Rev. David Holwick ZM
First Baptist Church
Ledgewood, New Jersey
November 28, 2010
Deuteronomy 31:26-29
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I. The heroes of elementary school pageants.
A. We picture them with black hats and turkeys.
I remember dressing up for a Thanksgiving pageant in
elementary school.
Some got to be Indians, I was a Pilgrim.
All pilgrims need is a black hat with a buckle on it.
The pageant reinforced important American ideals.
Europeans and natives coming together, in peace, to share
thanks for a bountiful land.
The gratitude was generalized - God was never a character
in our pageants.
And the ideals were too idealistic.
Most meetings of whites and Indians weren't very peaceful.
Still, the Pilgrims seemed like good guys.
B. Influence far greater than their numbers would suggest.
1) Only around 21,000 English Puritans moved to New England.
a) And the Pilgrims were a tiny subset - only around 300.
b) Distinction - Puritans wanted to reform the Church of
England while the Pilgrims had given up on it.
1> Pilgrims wanted a clean break from the Church of
England so they were also called Separatists.
2> Baptists have similar viewpoints and actually grew
out of the Puritan experience.
2) Puritans were not the earliest European Americans.
a) The Spanish came first, but in very small numbers.
b) Jamestown, Virginia, predated Plymouth by a decade.
1> The Mayflower was supposed to land there but missed.
3) The importance of the Pilgrims was their priorities.
a) They were motivated by ideals more than money.
b) Puritans helped form the American consciousness.
Alexis de Tocqueville suggested in his book
"Democracy in America" that Puritanism was the
foundation for American democracy.
II. Yet today Puritans are often reviled.
A. Puritans are symbols of uptightness.
1) We see them as hypocritical prudes.
2) Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter."
Story of a young Puritan woman who is ostracized
for bearing a child out of wedlock.
Only in the end do we find out that it was the
Puritan preacher who got her pregnant.
He ends up falling dead from the pent-up guilt.
Hawthorne was the descendant of some notorious
Puritans and was so embarrassed by it he changed
the spelling of his last name.
3) Hugh Hefner and his Playboy philosophy proposed that the
Puritans had messed us up for generations.
B. They were control freaks.
1) They didn't make much distinction between private and public.
a) Rigid enforcement of their moral code down to small
details.
b) They loved putting people in the stocks.
c) Salem Witch trials shows the tension between
supernatural beliefs and public policy.
2) They could be brutal toward those who disagreed with them.
a) Not just with Indians but other colonists.
b) Baptists were severely persecuted by Puritans.
C. New England soon drifted away from Puritanism.
1) Many of their descendants became Unitarians.
a) Harvard University was a strong influence in this.
b) Today, New England is the least religious section of
the country.
2) Other Puritans morphed into Congregational churches.
a) Today the UCC is the most liberal denomination in America.
b) Like most Protestant denominations, it is losing members.
c) Will we share their fate?
III. What Puritans believed.
A. Salvation had to be experienced but could not be sought.
1) Puritans were strict Calvinists and stressed predestination.
a) They never had "altar calls" in their churches.
b) They did not believe you could accept Jesus as your
Savior - he had to accept you.
2) How could you know you were destined to be saved?
a) God made you feel guilty for your sins. (Guilt was BIG)
b) He enabled you to lead a godly life.
c) One evidence of his acceptance of you was prosperity.
B. Churches were for saved people.
1) Only those who gave a convincing account of being converted
could be admitted into full church membership.
2) Buildings were simple and services were direct, without
a lot of pomp and circumstance.
3) Sermons were long - very long - and very theological.
Few amusing stories or illustrations.
It was like listening to a PowerPoint presentation.
4) They baptized children but did not consider them members.
C. Covenants defined their relationships.
1) Mayflower Compact.
a) They bonded together for mutual support.
b) The non-Pilgrims on the ship also signed it.
c) It created a strong emphasis on law as a foundation
for their society.
2) Tight families and communities.
a) They were not as uptight as we think.
1> They had social drinking.
A> Some argued even Indians had a right to booze.
2> You could be jailed for withholding sex from your
spouse.
b) The worst punishment was to be banished from the town.
c) Church was the center of their civic life.
1> Non-members couldn't vote, so it was really a
theocracy, like Iran today.
D. Puritans wanted to build a perfect society.
1) One Puritan famously said they wanted to build "a city on
a hill," alluding to Jesus' challenge for Christians
to be a shining light in the world.
2) The Church and State were pretty much the same thing.
a) Positive - society should reflect ideals of Gospel.
b) Negative - imperfect humans will run lousy theocracies.
1> Political leaders were expected to enforce "true
religion."
IV. Why the Puritans failed.
A. They lost control of their communities.
1) America expanded quickly and too many outsiders arrived.
2) Puritans wanted the government to enforce their faith and
the people in government changed.
B. They lost control of their churches.
1) Fewer and fewer people could give a convincing testimony
of being converted.
2) They lost their grandchildren.
a) At first, only children of members could be baptized.
b) Then they modified this so grandchildren could also
be baptized, even if their parents were unsaved.
1> They called this the Half-Hay Covenant.
2> In time, the unconverted controlled the churches.
C. They lost control of their theology.
1) They did not give enough weight to human free will.
a) The Bible says we can make moral and spiritual choices.
b) The great religious revivals of early America siphoned
off their numbers.
1> Very few Baptists migrated to America.
2> Instead, early American Baptists were converted
Puritans.
2) Their emphasis on rational thought and the mind led to
theological error like Unitarianism.
a) Great American thinkers like Thoreau and Emerson were
the offspring of Puritanism, but rejected it.
b) Within 150 years, Puritanism was only a remnant.
V. Baptists share many Puritan traits.
A. We value salvation and holy living.
1) Like them, we expect every member to have a saving
relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
2) But unlike them, we believe you can seek God as well as
be found by him.
3) We also value the intellect, but always bear in mind that
God's ways cannot always be figured out by us.
B. We are Separatists.
1) In a literal sense, Baptists are offshoots of the Pilgrim
movement.
2) Like the Pilgrims, we long for a pure church.
3) We go farther than them in requiring believer's baptism.
a) There should be no "half-way" membership for the
"sort of" saved.
4) The goal is to have a church that is like those in the days
of the apostles.
C. We want to have an impact on society.
1) We should work to be a positive influence, and hope that
society will reflect Christian values.
2) But unlike the Puritans, we should be skeptical that it can
be legislated.
a) We must change laws, but also change people.
b) Laws alone are not enough.
VI. One Puritan's story.
Adoniram Judson was born to a Congregational pastor's family
in the 1700s. (Puritans had morphed into this group.)
He went to college, but met a man named Jacob Eames who was a
deist and a skeptic about religion.
Under the influence of Eames, Adoniram abandoned his childhood
faith, but went to seminary anyway.
(This is still a problem today, and many preachers are actually
unsaved.)
His friend then died suddenly and Judson had a conversion
experience.
He decided to become a missionary to Asia.
On his voyage to India, his study of what the Bible teachers
about baptism led him to become a Baptist himself.
He is considered the founder of the modern American
missionary movement.
What Judson experienced, you can as well.
Do you know for a fact that Jesus is your Savior?
Copyright © 2024 by Rev. David Holwick
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