Row, are well worth reading. A nice collection of Puritan writings can be found in Miller and Johnson’s The Puritans, Harper & Row, 1963.

One of the most delightful things to do in studying Puritanism is to read the Puritan writers themselves. We have some of the works of Richard Baxter available in modern reprints. One of my favorites is The Reformed Pastor put out by Banner of Truth Press in 1983. If you want to read about Richard Baxter, N. H. Keeble’s Richard Baxter, Oxford Press, 1982, is a good place to begin, or you might want to read John Bunyan. Many of you will be familiar with his Pilgrim’s Progress. If you want to read a recent book about Bunyan, let me suggest Christopher Hill’s A Tinker and a Poor Man put out by Norton Press, 1988. Those of you who might want to look at some of the American Puritans could turn to Robert Middlekauff’s The Mathers, Oxford Press, 1971. If you want to read one of the classic theologians of Puritanism, perhaps the greatest of all of the theologians of that movement is John Owen all too little known in our day. His sixteen-volume set of Works of John Owen is available through Banner of Truth Press published in 1966, and there are many other marvelous sources as well.

Puritanism, you see, covers a whole variety of different denominational groups and their development. It is not itself a denomination. It’s a movement that touches and renews a



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good many other denominations so that included in that whole process are Presbyterians and Congregationalists and Baptists and Quakers, and we want to look at several of those groups in our class today. We’ve had occasion to look at Presbyterians already, but we want to focus today on Congregationalists and then as time allows to move to the Baptists and to the Quakers, all of which were representative in different forms of this great Puritan movement.

Puritanism reached its fullest flowering here in America during the seventeenth century, and there’s little doubt that Puritan religious philosophy dominated the life of American Christianity during the whole Colonial period from our first settlement at Virginia in 1607 down to 1776, when the colonies broke from their mother country. Indeed, as Sydney Ahlstrom in his A Religious History of the American People has commented, “Puritanism provided the moral and religious background of fully 75 percent of the people who declared their independence in 1776.” That’s a pretty substantial influence. Of course we need to say also that not all of the American colonies or the American colonists were Puritan.

There were thirteen original colonies that made up Colonial America life beginning in Virginia in 1607 and ending with the last of the colonies to be included, that of Georgia. Among these were many different religious sentiments. The Dutch Reformed were particularly strong in New York. The Church of England dominated the Virginia Colony. Lutherans were strong in Delaware and Pennsylvania, and one could add a good many others as well. In New England, however, the dominant strain was Puritan, but it was of two kinds. There were the separatist Puritans who settled the Plymouth Colony, the Plymouth Plantation as it was known, in 1620, and their larger neighbors to the north, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the non-separating Puritans of whom we’ll talk in just a moment. Let’s talk a little bit about the Plymouth Puritans, the Pilgrims as they’re often called.

These folk arrived at Cape Cod Bay in November of 1620. The event is described by William Bradford in his history of Plymouth Plantation which has been published and republished in a variety of different editions. Let me read a section of that to you.

Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed ye God of heaven who had brought them over ye vast and furious



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ocean and delivered them from all ye perils and miseries thereof again to set their feet on ye firm and stable earth their proper element. But here I cannot but stay and make a pause and stand half amazed at this poor people’s present condition and so I think will the reader, too, when he well considers ye same. They had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies, no houses or much less towns to repair to to seek for succor and for ye season it was winter and they that know ye winters of ye country know them to be sharp and violent and subjects to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not, neither could they as it were go to the top of Pisgah to view from this wilderness a more godly country for summer being done all things stand upon them with a weather beaten face and ye whole country full of woods and thickets represented a wild and savage hue.

It’s an interesting description of their arrival in this New World. They searched over a month for a harbor and a town site where they could settle. They finally found one on Christmas Day 1620, and asserting their freedom from what they called popish festivals, they began work immediately on building the buildings that they were to use.

Those of you who visit the Boston area may want to travel down to the south to Plymouth, and you’ll find recreated there that original Plymouth Plantation. It’s a marvelous place to visit with people there on site who play the roles of those early settlers, and you can ask them questions and interact with them. You can stay in the area. You can even have Thanksgiving dinner if you want in Plymouth. There are many restaurants that are set up for that very purpose. It’s a delightful kind of experience and one that will bring all of this history very visibly back to mind.

Before landing they had agreed on a form of government known as the Mayflower Compact. The group had sixteen years earlier entered a similar compact, that time consciously separating themselves from the Church of England. That’s why we call them the Separatist Puritans. They wanted nothing to do with that Church of England, which they considered to be not fully enough reformed. They wanted to establish their own practice separate



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from that larger church body which had spawned them.

