f The Wittenberg Door

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

About Me

My Photo
Name:

Commenting on Christendom, culture, history, and other oddities of life from an historic Protestant perspective.

Monday, February 24, 2014

The Puritans, Work, and You

It seems easy to fall prey to our culture’s negative attitude towards work. We say that we’re “off to the salt mines,” or we claim to be “working for the weekends.”

The Puritans, however, held a very different view. They believed that work should be kept in high esteem. They believed this because they were theologically committed to an integrated view of life: all was spiritual; all was worship; all was service unto the Lord.

A true believing Christian . . . lives in his vocation by his faith. Not only my spiritual life but even my civil life in this world, and all the life I live, is by the faith of the Son of God; He exempts no life from the agency of his faith.

John Cotton (1584–1652)

Work was also a way for Christians to obey God by fulfilling the Cultural Mandate, which is found in Gen. 1:28. In that passage God tells us, via our first parents, to “be fruitful and multiply” and to subdue the earth. The first is a command to create cultures; the second is a command to build civilizations.

God hath made man a societal creature. We expect benefits from human society. It is but equal that human society should receive benefits from us.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728)

The Cultural Mandate was given prior to the Fall. Man was created to work with joy and with satisfaction. It was only after the Fall that weeds entered the garden, that work became toil.

I believe we modern Christians would do well to recover the Puritan view of work as service unto God, and also as service unto men. This is not only good, but good for us—for great joy is found therein.

The main end of our lives . . . is to serve God in the serving of men in the works of our callings. . . . Some man will say perchance: What, must we not labor in our callings to maintain our families? I answer: this must be done: but his is not the scope and end of our lives. The true end of our lives is to do service to God in serving of man.

William Perkins (1558-1602)

--The Catechizer

Labels: , ,

posted by The Catechizer and The Deacon | 12:43 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Individualism and the Christian


When the Puritans would start a colony here in the new world, the first building built was a church. The rest of the community was built around the church. The reason the church was in the middle was symbolic: all of life revolves around worship and service unto the Lord.

The church was the center of life outside of the home. This is where the Puritans gathered to worship the King, hear His Word, fellowship with the saints, and meet each other’s needs. One Puritan called the church . . .

. . . a company of Christians, called by the power and mercy of God to fellowship with Christ, and by his providence to live together, and by his grace to cleave together in the unity of faith and brotherly love, and . . . bind themselves to the Lord and one to another, to walk together by the assistance of his Spirit, in all such ways of holy worship in him, and of edification one towards another.

Richard Mather (1596 - 1669)

America has changed since those early days. Always an independent breed, Americans cultivated a rugged individualism as they built this nation. Unfortunately, this individualism spread to the church. We’ve replaced the theology of the Puritans with that of Frank Sinatra, “I Did It My Way.”

Pastor Matt Powell of Providence Reformed Chapel in Colorado offers a Biblical critique of Christian individualism over at the Wheat and Chaff blog in a post titled, “The Body of Christ.”

Reading about salvation in Scripture, either Old or New Testament, one sees constantly and clearly that we are not saved as individuals, to have an individual relationship with God, with churches merely existing to provide some services to bolster that individual relationship. Yet this is the way it seems we commonly view our salvation. Instead, the consistent promise of salvation throughout Scripture, from beginning to end, is "I will be your God, and you will be My people, and I will dwell in your midst." That is, He saves us as individuals by ushering us out of our present associations and fellowships and into a new fellowship, the fellowship of the people of God. A holy nation and royal priesthood. I do not believe it is possible to conceive of salvation Biblically outside of the concept of fellowship, both vertically with God and horizontally with God's people.

Read the rest of Pastor Powell's comments by clicking here.

Labels: ,

posted by The Catechizer and The Deacon | 5:35 PM | 2 comments