Puritan Christianity: The Puritan Pastor as Physician of the Soul
Puritan Christianity: The Puritan Pastor as Physician of the Soul
Several times in these articles it has been stated that Puritan preachers were practical men. They were learned theologians but they were also able to come down to the level of the common people and help them in their spiritual struggles. Whatever else they were, Puritans were real pastors and physicians of the soul.
One could say that the Puritans were Biblical psychologists. Although living centuries before Freud, Jung and Adler, they were as knowledgeable about the intricacies of the human mind and heart as the modern physicians of the soul are. In fact, Puritan pastors were better at analysing psychological problems and prescribing remedies for them. The reason for this is that they were not only well-versed in the wisdom of the world, but they were also well-taught in the wisdom of God. These men knew the Bible and they understood human nature, both in its fallen state and as redeemed by grace. They were experts in the workings of the human conscience, the deceitfulness of sin and the wiles of the devil.
The Puritan Concept of the Conscience⤒🔗
Puritan preachers were very concerned with the human conscience: how to awaken it and how to guide it. Conscience was for them and their hearers a tremendous and inescapable reality. It is difficult for us to appreciate just how important the conscience was for sixteenth and seventeenth century people, not just for Christians, but for people generally. If you know Shakespeare at all, you will remember how frequently this great playwright refers to the conscience. Just one quotation will do. In Hamlet we have this memorable phrase: "conscience makes a coward of us all."
William Perkins spoke for most Elizabethans when he said: "Let a man commit any trespass or offence, though it be done in secret and concealed from the knowledge of any person living; yet conscience, that knoweth it, will accuse him and terrify him before God and give him no rest." It is a sad commentary on our own times that such strong statements on the conscience and its convicting power no longer find universal acceptance. In our society conscience does not seem to function that way anymore. The most horrendous crimes are committed today without any apparent remorse being experienced by its perpetrators. Even among Christians, conscience does not seem to function as it once did. This alarming phenomenon has prompted John McArthur to write a book recently, entitled The Vanishing Conscience.
What, according to the Puritans, is the conscience? William Ames gives this helpful definition: "Conscience," he says, "is a man's judgement of himself according to God's judgement of him." David Dickson, elaborating on Ames, says, "Conscience, as it respects ourselves is the understanding power of our souls examining how matters stand between God and us, comparing his will revealed, with our state, condition and conduct, in thoughts, words or deeds, done or omitted, and passing judgement thereupon as the case requires." This idea, namely that the conscience passes judgement on human behaviour, is crucial. The Puritans viewed the conscience as an internal judge whose function it is to condemn or commend, depending on one's compliance with the will of God as revealed in Scripture. Conscience, in other words, has real authority.
As J.I. Packer puts it, "It stands over us, addressing us with an absoluteness of authority which we did not give it and which we cannot take from it." Thus the Puritans, says Packer, personified the conscience, referring to it as "God's watchman and spokesman in our soul," or "God's deputy and vice-regent within us, yes, God's spy in our bosoms."
The conscience, according to the Puritans, functions as a spiritual nervous system — the pain of guilt informs the understanding that something is wrong and needs correction. Not to heed the warnings of conscience and neglecting to seek removal of the guilt it produces can only lead to the hardening or searing of the conscience, which in the end will bring destruction. Richard Sibbes compared the authority of the conscience to a divine court within the human soul, where it serves as a witness, accuser, judge, and executioner.
The basis for the functioning of the conscience is the law of God revealed in Scripture. The conscience is not itself the lawgiver, but, rather, it demands compliance with God's law. An erring conscience operates on standards other than the Word of God, and instead of being obeyed, it should be better instructed. The Puritans were keenly aware of the danger of relying on the conscience as such as the ultimate standard of behaviour. If the human conscience is not properly instructed by the Word of God, it is to that extent unreliable. For people to say, I must obey my conscience, is not necessarily indicative of proper conduct. It all depends how the individual's conscience has been informed. Today, we would say "programmed." A person's conscience is reliable only to the extent it is instructed by and sensitive to God's Word. In Packer's words, "a healthy Christian conscience is constantly in operation, listening for God's voice in his word, seeking to discern his will in everything, active in self-watch and self-judgement."
For Puritans, godliness consisted primarily in obtaining and maintaining a clear conscience before God through a careful, informed response to biblical truth. That which robbed a person of such a clear conscience was sin. For the Puritan sin, any sin, is a lack of conformity to the law of God and results in guilt and renders the conscience troubled and uneasy. Therefore, Puritan pastoral counselling was based on two main principles or axioms: (1) that no known truth must be compromised or denied in practice; and (2) that no avoidable sin must be committed, however great the good to which such compromises and sin might lead.