This action was taken in a manor house in Scrooby, and it had brought great persecution upon the followers. Thus they had fled in 1607 to the Netherlands, assembling at Leyden. Although they prospered there under the ministry of John Robinson and Elder William Brewster, they itched for the chance to develop their ideas in a more favorable climate and atmosphere. Thus it was that after negotiations with the Virginia Company in London, they set sail from Delfshaven on the twenty-second of July 1620 in the Speedwell for England. They were joined there by other people in the group, and they all took passage then on the Mayflower, that famous ship which left Plymouth Harbor on the sixteenth of September.

The ship was somewhat overloaded. It carried a crew of 48 and 101 passengers, 56 adults, 14 servants and hired artisans, 31 children including a few waifs. The voyage took a full sixty-five days. One died on board; two were born on board. During the first winter here in the New World, however, over half of the settlers died.

The settlement wasn’t particularly distinguished. Settlers came from the lower and lower middle classes. Few had academic training. In fact there were fewer than twenty university-trained people in the colony during its first thirty years. No public school existed for fifty years. No one even went from that plantation to the university. As you recall, Harvard had been established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636, but no one came in those fifty years from Plymouth to study there. There wasn’t even a minister there until 1629.

John Robinson had died in Holland in 1625 before he could join the colony. Thus the settlement never achieved greatness, and in 1691, it was taken over as part of the larger Massachusetts Bay Colony. Its growth was small. It was always overshadowed by its large and somewhat overbearing neighbor to the north. The reason that it becomes increasingly important to us in our country is because it symbolizes that vigorous and determined settlement pattern, and these were remarkable people. Folk who had committed themselves to establishing a new life focused around the church and the work of the church here in the New World, and we know them well for the celebration of Thanksgiving when they joined with their Indian friends to celebrate the bounty of God’s hand after they had survived some of the difficulties of life here in the New World.



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The more important and more dominant religious pattern in America for the Puritans was established however in Massachusetts Bay. The first four ships carrying four hundred passengers set sail for America on the twenty-ninth of March in 1630, a decade after the Plymouth Plantation had been established. Before the year was out some six hundred more would follow.

By 1643, when the reins of English government passed from Charles I to the Puritan-dominated Long Parliament, more than twenty thousand had migrated to the New World. This group of Puritans shared a profoundly Reformed belief. Remember they came from that wing of the Magisterial Reformation, a belief that the magistrate and the church needed to cooperate, church and state linked together integrally. They also sought for a visible reflection of their commitment to Christ, and that took shape around the church. They were concerned also to be a reforming element within the larger church life of England. They, unlike the Plymouth Plantation, did not separate from England. In fact they committed themselves to reform the Church of England, and they wanted to do that by means of example. They were to be the City on the Hill, as John Winthrop phrased it in his famous Model of Christian Charity which he preached aboard the flagship of that early group, the Arbella, en route to the New World. The reason they were to be the City on the Hill is that God had set them aside for that very purpose, to be here a model community that would eventually by example reform not only the Church of England, but they hoped worldwide Christianity.

It was a grand vision, and I want to talk more about that in a moment, but I think it’s important to note at the beginning that they were non-separatists, that is, they had committed themselves to [be a] continuous part of the Church of England, but to model that membership in the church in a new way. John Winthrop phrased it before leaving England, “We esteem it our honor to call the Church of England, from whence we rise, our dear mother, ever acknowledging the hope that we have obtained in the common salvation, we have received in our bosom, and sucked from her breasts. We leave it not therefore as loathing that milk wherewith we were nourished but blessing God for the parentage and education as members of the same body, we shall always rejoice in her good.”

Congregationalism here in America was not synonymous with separatism. You have the separatist forms such as at Plymouth, but you also have the strong non-separatist reforming branches



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such as at Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Church of England then is not considered the whore of Babylon or the engine of anti-Christ. It is simply an unreformed body which they wanted to change by their own example.

I have for many years been fascinated with this group of early American Puritans at the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In part my fascination focuses around their sense of special destiny. They believed themselves to be the newly chosen of God, what they call the New Israel, chosen by God for a special destiny, and that destiny was to establish here in the howling wilderness as they called it in the New World a model Christian community, a Christian society integrated in all of its parts thoroughly biblical from the ground up. They were a people of the book, as we’ve discovered already. Their authority was the Scripture, and what they wanted to do here in the New World was to establish on the basis of the teachings of the Bible a society that would reflect that scriptural mandate as fully as it was possible for it to do. They would be unified around that as a people committed to that kind of destiny with a special sense that they were the chosen of God for this new purpose, this great calling.

