WHO WERE THE NEW ENGLAND PURITANS?
This was not happening for the first time in history when one religion stood against the hypocrisy of another religion. In the interval of time, we see many such religions whose followers have been trying to harass people in the name of religion. Similarly, Puritanism, Parry Miller stated in his classic study on the subject, began as a movement within the Church of England in the late 16th century. The main subject of this revolution was the abolition of this institution and hence the prevailing religion was hardly an alternative denomination. In 1530 the Church of England broke up with the Roman Catholic Church. The rebellion grew from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I in 1558 and had become a complete Protestant. The monasteries were removed and many papist cases of abuse were rectified. Puritanism believed that the reform should continue, that more abuses remained to be fixed, that traditions persisted from the Papacy days that were to be renounced, that the Church of England was to be returned to the "purity" of the Church of the first century as founded by Christ himself. When the purification advocate first became the Puritans in the 1560s, nobody knew precisely what the method would be or what would be the ultimate goal, even the most militant of them. During the days of the so-called Puritan Awakening, no resolution was ever reached on this issue, and eventually, this failure to achieve unanimity was the making of English Puritanism. Most Puritans wanted only to cancel or alter those ceremonies. Some wanted ministers to preach more sermons instead of reading fixed formats from a book, making their own prayers on the inspiration of the moment. But whatever their Puritanism's hue or colour, Puritans were the ones who wanted to start a revolution already underway. Their rivals, the Anglicans, were the ones who believed that things had gone far enough with Elizabeth I's enthronement and the "Elizabethan Compromise" within the Church. According to the Anglicans, the Elizabethan Compromise had effectively eliminated the excesses of Roman Catholicism. They were trying to make a stop, just where they were, and to stabilize at that point.
Thus, the issue between the two points of view, though large enough, still involved only a limited number of questions. There was an essential agreement on everything except those matters on which the Puritans wanted further reform. One of the worst, but definitely not the most extreme that the movement produced, was the Puritans who wanted to go to New England. Even before they left in 1620, they had taken time to formulate a formal framework for church organization, which they would like to see developed rather than the episcopal structure in England.
By 1620, the Puritans had taken the English Church a long way in their thinking, but then a shocking reversal took place. A commitment of counter-offense was initiated by a new king, Charles I, who met with those who disagreed with the Puritan. The Anglicans were first active in maintaining the Episcopal structure, assisted by the Monarch. Second, they maintained the existing infrastructure for devotional services — elegant costumes from the past, glorious objects of gold and coloured glass in use during worship, the shrine itself is treated as a site of almost miraculous significance. Third, the prayers of the Book of Prayer and the Sacraments were venerated as the center of all worship by the Anglicans of the Puritan Context — especially communion, because it represented the Body of Christ.
The Puritans were surprised to see these, what they considered to be, retrogressive practices within the church, and even more horrified when hundreds of priests who opposed them were thrown out of their churches. Puritans believed, like everyone else, that the Church of England was the driving force, the very center of the national life. If it were corrupted, chaos would come down to the land itself. England, the Puritans argued, was in an anarchic condition. Disorder and discord were everywhere: gambling, whoring, thieving, rape, and murder were regular occurrences. Excessive self-indulgence and self-gratification seemed to have become the norms of social behavior. The Puritans articulated the emerging bourgeois ethos of warmth, caution, thriving, and hard work. They held that God the Father, who must punish as well as protect his children would certainly not tolerate their sins and punish them with plagues and other disasters. Only when England had a truly pure church will God stop punishing the English for their sins, the Puritans claimed.
The Anglicans pointed out that by law the king and his Church of England officers had the right, in the religious field, to make all decisions and insisted that it was a responsibility of all to obey them, not to groan and grim. All agitation needs to stop. The tenacious and stubborn Puritans declined to oblige. To hear people posed as ministers of God would be like bringing the "vast, suffocating fog" of Papist superstitions and irrationalities which was supposed to be swept away by the Protestant Reformation to the church of England. On the European continent, across the English Channel, this was the time when the strong forces of Roman Catholic monarchs were advancing from victory to victory as the Contra-Reformation against Protestantism waged by the Roman Catholic Church was growing in excitement. Suspicious Puritans then claimed that what the Anglicans were doing was part of a covert Roman Catholic conspiracy, working to destroy Protestantism in England through the King and His followers.
But the Anglican and Puritan arguments about the nature of mankind were still more fundamental to their differences. To the Puritans human beings are totally depraved in their "natural" condition, their reason being effectively impaired by their passion. If somebody is "saved "— forgive their sins and go to heaven — that's because God wanted it, not because individuals could do something themselves.
The Anglicans recoiled from all this. Of course, they claimed that all men were sinners, but that they were all discriminated against by God They said that the ethical choice is "the Lord's candle." Thus, in a way we have a free-will, that is to say, we have a role to play in determining our personal destiny. The Anglicans believed that if we chose to live in the fashion of God, to take regularly the sacraments and accept the salvation offered to everyone by the benign God, we are saved
The Puritans stressed the first four of the Ten Commandments, the First Table that ordered mankind to reverence and glorify God without having anything else. The dilemma was that humans were so naturally decayed, their passion so prevalent on their reason, that every instinct and inclination turned them away from God. They knowingly chose evil.
Instead, do we all go to hell? No. No. The Puritans believed that God had decided to save some of humanity from that eternal torture for reasons known only to Him. He had sent Jesus Christ to save these people from all eternity, who are the elect. After meticulous, prayerful and lengthy inner research, they hear unexpectedly that they are saved indeed. The old, sinful person inside, i.e., in that overwhelming moment... Adam, he's dying and a new, sinless guy, that is. Christ is born. Christ is born. Then the saved lives of virtuous and inviolate lives by divine grace are clearly designed to bear witness to that greatness of God.
Your redefined enterprise is to continually do the work of God on earth to revive and revive this world. They have to build a rejuvenated Jerusalem and they must not be discouraged by existing, tarnished customs. They had a covenant with God in which they were given redemption without passengers, but with a strong commitment to lead a written and dedicated life thereafter.
Next
« Prev Post
« Prev Post
Previous
Next Post »
Next Post »
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon