Puritans and Revival V: Knowing and Loving
We continue our series on the influence of the Puritans on the Great Awakening (US) and the Evangelical Revival (UK). This week, we’re focusing on speculative and sentient knowledge.
Jonathan Edwards wrote of speculative knowledge as a conjecture of things that one does not really grasp; truth that doesn’t impact the life, conscience, affection, or will, of the individual.
Sentient knowledge, however, is an exciting sense of things that have to do with our good, the sense of the heart. It is both head and heart knowledge together. In the regenerate person, you cannot have head knowledge only. A Christian’s whole person is changed—mind, heart, will are all changed.
Bishop Hall writes:
“There is nothing more easy, than to say divinity by rote . . . but to hear God speak it to the soul, and to feel the power of religion in ourselves, and to express it out of the truth of experience within, is both rare and hard . . . It will never be well with me . . . till sound experience has really catechized my heart, and made me know God and my Savior otherwise than by words.”
What kind of knowledge did the evangelicals of the 18th revivals believe was less than Christian?
1. Knowledge without the Spirit
John Berridge, in his hymnbook Sion's Songs, speaks of the fear of even orthodox truths, without the illumination of the Spirit:
It raiseth no man from the dead,
While seated only in the head,
But leaves him dry and faint;
It maketh matter for some talk,
But cannot give him legs to walk
Nor make a man a saint.
2. Knowledge without Affection
The Methodists expected illuminated truths of the Bible to influence man's desires and affections.
George Whitefield wrote, “I like orthodoxy very well; but what signifies an orthodox head with a heterodox heart? I tell thee, O man; I tell thee, O woman, whoever thou art, thou art a dead man, thou art a dead woman, nay a damned man, a damned woman, without a new heart.”
William Williams wrote:
But oh! it profits nothing,
To know truth in the head,
Mere knowing may not influence,
The heart is still not fed;
To feel it, ah! that's different,
A taste of pardoning grace
Would make my life most blessed,
My home the happiest place.
John Owen writes concerning the place of the affections in religion:
“When the heart is cast indeed into the mould of the doctrine that the mind embraceth . . . When not the sense of the words only is in our heads, but the sense of things abides in our hearts, when we have communion with God in the doctrine we contend for—then shall we be garrisoned, by the grace of God, against all the assaults of men. And without this, all our contending is, as to ourselves, of no value ... Let us, then, not think that we are anything the better for our conviction of the truths of the great doctrines of the gospel . . . Unless we find the power of the truths abiding in our own hearts and have a continual experience of their necessity and excellency in our standing before God and our communion with him.”
Is your mind being daily fashioned into the truths you’re reading and hearing?
3. Knowledge without Humility
This was seen especially in the area of a simple hunger for God’s word. The leaders noticed that human learning, rather than assisting theology, often replaced simple and purposeful reading of Scripture.
“Visit other books often, but live in the Bible.” (Charles Spurgeon)
4. Knowledge without Transformation
For the evangelicals, holiness was always the goal. The evangelicals were distrustful of knowledge that did not transform the life of its possessor.
J. I. Packer writes this of the Puritans before them:
“For the Puritans, true Christianity consisted in knowing, feeling and obeying the truth; and knowledge without obedience, feeling without acting, or feeling and acting without knowledge were all condemned as false religion and ruinous to men's souls.”
Whitefield never tired of reminding his people:
“All truths, unless productive of holiness and love, are of no avail. They may float upon the surface of the understanding; but this is to no purpose, unless they transform the heart.”
Again, he writes to an anxious friend, “Good dear Sir, never leave off watching, reading, praying, striving, till you experimentally find Christ Jesus formed within you.”
These men weren’t saying that the intellect was unimportant. They were saying that real Christian knowledge needs to be more than agreeing with certain bible facts.
It must be:
Knowledge with the Spirit,
Knowledge with Affection,
Knowledge with Humility,
Knowledge with Transformation.
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Show Notes
Podcast Resources
Anglican and Puritan, J. F. H. New