The Puritan Concept of Sin←⤒🔗
In this uncompromising attitude toward sin Puritanism stands in stark contrast to the present generation. According to Puritan theology, human nature was radically defective, characterised by an inclination to evil and an aversion to good. Today's evangelicals have by and large replaced the biblical realism of the Puritans with a shallow, superficial view of sin. Sin is being redefined as the result of either demonic affliction or addictive behaviour. In either case, the sinner is reclassified as a victim, and therefore, not personally responsible for his or her actions. Puritans viewed sin as criminal and devoted much attention to it. Stephen Charnock describes sin as an affront to God. "All sin," he says, "is a form of secret atheism ... in every sin man aims to set up his own will as his rule, and his own glory as the end of actions." Sin is a turning from the worship of God to the worship of self. Self-worship, then, is at the core of the sin problem.
In light of the current infatuation with self-esteem, it is worth examining the Puritan teaching on self-love. Puritans distinguished between three types of self-love: natural, carnal, and gracious self-love. Natural self-love or self-preservation is innate and constitutional and therefore does not need to be encouraged. To do so leads to inordinate or carnal self-love. "Carnal self-love," says Stephen Charnock, "is when a man loves himself above God in opposition to God and with a contempt of God." This type of love, he says, is the fundamental passion of the sinful human heart and the gateway to all iniquity. It is a "shrinking from God into the mire of a carnal selfishness from which there is no escape apart from Divine grace." This leads to the third type, namely gracious self-love, which is imparted to believers in regeneration. We possess gracious self-love when we love ourselves for higher ends than serving the flesh and catering to creature comforts. Believers are newly-created in Christ Jesus to perform good works to the glory of God.
Apart from such a radical transformation of his nature, however, man will practice idolatry in one form or another. He will worship the creature rather than the Creator. Hence, as Charnock says, the glutton makes a god of his dainties; the ambitious man of his honour; the incontinent man of his lust; and the covetous man of his wealth; and consequently esteems them as his chiefest good and the most noble end to which he directs his thoughts.
The fact that appetites and affections can create their own idols demonstrates the pervasiveness of the sin principle in its effect upon the human faculties. Speaking of faculties, the Puritans developed a primitive type of faculty psychology which by today's standards appears quaint, but which helped them to explain the inner life quite accurately. According to this theory, the brain comprises six or seven compartments, each representing a different faculty of the soul. Sensory images of various objects, known as phantasms, are mediated through the five senses and enter the compartment of the brain known as common sense. This faculty identifies the phantasms or mental images, distinguishes them from one another, and relays them to the imagination. The imagination compares the phantasms with one another, assigning meaning and intelligibility to them, and is able to retain them when the object is no longer in view. The phantasms are then stored in the memory for future reference and recall.
The understanding summons phantasms from either the memory or the imagination; renders judgment as to whether they are right or wrong, true or false; and then makes a decision concerning a course of action to take. The will receives instructions from the understanding via the agency of the nervous system and directs the body accordingly. The affections then prompt the muscles of the body in accordance with the direction of the will. For example, a man travelling in the wilderness encounters a bear. This animal appears in the man's eye as a phantasm or mental image. This image is then identified by the common sense as belonging to the species bear. The imagination recognizes this animal as dangerous, the memory associates it with dangers experienced in the past, reason declares it an object to flee from and sends a signal to the will which excites the affection of fear which in turn prompts the muscles of the legs to run.
Applying this to man's sinful condition, the Puritans were keenly aware that especially the imagination and the will are susceptible to sinful motions. Since the imagination is not bound by the senses, it can form mental images beyond or in excess of nature. In its depraved state it is utterly lawless and capable of conjuring up all sorts of vile images apart from any external sensation.
Since the imagination can so easily transgress, Puritans stressed that it needs to be rigorously controlled by a Spirit-illumined reason grounded in Scripture. Realising that the will can act independently of the understanding and contrary to reason, they were convinced that reason could only prevail over will by divine grace and not by human education. Education by itself will only render a sinner more wicked. Only grace can tame a rebellious will that is in bondage to sin and which left to itself, will always prefer evil over good.
Puritan pastors understood the deceitfulness of sin. John Owen recognized three stages in this process of deception. First of all, a person loses his perspective on the vileness of sin and the wonder of God's grace. Sin's tendency is always to lessen sin's seriousness. Biblical truth loses its grip on the imagination and is reduced to mere cognitive content. As spiritual sensitivities are dulled, the believer loses that "holy relish" in the things of God which he had known earlier.
Second, when the affections are not firmly set on the things of God, sin's attractiveness makes its appearance in the imagination. As sin is contemplated without a corresponding sense of disgust, it captures the imagination and becomes positively desirable. The imagination "rolls" the pleasure of sin, "like the rolling of food on the tongue for tasting."
Third, the will consents to what appears to be good in the mind and develops rationalizations to justify the sin being contemplated. The affections are stirred and inflamed by the vivid representations of the pleasure of sin, while the convictions of conscience are silenced. If this "chain of deceit" is not broken, it leads to sinful attitudes and actions. In this connection Thomas Brooks warns against sin's ability to make itself look like virtue. Sin, he says, often puts on a mask, so that it appears to be what it is not. He further warns that yielding to a lesser sin moves the devil to tempt us to commit the greater sin. Sin, he says, is of an encroaching nature; it creeps on the soul by degrees, step by step.
