Who Were The Puritans?
Puritans Arrive in America
First came the Pilgrims in the 1620s. They were followed by thousands of Puritans in the 1630s, and these Puritans left their mark on their new land, becoming the most dynamic Christian force in the American colonies. Back in England, the Puritans had been people of means and political influence, but King Charles would not tolerate their attempts to reform the Church of England. Persecution mounted. To many, there seemed no hope but to leave England. Perhaps in America, they could establish a colony whose government, society and church were all based on the Bible. "New England" could become a light Old England could follow out of the darkness of corruption.
"Puritans" had been a name of ridicule first used during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. These were Christians who wanted the Church of England purified of any liturgy, ceremony, or practices which were not found in Scripture. The Bible was their sole authority, and with these beliefs, they believed it applied to every area and level of life.
A Fortuitous Loophole
When King Charles granted a colonial charter to the Massachusetts Bay Company, the document failed to specify that the governor and officers of the company had to remain in England. The Puritan stockholders took advantage of this silence and agreed to move the company and the whole government of the colony to America. There they would try to establish a biblical community, a holy commonwealth, as an example to England and the world.
In the mother country, every Englishman was part of the national church of England. In New England, only the converted were members of the church. Only those individuals whose lives had been changed by belief in the gospel of Christ were accepted into the church. Men who were church members were given the right to vote in the colony. They were expected to establish rules for a godly social order, a society which would glorify God. As the Mosaic Law had regulated Israel's society in Old Testament days, so the church under the Scripture's authority would regulate New England's society. There was no place for toleration in Puritan America. Those not in accord with the lofty spiritual aims of the colony could move elsewhere.
Although they were individuals of strong beliefs, faith, and conviction, the Puritans were not individualists. They came to America in groups, not as individual settlers. Often entire congregations, led by their ministers, left England and settled together in the new land. They organized their settlements into towns, with their meeting house or the church at the center of town. The church was the center of their community, providing purpose and direction to their lives.
Map of the New England Colonies
Puritan Belief and Practice
The Puritans believed God and His worship were important enough to reserve at least one full day out of the week, and the original Puritan settlers joyfully devoted Sunday to the Lord. Sermons were central to the intellectual life of the Puritans, and they rarely were less than an hour in length. Times of prayer could also be as long. Hymns were not allowed in the earliest Puritan worship; only psalms or paraphrases of other Scriptures were sung. The first book printed in America was the Whole Book of Psalms (or Bay Psalm Book), a metrical version of David's psalms printed in 1640.
Puritan Education
The instruction and training of children were considered heavy responsibilities, and parents prayed that children would become a source of glory to their Lord.
Within five years after its founding, Massachusetts established schools for children. Every child should learn to read so he could read the Bible. As one Massachusetts law stated, "It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures...schools should be established." In 1636 the colony established Harvard College, especially to train ministers. The earliest rules for Harvard testify to the Christian commitment expected: Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the main end of his life and studies is, to know God, and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3). And therefore to lay Christ in the bottom is the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.
All is the Lord's
In keeping with their beliefs that every area of life should be molded by Christian principles, the Puritans saw all honorable work as a means of glorifying God. All of life was God's, and there was no distinction between secular and sacred work. God calls each person to a particular vocation or occupation, and the Christian should act as a careful steward of the talents and gifts God has given him. Working in one's calling or vocation as a means of serving God and men. Idleness was considered a great sin; diligence in one's calling was a virtue.
Puritan Influence in America
The Puritans who settled in New England laid a foundation for a nation unique in world history. Their beliefs had a most significant influence on the subsequent development of America. A large portion of later pioneers and westward settlers were descendants of these early Puritans. Their values and principles, though sometimes secularized and removed from their religious foundations, continued to mold American thought and practices in the next centuries.
Christ and the Gnostics.
Adapted from "The Tenth Insight" by James Redfield
. . . I watched as one person came into the Earth dimension remembering all of His birth vision.He knew He was here to bring a new awareness into the world, a new culture based on Love not on emotion. His message was this: The One God is a Holy Spirit, a Divine Energy, Whose existence could be felt and proven experientially. Coming into spiritual awareness means more than rituals and sacrifices and public prayer. It involves a repentance of a deeper kind; a repentance that is an inner psychological shift based on the suspension of the ego's ('Self's') addictions ('Self'-ish wants), and a transcendent "letting go", which would ensure the true fruits of the Spiritual Life.
As this message began to spread, I watched as one of the most influential of all empires, the Roman, embraced and then transformed Christ's Teaching into a new religion, spreading their inaccurate interpretation of His Message throughout much of Europe.
At this point I saw again the appeals of the Gnostics, urging the church to focus more fully on the inner, transformative experience, using Christ's life as an example (Imam) of what each of us should strive to achieve (John 14:6*). I saw the church lapse into the Fear, its leaders sensing a loss of control, building false-doctrine around the powerful hierarchy of the churchmen, who falsely made themselves out to be the mediators or dispensers of the spirit to the populace. Eventually all texts related to Gnosticism were deemed by the clergymen to be blasphemous and excluded from the Bible...
The Gnostics were early followers of "The Way" (Christ) who believed that followers of The One God should not merely revere Christ, but strive to emulate him, in every thought, word and deed. They sought to describe this emulation in philosophical terms, as a method of practice. As the early Roman church formulated its canons, the Gnostics were eventually considered willful heretics, opposed to turning their lives over to God as a matter of faith. To become a true believer, the early church leaders claimed, one had to forego understanding and analysis and be content to live life through divine revelation, adhering to God's Will moment by moment. The churchmen did this in order to sustain their control over the people. They wished to keep His True Teachings and overall plan from the public, so people would be deceived into thinking that they had to go to the churchmen to find God, rather than learning to look within and find the Divine within themselves as Christ's Message to the world had been.
Accusing the church hierarchy of tyranny, the Gnostics argued that their understandings and methods were intended to actually facilitate this act of "letting go to God's Will" that the church was requiring, rather than giving mere lip-service to the idea, as the churchmen were doing.
In the end the Gnostics lost, and were banished from all church functions and texts, their beliefs disappearing underground among the various secret sects and orders. Yet the dilemma was clear. As long as the church held out the vision of a transformative spiritual connection with the Divine, yet persecuted anyone who talked openly about the specifics of the experience - how one might actually attain such an awareness, what it felt like - then the "Kingdom Within" would remain merely an intellectualized concept within church doctrine, rather than reality within each person, and The Truth would be crushed anytime it surfaced. . .
* John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am The Way, the Truth, and the Life: NOT one man cometh unto the Father, EXCEPT by me.
http://jahtruth.net/spirit.htm
Organized like a miniature church
The family was the most basic institution in Puritan society and was organized like a miniature church. Established by God before all other institutions and before man's fall, the family was considered the foundation of all civil, social, and ecclesiastical life. In the morning and evening the family assembled together for worship, and on Sunday the family joined other families in worship. |
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