I’ve often thought what a remarkable thing it is that these people had the opportunity here in a new world with well-trained deeply committed folk to establish what many of us have perhaps wished sometimes we could establish, and that was a society brand new from the ground up. Imagine what kind of a society you would build if you had a chance to do it, and especially if you felt called of God to do it on the basis of the teachings of the Bible. What would it look like? It’s important to note right away that unlike our current separation of church and state where the church exists outside of and unencumbered by that relationship with a larger state, political, social, economic structure of society, the Puritans were deeply committed. Remember they were Magisterial Reformers to the integration of church and state and in fact to the integration of all parts of society.

They were all to fit together so the community that they were to build was one that was thoroughly integrated with Christianity pervading everything in life: the way they set up their laws, the way they built their economic structures, the way they set up their political life, the way they educated their students, and the like. At the heart of their society was the church, and I suspect that many of us would have started in exactly the same place. If you want to build a Christian society don’t just start with the church



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at the core.

Sidney Mead, the great University of Iowa historian, has often called America “the nation with the soul of the church,” and that grows directly out of this great image of the early Puritan leaders. The church was to be at the heart of our society, but it was to be a very special kind of church. Remember as Alan Simpson and others have suggested, the two things that tie all Puritans together, whether they’re in England or in America, are number one, a dissatisfaction with the Church of England, that it wasn’t fully enough reformed and second, a commitment to conversion to religious experience of the new birth. If you put those two elements together in the building of society, you put them at the very heart of the church, you have what these early Puritans were trying to do. They wanted to reform the church to be sure that the church reflected that kind of pure biblical faith that they had hoped eventually the Church of England might reflect, but also they were deeply committed to putting at the heart of the church this experience element, the experiential part of Christianity, the element of conversion or new birth. No one could be a member of the church in the Puritan’s mind unless he or she was first a converted regenerate believing Christian.

That was enormously important for them, and in fact so important that when people came to this experience of conversion—and remember these were Calvinists, these were folk for whom God reached down, regenerating them so that they could respond in repentance and faith and activity in the life of the church—but once that experience had come to them, then they had to stand up in front of the whole congregation, and they had to give their testimony essentially of what had happened to them in conversion, and the congregation then would vote as to whether or not it was an authentic experience of conversion. If it were, they could then become part of that family of faith, they could be members in the church so that the church was to be made up of only regenerate converted Christians, in membership that is. All people were by law to attend the church, and in fact there were laws within the society that everybody had to go to church, but the members, those who had the vote, those who could participate in the sacraments, those folk all had to be regenerate Christians.

This was the very key to the society, a regenerate church membership. In our day, that perhaps wouldn’t seem so remarkable, but if you put the whole of the community together, the church and its membership then becomes the entry point to



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everything else that you might want to do in the society. Take politics, for example. No one could hold any political office, no one could be a magistrate within the society unless he (and that’s not a “he” and “she” here) unless he was first a member of the church, and no one could be a member of the church unless he or she was converted.

Furthermore, nobody could even vote within the society unless he (in this case) was a member of the church, and no one could be a member of the church unless he or she was a converted Christian. The whole franchise was held by regenerate people. Political office was held only by Christians. Haven’t you ever wondered what society would be like if we could only have regenerate folk in our political life? Well, here’s what they did. Furthermore, their society was to be built in every other instance on the basis of the teachings of Scripture.

A good example of this is in their legal structure. In England they had a system of common law, that is, of legal precedents which emerged over the years and simply accumulated but was not codified. Here in America, we have the first instance in the English-speaking world of a code of laws, and that came right out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1648, and that code of laws was built specifically on the basis of the teaching of Scripture. In fact, if you read through it, and you can find it in most libraries, this Massachusetts Bay Code of Laws, you’ll see that the categories are set up and then the laws are indicated under the major categories and at the end of each law generally you’ll find a Scripture reference or several Scripture references, and where do they come from? A good many of them come from Deuteronomy from the early writings of the Old Testament. Remember these are the newly chosen people of God. They call themselves the New Israel. Where better to look for their laws then than the laws of the Old Israel, what had come in the early sections of the Old Testament.

Let me give you an example of this. There’s a fairly lengthy section in the code of laws of breaches of law for which the death penalty is required. These are capital offenses, and you have them listed virtually every one of them as the law and then the Scripture reference. Now let me read just one of those for you, and the code reads this way: “If a man has a stubborn or rebellious son of sufficient years and understanding [and they listed this as age sixteen or more], who will not obey the voice of his father or mother and when chastened will not hearken to them, then shall



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his father and mother being his natural parents lay hold of him and bring him to the magistrates assembled in court, such a son shall be put to death.”