Sin being so deceitful, persuasive and pervasive, Puritan counselling focused on combating it. The method they recommended most frequently is mortification. Of course, this was not a Puritan idea. In several of his letters the apostle Paul speaks of mortification or putting to death the deeds of the body (Rom.8:13). The Puritans interpreted Paul to mean by this principle that all available means be used to take away the strength, vigour and power of sin so that it can no longer act on its own or exert itself in the life of a believer. Mortification, in Puritan pastoral theology, entailed not only killing the fruit of sin in external behaviour patterns, but also eradicating the root of sin in internal motives and desires.
By mortification Puritans did not mean that sin could be so effectively eliminated that it would no longer be a problem. Perfection cannot be reached this side of glory. The Christian will have to live with indwelling sin until his dying hour (Rom. 7:14-25). Neither does mortification mean achieving a degree of conformity to outward morality, for says Owen, "such may seem to themselves and others very mortified men, when perhaps, their hearts are a standing sink of all abominations." Again, mortification does not mean obtaining occasional victories over certain sins. What mortification does involve is, in Owen's words, "the habitual weakening of sin, and constant fighting against it with a measure of success. The battle needs to be perpetual because each manifestation of sin contains the seeds of sin's evil dominion, and inclines to the same end. There is a necessary universal crucifying of the flesh by which sin is weakened."
Here we have the essence of Puritan pastoral counselling. This is what Puritan pastors were after: to see that those entrusted to their care would live a life characterised by fighting against sin and thus attain to the highest possible degree of holiness. The Puritans knew themselves to be involved in a never-ending spiritual warfare against sin. Their understanding of this warfare, however, is quite different from that which goes by the same name today. I'm referring to so-called spiritual-warfare seminars that are being offered in many places, where Christians are taught to battle the demonic forces all around them. The Puritans did not battle demons and hardly mentioned them. They battled themselves, and consequently gained a degree of mastery over themselves, producing godliness of life, the likes of which the world has not seen since.
The opposite of mortification, Puritans, said, is to let sin continue unchecked. And what will happen to the sinner if he does nothing about his sin? Among the consequences are a hardening of the heart, searing of the conscience, loss of peace and assurance, and corrective discipline from God. A careful consideration of these fearful consequences should lead to heartfelt confession of the sin in question. The sin should be brought into the light of God's law as well as the Gospel. Seeing how God's holiness condemns sin and how Christ had to die for it, should convict us of the evil of sin. Such conviction, if it takes hold in the heart, will be followed by a thoroughgoing repentance, the main ingredient of which is a sincere hatred of sin and not just a fear of sin's consequences. Real repentance says Sibbes, is a "working our hearts to such griefs as will make sin more odious to us than punishment, until we offer an holy violence against it."
To those who have experienced conviction and repentance, Owen offers the following encouragement: "Set faith at work on Christ for the killing of thy sin. His blood is the great sovereign remedy for sin-sick souls. Live in this, and thou wilt die a conqueror, yea, thou wilt, through the good providence of God, live to see thy lust dead at thy feet. Following repentance of sin God will speak peace to the conscience by His Word and Spirit." It is, however, only to the humbled soul who hates sin and will not tolerate its presence, that God will speak peace. Also, Christ through His Spirit, ministers to saints contrary to the way saints judge themselves. If believers, in a state of carnal security, comfort themselves in their sin by nonchalantly discounting its impact on their lives, then the Holy Spirit will convict them, opposing their comfort with grief, misery and the pangs of a tormented conscience. On the other hand, if believers judge themselves for their sin and deeply grieve over how they have offended the Saviour, then the Holy Spirit will encourage and comfort them, and soothe their afflicted conscience. Thus, mortification is achieved. As the saint is crushed over sin and consoled by the Spirit, the power of sin is weakened.
This is how Owen and others of the Puritan school counselled those troubled with sin. Is there a lesson here for us today, particularly for ministers and others who deal with souls? Absolutely. We can use the Puritan approach by applying the theological truths they employed to the psychological presuppositions of our own day. Their view of how sin dominates the life provides the key to understanding addictive behaviour. Their God centredness establishes the framework for a proper approach to self-image. By modern standards, any person struggling with deep patterns of self-gratification or self-will might be told, "you are not responsible" or "a real Christian wouldn't feel like this," or "you must have a demon." By contrast, the Puritan counsellor first exhorted the person to mortify sin through contrition, confession, and repentance. Then the counsellor encouraged the individual that the struggle with sin was a good sign, indicating there was not yet a complete dominance of sin. On this basis there was reason to hope that the pattern of sin would be broken through the truth of the Gospel.
To say, as many do, that the Puritan stress on sin and on the necessity of mortification of sin produces a morbid introspective type of piety, is to completely misunderstand their motives and goals. As Packer says, "the Puritans ripped up consciences in the pulpit and urged self-trial in the closet only in order to drive sinners to Christ and to teach them to live by faith in him. They plied the law only to make way for the gospel and for the life of dependence on the grace of God."
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