Why did New England Puritanism ultimately fail in its “errand to the wilderness”? Almost as early as the advent of the second generation of Puritans, one can already find first generation Puritans lamenting the corruption and near dissolution of their beloved “city on a hill.” An aged William Bradford manually supplemented his earlier, optimistic record Of Plymouth Plantation with this dour note of gloom:

O that these ancient members had not died or been dissipated (if it had been the will of God) or else that this holy care and constant faithfulness had still lived, and remained with these that survived . . . But (alas) that subtle serpent hath slyly wound himself under fair pretence of necessity and the like to untwist these sacred bonds and ties . . . .¹

Even if some would completely dismiss Bradford’s lament as the feverish jeremiad of a religious fanatic, few historians would deny that Puritanism per se experienced an early and rather precipitous decline. But why? Many have attempted answers to this question.

Did They Betray Their Principles?

Cotton Mather hazarded an attempt with one choice phrase in Magnalia Christi Americana: “Religion brought forth Prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother.”²

In Mather’s view, similar to Bradford’s and many others to come, the decline of New England Puritanism stemmed from a rejection of her founding principles and practices, not from any error in those Puritan principles or practices themselves.

In other words, New England Puritans failed either because they or their children were inconsistent or because enemies (particularly “that subtle serpent,” Satan) betrayed their cause. Contemporary “neo-Puritans” have echoed this implicit belief in the goodness or flawlessness of Puritan ideals and Puritans, elevating them to a place of near unimpeachable honor:

Informed folk now acknowledge that the typical Puritans were not wild men, fierce and freaky, religious fanatics and social extremists, but sober, conscientious, and cultured citizens, persons of principle, determined and disciplined, excelling in the domestic virtues, and with no obvious shortcomings save a tendency to run to words when saying anything important, whether to God or to man. At last the record has been put straight.³

Or Did They Face an Impossible Dilemma?

Other historians make some attempt to pinpoint central tensions or contradictions inherent in Puritan principles which might have eventually proved their undoing. For instance, Edmund Morgan speaks of the Puritan Dilemma—the unbearable tensions between heavenly-minded ideals and earthly-oriented practicalities, which tensions eventually wore out the Puritans who tried quite impossibly to maintain them.⁴

Attempting to solve Morgan’s dilemma, and arriving back closer to Mather’s thesis in the process, Terrill Elniff claims that the “dilemmas faced by the Puritans can be traced, not to a contradictory position inherent in the Puritan theology and world view, but rather to the adoption of a position [of human autonomy] that was in contradiction to their Calvinistic philosophy.”⁵

What if Their Principles Betrayed Them?

So, most historians seem rather consistently to assert that the decline of Puritanism stemmed from the abandonment of Puritan ideas rather than the fruition of them. I do not believe this is the case. The undoing of Puritanism followed quite naturally (even logically) from the Puritan emphasis itself. Puritans erred centrally by over-emphasizing reason as the main, sometimes exclusive, human faculty of faith, even while they claimed that faith transcended human reason. They failed to see any significant difference between saving faith and right reason.

This emphasis birthed two ills: on one hand, it lent itself quite naturally to the Deistic Enlightenment impulse which would displace Puritanism in the States, and on the other hand, it provided no lasting framework for the cultivation and sustenance of Christian morality and affections.

The Puritan Mind

Without a doubt, the Puritans produced some astounding geniuses and contributed more than probably any other class of people to the intellectual and scientific revolution that has shaped the modern Western world. What accounted for the well-documented Puritan emphasis on knowledge and the mind? In a word: Calvinism. As I have written elsewhere, Calvin’s equation of faith with knowledge became the impetus for the well-storied educational explosion of the Magisterial Reformation.⁶ This emphasis became almost exclusive for its most zealous inheritors, the New England Puritans:

For the Puritan, education was inexorably tied to religion, “it being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures.”⁷

One can see this emphasis in the early establishment of higher-learning seminaries, Harvard being the first in 1636. Reading in the “rules and precepts” that governed Harvard students, one can see what little distance the Puritans placed between academic and saving knowledge:

Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternall life, Joh. 17. 3. and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all found knowledge and Learning.⁸

Saved by Knowledge?

The Puritans knew that they could not teach anyone into the saving knowledge of God, in the personal and intimate sense of knowledge (the biblical sense). No human institution can effect that task—not church, school, or state. These institutions can teach about God and His will, but education cannot impart saving grace or saving knowledge, only the Spirit can. Though Harvard graduates imbibed libraries full of information about God by graduation, that did not ensure that they knew God. Again, such knowledge is the work of the Spirit first, not reason.

Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the last and greatest New England Puritan thinker, understood this, as did most Puritan luminaries. Though an intellectual par excellence, Edwards himself had a keen understanding that true religion did not arise from any human learning, but from revelation by the Spirit. And the Spirit can and does address the intellect, the affections, and the will. Otherwise, Edwards argued, only well-educated men would have access to God:

A saving evidence of the truth of the gospel is such, as is attainable by persons of mean capacities, and advantages, as well as those that are of the greatest parts and learning. If the evidence of the gospel depended only on history, and such reasonings as learned men only are capable of, it would be above the reach of far the greatest part of mankind. But persons, with but an ordinary degree of knowledge, are capable . . . of being taught by the Spirit of God, as well as learned men.⁹

It seems not many Puritans actually practiced this truth, however. It may have functioned as a limiting concept, but not a normative principle (e.g., “Well, of course God could save someone with no education or means to attain it, but ordinarily God saves people through right teaching.”) For instance, very much of the Puritan criticism of Quakers centered on the Quaker’s lack of erudition.¹⁰ If in fact, the Holy Spirit could teach the stupidest as well as the smartest person, why should education be a factor in salvation at all—and why such an important factor? Ever so subtly, Puritans had replaced the pursuit of the God of truth with the pursuit of the truth of God, and such a reversal nearly always leads to human autonomy and rationalism.

