A PURITAN THEOLOGY:
Doctrine for life
By Joel R. Beeke & Mark Jones
Reformation Heritage Books. 1054 pages £39.61
ISBN 978 1 601 781 666
One of the difficulties of editing a Christian newspaper is handling reviews of large tomes. Most reviewers are ministers of churches and they are simply too busy to take on reading and inwardly digesting a book of a 1000 pages or more.
So it is that for the past year or more I have been reading a few pages of A Puritan Theology each day and I finally got through it. I can say it has been an exceedingly worthwhile exercise. The Puritans were not only theologically acute – one has only to think of giants of thought like John Owen and Jonathan Edwards – but were perceptive readers of the human heart. This makes for theology that hits deep.
Resumé of thought
The volume consists of 60 chapters mostly on the standard topics of systematic theology, on which Beeke and Jones seek to give a resumé of Puritan thought, using a number of Puritan authors and interlacing the text with striking quotations from their works. Along the way there are introductory biographical sketches of various divines. The book is rather dominated, not unexpectedly, by John Owen and Thomas Goodwin. The best chapters for this reader were on Providence, Satan’s Devices, the Covenant of Redemption and the art of Christian Meditation. The Puritans had varied views on exactly how the Old Covenant and the New Covenant in Christ relate to one another, with Owen having his own unusual ideas.
The book tends, of course, to be a eulogy, but the authors are independent enough to concede that on the doctrine of adoption, for example, the Puritans did not get to grips with all that Scripture has to say and did not adequately address the centrality of ‘sonship.’ The old jibe, reheated some years ago by R.T. Kendall, that the Puritans were out of step with Calvin, is taken on and proved to be ill-founded. Sometimes the book falls back on becoming simply an exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith with Puritan quotations attached. However, the Presbyterians do not have it all their own way as it is explained that both Owen and Goodwin were Congregationalists, Owen having once been a Presbyterian but then departing from that stance. The Baptist John Bunyan gets a whole chapter on preaching to the heart.
Puritan views on eschatology prove to be quite strange at times. But the authors are very helpful in explaining how the situation of the Civil War in England, and the violence and uncertainty of the times tended to influence the Puritan outlook in this matter.
Applicable today
The end of the book seeks to draw some conclusions in order to help the contemporary church. This does become a bit too ser-monic at times. But ‘to be a Puritan essentially meant having to face opposition and endure various degrees of persecution for maintaining the things taught and commanded in Scripture’. This ‘Sitz im Leben’ is just where faithful churches are today with regard to many crucial biblical issues. Many of these men of old who have been through the fire before us have much to teach us.
