Dr. Joel R. Beeke
From an email friend:
I wrote an article this week for the Spanish Evangelical Press, promoting the writings of the Puritans. This article provoked a fierce attack from one reader who accused the Puritans of various heinous acts, namely:
• That they murdered many native Americans when they arrived in the New World;
• that they hanged a Quaker preacher named Mary Dyer on June 1, 1660, in Boston; and
• that they promoted witch hunts.
Needless to say, the writer used these details to detract from all the positive things I had mentioned about the Puritans. What kind of answer do you think I could give to him? As far as I see it, I wouldn’t lay the blame at the feet of the Puritans but rather at local political interests. Do you think that would be right?
Response: Thank you for your email and for promoting the Puritans among Spanish evangelicals. Though the Puritans were far from perfect, they loved Christ and their writings continue to be used by the Spirit today, for their books are full of the Word of the Lord.
Let me address the three points your critic raised. But before I do, let me point out that not all British or European colonists in the New World were Christians, much less Puritans. There were wicked and unbelieving settlers among the colonists, and there were hypocrites and false brethren in the church. Thus it is historically inaccurate to charge the Puritans with every misdeed done by the colonists in general. Nor should we blame the Puritans for crimes committed long after the Puritan movement had ceased, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
First, early Pilgrim and Puritan colonists in Massachusetts often had good relationships with native tribes such as the Wampanoag. The two groups traded with each other, and these Native Americans taught the colonists many skills. However, cultural differences, the increasing acquisition of land for the growing number of colonists, and rivalry among the native tribes brought inevitable conflict. There were two wars in the seventeenth century, the Pequot War (1636– 1638) and King Philip’s War (1675–1676). Persons on both sides committed war crimes. It should be noted that some tribes fought as allies to the English.
John Eliot (1604–1690) exemplified Puritan love and evangelistic zeal towards the Native Americans. Eliot was a pastor in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He spent three and a half decades evangelizing nearby Native Americans, and his sons followed him in this work. He learned Algonquian, started preaching in it in 1646, and translated the New Testament (1661) and Old Testament (1663) into Algonquian, plus wrote primers and catechisms. He led the Native Americans to join together in “praying towns” where they lived in covenant with God and governed themselves. Fourteen such towns were organized, with a total of perhaps 3,600 inhabitants, before King Philip’s War erupted. Tragically, the Christian Native Americans were killed both by colonists and other native tribesmen in that war, and the movement suffered a huge setback. However, Eliot continued in the work.
Second, it is true that Massachusetts civil authorities hanged a Quaker named Mary Dyer in 1660. Once part of Anne Hutchinson’s mystical antinomian circle in Boston, Dyer and her husband had returned to England where she embraced the Quaker belief in immediate divine revelation through the “inner light” of the Spirit. She returned to Massachusetts and was banished but came back again to preach the Quaker faith. She was banished a second time on pain of death, but she returned again and so was condemned to death. However, she received a reprieve at the last minute and was released, only to return yet again a year later, when finally she was hanged. In other words, she repeatedly chose to break the law in Massachusetts, and suffered the consequences. Seventeenth-century Quakers were not quiet people persecuted for their personal beliefs but radical preachers and protesters who aimed to revolutionize church and society, often in publicly disruptive ways.
Most Christians today acknowledge the principle of religious liberty and recognize that the civil government should not use its coercive power to persecute anyone on religious grounds, be they sectaries, heretics, or infidels. However, in the seventeenth century, it was widely believed that the civil government had a duty to punish and suppress blasphemy, heresy, and false worship. Not to do so, most Christians believed, would bring down God’s wrath upon the nation. Some Puritans, such as Oliver Cromwell and John Owen, called for a limited toleration for various forms of Protestant Christianity but not full religious liberty for all. Only a small minority of Christian writers called for universal toleration. Therefore, we must sharply disapprove of the religious persecution of Quakers and others in Puritan New England, but we should not demonize the Puritans. They acted out of sincere but mistaken convictions, nor were their policies at variance with the practice of most other nations in their day.
Third, the Salem witch hunts were indeed a horrendous tragedy that resulted in the death of twenty people. However, we are not true to history if we single out the Puritans as witch hunters. Witchcraft was a crime in Europe, and witch hunts were a sad part of European life for a long time. For example, under Roman Catholic authorities in Trier, Germany, over three hundred people died in a witch hunt spanning a decade in the late sixteenth century. Furthermore, very few Puritan ministers were involved in the witch hunts, and we should also note that Puritan ministers took the lead in stopping the witch trials on the basis of injustice in the court proceedings.
To study these events in the history of Puritanism is to enter the culture of another time and place. To impose modern cultural values on the Puritans is grossly anachronistic. We do not conduct our civil affairs as the Puritans did any more than we should dress or prepare food the way they did. However, insofar as the Puritans taught and lived the Holy Scriptures, we can learn much from them.
I hope you find this helpful. May the Lord bless your ministry and use you to lift up Jesus Christ in the midst of a fallen and corrupt world.
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Dr. Joel R. Beeke is president and professor of Systematic Theology and Homiletics at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, and a pastor of the Heritage Netherlands Reformed Congregation of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Published with permission by The Banner of Sovereign Grace Truth