Why? Because when you de-prioritize hearing from God Himself about who He is in the world and in the Scriptures, you inevitably prioritize your own opinions about God in the world and your own (often self-serving) interpretation of the Scriptures. And your own thoughts, unmoored from God’s living self-witness in the Spirit, quickly stray from the truth (even, or perhaps especially, when those thoughts purport to be rooted in Scripture). Inevitably, displacing the pursuit of God with the pursuit of knowledge (even “right” knowledge) results in hypocrisy, error, cynicism, and unbelief. Such a reversal constitutes the major failure of Puritan rationalism (and our own), and this reversal nearly ensured that, eventually, the inheritors of Puritanism would reject both the Spirit of knowledge and the knowledge of the Spirit.

Faith Via the Mind and Only the Mind

In The New England Mind, Perry Miller agrees that the conflation of faith and reason eventually displaced faith in New England altogether:

Puritanism, for all its piety, for all its hunger and thirst after salvation, never doubted that the life of the elect was the life of reason, and so could never, in its earnest struggle for regeneration, let go its intellectual heritage.

Men in the seventeenth century did not see the dangers ahead, the possibility that such descriptions of faith in terms of right reason and the rational rule of “eupraxia” could give rise to a naturalistic morality and the belief that education would achieve everything usually ascribed to grace, because they were convinced that theology would remain forever the norm of reason.¹¹

While one could easily dismiss Miller’s assessment as an over-simplified misunderstanding, even apologists for Puritanism unwittingly expose the Puritan (and their own) equation of faith and reason. For instance, J. I. Packer beams:

Knowing themselves to be creatures of thought, affection, and will, and knowing that God’s way to the human heart (the will) is via the human head (the mind), the Puritans practiced meditation, discursive and systematic, on the whole range of biblical truth as they saw it applying to themselves.¹²

That Packer left the affections he just mentioned out of the salvation equation altogether should trouble anyone paying attention, but, beyond this, notice what he says the Puritans believed. He says they thought the only way of salvation was “via the human head” (i.e., right knowledge). In other words, God does not directly address the will or the affections for salvation. And apparently, Puritans believed that this right knowledge, the way to salvation, could be received and imparted through rational human processes (“meditation, discursive and systematic, on the whole range of biblical truth”). Further, Packer apparently agrees with all this! Whatever the value of Puritan (or neo-Puritan) contributions to erudite faith, these fundamental misconceptions concerning faith and knowledge have terrible consequences in the church. For many church-goers, a loveless intellectualism has created the same tell-tale signs of hypocrisy, arrogance, apostasy, and decline that plagued the New England Puritans.

Troubled from the Start

Contrary to Miller, I think that even early New England Puritans already operated as if “education would achieve everything usually ascribed to grace.” This does not constitute a corruption of their belief. It was their belief in its methodical implications, even if not in its stated exceptions.

Of interest, an 18th-century heretical offshoot of Puritanism named Sandemanianism fully equated the bare intellectual assent to Gospel facts with saving faith itself. I can hardly fathom such a movement existing outside the philosophical auspices of an already deep-seated rationalism. In some ways, Sandemanianism represents the naked distillation of New England Puritanism’s philosophical foundation—salvation through the mind. In 1812, Andrew Fuller explained the difference between the tenets of Sandemanianism and orthodox Christianity, and his distinction still bears emphasizing for the more “intellectual” members of the contemporary church:

The foundation of whatever is distinguishing in the system seems to relate to the nature of justifying faith. This Mr. S. [Sandeman] constantly represents as the bare belief of the bare truth; by which definition he intends, as it would seem, to exclude from it every thing pertaining to the will and the affections, except as effects produced by it.¹³

Conclusion

Though Puritan inheritors like Jonathan Edwards and Andrew Fuller fought to uphold the equal importance of religious affections, the will, and the intellect, New England rationalism had already gained an unstoppable upper hand. In Edwards’ time and after, religious emotionalism and moralism rushed in to fill (quite inadequately) the gaping holes Puritanism had left in the human psychology of New England (and the United States). Then, slowly and surely, the intellectual legacy of Puritanism began to discard altogether any of the religious trappings its inheritors viewed as “superstitions.” Though we often look at Unitarianism, Deism, Pragmatism, and Materialism as rejections of Puritanism, they are in fact its natural and logical children. A Spirit-quenching emphasis on the intellect to the subordination (or even dismissal) of the affections and will cannot help but produce such false doctrines in time.

Disturbingly, this same emphasis on the primacy of the intellect and knowing about God only from the Scriptures (rather than knowing God in and through the Scriptures) continues to prevail among the inheritors of Puritan orthodoxy, as we saw with Packer. These still look back on Puritan New England as the Golden Age of American Christianity. All of these neo-Puritans believe that the Puritans betrayed their principles, rather than the other way around. On this basis, they exhort contemporary Christians to continue attempting to resurrect the Puritan project wholesale in all its flawless ideals. They then look in astonishment when their own children, just like the second generation Puritans, stream from the church in droves.

Perhaps we need to hear the same rebuke Sandeman needed: “The very essence of Scriptural knowledge consists in the discernment of divine beauties, or the ‘glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’”¹⁴ Saving knowledge of God is first personal and Spiritual, and without this knowledge, all the learning in the world is vanity. As Paul explains, “The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit” (1 Cor. 2:14).

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