You say, “That sounds awfully severe. Where do they get that?” Turn to Deuteronomy in the Old Testament, chapter 21 verse 18 and following. Let me read: “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother and though they chastise him will not give heed to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of the city at the gate of the place where he lives and they shall say to the elders of the city, ‘This, our son, is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey our voice. He’s a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So shall you purge the evil from your midst and all Israel shall hear and fear.”

You see what they’re doing? They’re taking almost the exact wording of the Old Testament law and transposing that now in codified form into the new laws, the actual laws to govern this new society here in the New World. They were the New Israel. Where better to draw their laws then from the Old Testament legal structures? And one could give many other examples, but you can look those up for yourselves if you would like.

The same is true for the social order. How do you structure society? The Puritans felt that the Bible taught that all relationships are built upon the principle of superior and inferior, and of course this is going to haunt us right down to the present time. Rulers are superior to those they rule, that is, magistrates over those who are in the general population, ministers are superior to their congregations (to the lay people), the bright or clever or superior to the not so clever, the high born are superior to the low born, the craftspeople are superior to the laborers, the rich are superior to the poor, the old are superior to the young, the educated are superior to the uneducated, men are superior to women.

This is a very interesting point and won’t come as any surprise to any of you because growing out of this kind of structure was the kind of ranking of men and women which is so clearly part of Puritan life. One of my favorite illustrations of this came from Thomas Parker, who was a Puritan leader. He wrote an open letter that was published, incensed as he was by the fact that a woman in the colony had actually had a book published. In those days, they didn’t have regular publishers as we do today. What they did was



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to write a book, and if they wanted to have the thing circulated they would plunk down the money, go to a printer, have it done, and then they would try to recoup their money through the sales of the book. They didn’t have these kinds of middle people that carried out the tasks that most publishers do today. This woman had written a book, she had gotten the thing printed, and she was trying to sell it in the colony, and he was incensed, and he said something like this: “The printing of a book beyond the custom of your sex doth rankly smell,” and that’s exactly the way he and many of the other males at least with in the society felt.

We’re still struggling in part with that kind of layering of society, not only men and women but also clergy and laity, rich and poor, those are things that we continue to struggle with in the church, and many of them were set into motion at least in the American scene by the Puritans who had believed deeply that the Scriptures taught these things and in fact wanted to reinforce those by the structure of society itself. You have the impact of the Scripture and their sense of destiny upon art and music as well, to take another illustration.

Remember these folk were part of the Reformed wing of the Reformation. The Lutheran wing had from its earliest years committed itself to hymnody, that is, to the writing of music for worship in the church. Martin Luther himself had written some of the great hymns. All of us have sung “A Mighty Fortress” and some of the other great Lutheran hymns. The Reformed camp, however, had eliminated the use of that kind of written form for worship and would only allow in the worship of the church the Psalms in most cases, certainly nothing beyond the words of Scripture for the worship of God, and the Puritans of the Bay Colony picked up that Reformed tradition allowing only for the Psalms to be sung in the worship of Christ. You have examples of the kinds of translations of the Psalms for this purpose coming from England in the famous Sternhold/Hopkin’s Book of Psalms which had been published in 1562 and which was used here in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the first years of their existence. This had been replaced in some quarters in England by Tate and Brady’s new version of Psalms published in 1696; it was a kind of paraphrase, a sort of Ken Taylor movement of the Psalms. Brady’s brother’s maid commented, “If ye must know the plain truth, sir, as long as ye sung Jesus Christ Psalm, my son along with ye, but know that you sing Psalms of your own invention, ye may sing by yourself.”



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Samuel Wesley expressed the same kind of sentiment when he said, “These new translations are nothing more than scandalous doggerel.” It was a matter of some great contention there, but here in America, Tate and Brady never made any inroads at all. In fact, they weren’t even happy with Sternhold and Hopkins’s very wooden translation of the Psalms for the singing of the church. In fact, they were so dissatisfied even with Sternhold and Hopkins that they wanted an even stricter translation of the Hebrew Psalms for singing in the church, and so they commissioned in 1636 thirty ministers to translate the Psalms for singing in the church.

Among them and doing some of the editorial work were Richard Mather from Dorchester, Thomas Weld and John Elliott from Roxbury. Cotton Mather in his Magnalia Christi Americana commented, “Though they blessed God for the religious endeavors for Sternhold and Hopkins yet they beheld in the translation so many detractions from, additions to, and variations of not only the text but from the very sense of the psalmist that it was an offense to them and so they commissioned the Bay Psalm Book the very first book to be published here in the New World.”

