The Reformed/Puritans on Knowledge, Learning, and Christian Education

"The Puritans overwhelmingly defended the cause of learning and the faculty of reason against such attacks on the mind. For the Puritans, zeal was no substitute for knowledge. John Preston declared, “I deny not but a man may have much knowledge and want grace, but on the other side,…you cannot have more grace than you have knowledge.”16 Richard Baxter believed that “education is God’s ordinary way for the conveyance of his grace, and ought no more to be set in opposition to the Spirit than the preaching of the Word.”17 John Cotton claimed that although “knowledge is no knowledge without zeal,” yet “zeal is but a wild-fire without knowledge.”18 The sectaries and antinomians pictured faith and reason as antagonists. The Puritans rejected the perennial attempt to belittle reason in religious matters. “Faith is grounded upon knowledge,” said Samuel Willard; “though God be…seen by an eye of faith, yet he must be seen by an eye of reason too: for though faith sees things above reason, yet it sees nothing but in a way of reason.”19 John Preston wrote that divine grace elevateth reason, and makes it higher, it makes it see further than reason could, it is contrary indeed to corrupt reason, but to reason that is right reason it is not contrary, only it raiseth it higher: and therefore faith teacheth nothing contrary to sense and reason.20 John Cotton called reason “an essential wisdom in us,” and William Hubbard, “our most faithful and best councilor.”21 The Puritans’ faith in the authority of the Bible did not lead them to belittle reason as unimportant. Cotton Mather made the profound comment that “Scripture is reason in its highest elevation.”22 Harvard’s first college laws required that students be able not only to read the Scriptures, but also “to resolve them logically.”23 A hint of what this entailed is suggested by Richard Baxter’s description of instances when Christians must use their reason: We must use our best reason…to know which are the true Canonical Scriptures…, to expound the text, to translate it truly…, to gather just and certain inferences from Scripture assertions; to apply general rules to particular cases, in matters of doctrine, worship, discipline, and ordinary practice.24 William Bridge sounded the authentic Puritan note when he wrote that “reason is of great use, even in the things of God.”25 Thomas Hooker was eulogized by his colleague Samuel Stone for making “the truth appear by light of reason.”26 Given the forces of anti-intellectualism at work in their own religious milieu, the Puritans could have slipped into a disparagement of reason. Instead they remained defenders of reason and knowledge.

Puritan Aversion to Ignorance

 
The Puritans’ defense of learning and reason had as its counterpart an unusual aversion to ignorance, especially in religious matters. The impulse behind the Puritans’ founding of Harvard College was their “dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”27 Ebenezer Pemberton, in a funeral sermon delivered on the death of the Honorable John Walley, declared that “when ignorance and barbarity invade a generation, their glory is laid in the dust.”28 Thomas Hooker exclaimed regarding the English people of his day, “It is incredible and unconceivable, what ignorance is among them,” while William Perkins was of the opinion that “where ignorance reigneth, there reigns sin.”29 To say that the Puritans treasured an educated mind is not to imply that they found that ideal easy to attain. The obstacles to it were the same then as now: mental laziness, the complacency and snobbery of ignorance, the pressures of time, and the temptation to amass money instead of paying for an education. Puritan leaders, at least, valued an educated mind over material riches. Cotton Mather admonished his congregation with the comment, “If your main concern be to get the riches of this world for your children, and leave a belly full of this world unto them, it looks very suspiciously as if you were yourselves the people of this world, whose portion is only in this life.”30 John Milton paid this moving tribute to his father as he neared the completion of his college education: Father, you did not enjoin me to go where the broad way lies open, where money slides more easily into the hand, and the golden hope of piling up wealth shines bright and sure…, desiring rather that my mind should be cultivated and enriched…What greater wealth could a father have given…, though he had given all things except heaven?31 Setting the right priority of values has been the hidden agenda for every generation of Christians. In a day of relatively modest material means, many Puritans showed by their actions that they valued learning above possessions.

