Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!lll-crg!nike!aurora!ames!barry From: barry@ames.UUCP (Kenn Barry) Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc Subject: Re: Puritan Ethics Message-ID: <1682@ames.UUCP> Date: Wed, 1-Oct-86 01:37:06 EDT Article-I.D.: ames.1682 Posted: Wed Oct 1 01:37:06 1986 Date-Received: Thu, 2-Oct-86 19:59:26 EDT References: <2758@pogo.UUCP> <6004@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> Distribution: na Organization: NASA-Ames Research Center, Mtn. View, CA Lines: 110 From: hedrick@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (Charles Hedrick): >The problem with being imprecise when evaluating people is that you >can end up writing off people who had ideas that are valuable simply >because they have an unsavory label attached to them. The actual >Puritans were trying to do something that I think is worth looking at. >They were trying to organize their lives as God would want. I think the Puritans make a fine example of what goes wrong when churches get temporal power. Things really were OK for a while. Virtually all the Massachusetts Bay colonists were Puritans, and had voluntarily undertaken to live their lives in the new City of God according to the rules under which it was organized. But the population became more diverse as time went on. Some colonists came to doubt the perfect wisdom of the religious leadership; new colonists came who never accepted the perfection of Puritan doctrines in the first place; children disagreed with parents. Heck, they'd never had perfect agreement anyway. But the Puritan leadership still had their vision, and undertook to insure that everyone would be forced to live under the Puritan code. And what began as a voluntary association became more and more a religious dictatorship. >Most of >them tried to avoid extremes. E.g. they did not ban the use of >alcohol. They considered that a cop-out. Rather, it was a good that >God had created, and they wanted to use it responsibly. The movement >ran into a number of serious problems. But it was one of the most >sustained attempts in our culture to organize society on Christian >principles. As such it deserves to be looked at carefully to see what >we can learn. Everyone needs some releases. For the Puritans the main release seemed to be gluttony, a sin which they roundly condemned, but many practised. As for alcohol, that may have been an economic necessity. I forget exactly when the "triangle trade" began, but making rum was big business in New England for much of the Colonial period. What the Puritans did *does* deserve to be looked at carefully, for it is the main competition in this land against the Enlightenment tradition under which the Nation was founded. I judge theocracy a bigger danger to our institutions than Communism, because the tradition of political fanaticism has never been as hardy as that of religious fanaticism, here. Somewhere along the way, the notion of a *voluntary* association of the elect, living in harmony with God's will, slid into a system of the elect dictating God's will to citizens who didn't always agree. >Your comments on Jonathan Edwards represent a similar problem. I >assume the evaluation isn't yours, but is merely being quoted. >Nevertheless, Edwards is considered by historians of the period to >have been one of the finest minds produced by America. T'ain't his intelligence being questioned, it's his philosophy. >Hellfire >played only a minor part in his writings. It is somewhat ironic that >the only writing of his that most people know these days is his sermon >"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God". I conjecture that it is put >in high school English anthologies primarily as a way to prevent >people from reading his religious writings. The excuse is that it is >representative of an important type of prose. And representative of a world-view that's an important part of this country's history. >Instead something is presented (often in excepts -- only the >imagery, without the actual discussion) which is guaranteed to appall >the student, because they are not in a position to realize what he was >talking about. In fact Edwards says that the sin inside us would >spring into flame of its own accord except that God protects us. The >most striking image in the sermon is the spider dangling over the pit. >But note that God is holding the spider away, providing it with time >to repent. The subject of the sermon is God's grace. The view >actually expressed is one that is being rejected on >net.religion.christian (by non-Christians -- note that most of the >intolerant statements on the net are imputed to us rather than >actually said by us) as being too liberal to be representative of >Christianity, namely that Hell comes out of peoples' own nature, and >is not imposed from the outside by God. I think you are being ingenuous about Puritan beliefs. You will be hard-pressed to convince me that Edwards didn't believe in the traditional "fiery furnace" picture of Hell. And if he rationalized it as being the sinner's fault, and not God's, that's just standard Xian apologetics. God is good, so by definition, evil comes from elsewhere. Some non-Xians find this somewhat paradoxical, since God is also claimed to be the ultimate author of everything. Traditionally, Xians have mostly proselytized among the unsophisticated (the word "pagan" is from a Greek word meaning a rustic; country folk), where an ominous and literal Hell for sinners was effective PR. For the better-educated, such fiery visions are not only unnecessary as an underpinning of the faith, they are downright embarrassing in their primitiveness and unfairness. But that kind of Hell is an honest-to-badness Xian tradition, and Jonathan Edwards was not loath to preach it in no uncertain terms. Mr. Hedrick is right to insist that not all Xians share a belief in the literal, traditional Hell. But I think he is quite wrong to suggest Jonathan Edwards would share his liberal sentiments, notwithstanding their mutual admiration for Calvin. - From the Crow's Nest - Kenn Barry NASA-Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ELECTRIC AVENUE: {ihnp4,vortex,dual,hao,hplabs}!ames!barry