By the way, do you have any idea of what the first Bible published here in America was? It always strikes me as fascinating from a missionary standpoint that the very first Bible to be published here was published in a different tongue, in the Algonquin language for missionary efforts among the Indian people here in the New World. The first book to be published here, however, was this Bay Psalm Book, and Mather again in his Magnalia comments, “Though I heartily join with those who wish that the poetry were mended. In fact it was such a strict absolute translation that you could hardly sing it, yet I must confess that the Psalms have never yet seen a translation nearer to the Hebrew original” and that for them was the key element. The idea was to build a society on the basis of the Scriptures and even in the singing of the church these needed to grow not only out of the Scriptures but out of a very strict translation of the Psalms for use in the worship of God.

One could spell this out in even more detail as you talk about education and the founding of Harvard in 1636, which was established in order to supply ministers for the church and to give Christian training for those bright young minds who were emerging within the colony. If you’re ever at Cambridge and have a chance to see the Great Gate leading into the Harvard yard, read the inscriptions on the gate. It will indicate to you the deep



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passionate commitment to education and to Christian education that was part of the early Puritan experiments in college and university life.

The same could be said for the economic structures, the way they set up their crafts and trades, the way they did their business. All of these were to be tied together with the church at the core built on the authority and on the basis of the teachings of the Scripture because these were people of destiny called of God to do His work. That meant that they needed particularly to be unified in what they did and so through the sanctions of law they required not only that people attend church, not only that they construct their lives and do their business based upon the teachings of the Bible, but that all were unified, all played by the same rules. They were very unhappy to see any kinds of maverick elements emerge within the society, and that deep commitment was to get them into trouble fairly quickly. Let me just say a few words about the ongoing power of this tradition, and then I want to come back and talk a little bit about why it did not succeed.

Those of you who have thought back over our discussion of the Reformed wing of the church and remember our analysis of life at Geneva under John Calvin will see many parallels between Calvin’s Geneva and the Massachusetts Bay Colony here in Boston. This continues on right down to our day and in fact is picked up as a central motif of what today is called Reconstructionism.

Those of you who receive Christianity Today may remember an issue in February 20, 1987, in which the cover article is titled “Democracy Is Heresy,” and it is an analysis of the New Reconstructionist Movement. It was written by Rodney Clapp, but let me just mention a few things by quoting a couple of the paragraphs that are included here in this article: “In the early 1960s a small cadre of American Christians began calling for a second reconstruction, one even more radical than the post-civil war renovations in Southern society. Their white-bearded patriarch, Rousas John Rushdoony, found very few listeners then but today Rushdoony and his compatriots are regular guests on religious television shows, they testify in dozens of church/state educational trials and gain burgeoning numbers of adherence in the charismatic wing particularly of evangelicalism. In fact some have even suggested that as many as 20 million charismatics worldwide are now part of this reconstruction movement.”


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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The interesting thing about the movement is that it is essentially a recapitulation of what I’ve just described from Massachusetts Bay Colony, people who feel especially called of God to reform the church and society integrated together on the basis of the teachings of Scripture. They basically adhere to a presuppositional apologetic. They’re often called theonomists because of their particular emphasis in their theological structure. Most are postmillennialists. These folk want to design the political economic and legal agendas of America by relying on the details of Old Testament law.

Politically in Rushdoony’s terms, the Reconstructionists are Christian libertarians. In the reconstructed society we learn from this article by Rodney Clapp: “There will be no federal government nor will they be a democracy which Reconstructionists regard as heresy. Rushdoony is opposed to pluralism since in the name of toleration the believer is asked to associate on a common level of total acceptance with the Atheist, the pervert, the criminal, and the adherence of other religions. Society will focus on families. It will patriarchal in form. Parents won’t be responsible for the education of their children. Economically we’ll return to a gold or silver standard. There will no longer be the kinds of long-term debts incurred by borrowing money.” These and a whole variety of other fascinating developments sound curiously familiar to what has been developed at the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Reconstructionists are only the most recent of a whole series of groups within the church that have picked up this theme, this emphasis, and we’re going to see it in other forms as well as we move through our course.

Puritanism here in America then took two very distinct tracks: the Pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation were separatists who wanted to go their own way in constructing church life; the more dominant non-separating Puritans in Massachusetts Bay Colony attempted to establish a new Christian order, a society that was biblical from the ground up. These were people of destiny, called of God for this purpose. Now that established what I would like to call the First American Dream, the original vision, of America. Unfortunately, this great dream began to crumble early on, and in our next lecture I want to pick up that theme and explore it further with you.

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Church History Since the Reformation CH507 ormation ef e the R … · 2019-09-13 · Church History Since the Reformation Greetings once again in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,