The Christian Purpose of Education

 
Albert Einstein once remarked that we live in a day of perfect means and confused goals. The Puritans did not make that mistake. The strength of their educational theory was that they knew what education was for. Their primary goal was Christian nurture and growth. The statutes of Emmanuel College, the most Puritan college at Cambridge University, stated, “There are three things which above all we desire all the Fellows of this college to attend to, to wit, the worship of God, the increase of the faith, and probity of morals.”32 John Knox exhorted the Council of Scotland to be “most careful for the virtuous education and godly upbringing of the youth of this realm,” for “the advancement of Christ’s glory.”33 American Puritans voiced the same religious goals for education. The immediate occasion for founding Harvard College was religious, as we have already seen. One rule observed at the new college was this: 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, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.34 When his son entered Harvard as a student, Thomas Shepard wrote to him, “Remember the end of your life, which is coming back again to God, and fellowship with God.”35 The religious goal of education was evident in the most famous educational act ever passed in America. It is known as “Ye Old Deluder Act” and it established free public education in Massachusetts in 1647. The reason that the General Court of Massachusetts gave for the establishment of a reading school was this: it is “one chief project of ye old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures.”36 The way to foil Satan, according to the Puritans, was to educate people to read and study the Bible. It is obvious that the Puritans would be shocked by secular education devoid of religious purpose. In their view, such an education would lack the most essential ingredient. Cotton Mather expressed it thus: Before all, and above all, tis the knowledge of the Christian religion that parents are to teach their children…The knowledge of other things, though it be never so desirable an accomplishment for them, our children may arrive to eternal happiness without it. But the knowledge of the godly doctrine in the words of the Lord Jesus Christ is a million times more necessity for them.37 The English preacher Thomas Gataker saw things the same way: Let parents learn here what to aim at in the education of their children…: not study only how to provide portions for them…but labor to train them up in true wisdom and discretion.38 It is important to note in passing that Puritan writers on the subject address most of their remarks about the Christian goal of education to parents, not to educators. In the Puritans’ view, Christian education begins at home and is ultimately the responsibility of parents. Schools are only an extension of parental instruction and values, not a substitute for them."

The Centrality of the Bible in the Curriculum 

Given this religious conception of education, the Puritans naturally made the study of the Bible and Christian doctrine central in their curriculum. This practice can be traced to Luther, who had insisted, “Above all, the foremost reading for everybody, both in the universities and in the schools, should be Holy Scripture…I would advise no one to send his child where the Holy Scriptures are not supreme.”39 The Puritans agreed. At Cambridge University, the statutes of Emmanuel College established the Bible as central to the curriculum: It is an ancient institution in the church…that schools and colleges be founded for the education of young men in all piety and good learning and especially in Holy Writ and theology, that being thus instructed they may thereafter teach true and pure religion.40 At Harvard College the rule was that every one shall so exercise himself in reading the Scriptures twice a day that he shall be ready to give such an account of his proficiency therein…as his tutor shall require,…seeing the entrance of the word giveth light, it giveth understanding to the simple, Psalm 119:130.41 The Puritans’ aim in the classroom was to measure all human knowledge by the standard of biblical truth. Although Milton’s proposed curriculum contained both classical and Christian readings, the works of writers like Plato and Plutarch were subjected finally to “the determinate sentence of David and Solomon, or the evangels and apostolic scriptures.”42 Thomas Hall wrote that “we must…bring human learning home to divinity to be pruned and pared with spiritual wisdom.”43 A stipulation at Rivington School, one of many grammar schools founded by Puritans in Lancashire, England, was that the instruction must be in accord with “that which is contained in the holy Bible.”44 Milton’s Definition of Christian Education The classic statement of the Christian goal of education appears in Milton’s famous treatise Of Education, where he wrote: The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him.45 Milton here defines education in terms of what it is designed to accomplish. There may be many ways to achieve a Christian education, but in the meantime we had better not lose sight of what it is. In Milton’s view, education is not what people so often reduce it to—completing a certain number of courses, writing the required number of papers, “getting a requirement out of the way,” or acquiring a degree (though perhaps not an education). Milton the educator is less interested in how much a person knows than in the kind of person he or she is in the process of becoming. The goal of education, in Milton’s definition, focuses on a person’s relationship to God. Properly conducted, a person’s education makes him or her a better Christian. Milton even describes education as a process of sanctification when he writes that the aim is “to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him.” We customarily limit sanctification to moral and spiritual progress; for Milton, becoming like God can mean coming to share God’s love of truth and beauty as well as his holiness. The Puritans kept the religious goal of education clearly in view. They had big expectations for Christian education, which they conceived very broadly. While our society today is preoccupied with marketable skills, the Puritans were busy talking about becoming like God.

The Liberal Arts Ideal 

The Puritan emphasis on the Christian element in education will surprise no one. That emphasis, however, is only half of the picture. The other half is not nearly so well known. While the aim of Puritan education was religious, its content was the liberal arts. Puritan colleges were established primarily to provide an educated clergy, but this did not mean that they were seminaries or Bible colleges. They were Christian liberal arts colleges. This concern for a broad education in all subjects was influenced by the Continental Reformers, especially Luther and Calvin. Luther had written to the councilmen of Germany: If I had children and could manage it, I would have them study not only languages and history, but also singing and music together with the whole of mathematics…The ancient Greeks trained their children in these disciplines;…they grew up to be people of wonderous ability, subsequently fit for everything.46 “Fit for everything”: this has always been the goal of liberal education, as distinct from vocational training. The person fit for everything was also a Puritan ideal. Robert Cleaver theorized that no matter what profession a person entered, the more skill and knowledge he hath in the liberal sciences, so much the sooner shall he learn his occupation and the more ready…shall he be about the same.47 In the Dorchester, Massachusetts, regulations of 1645, the master of the school was required to instruct his pupils “both in humane learning and good literature,” with the latter phrase denoting the humanities as distinct from a vocational education.48 We might expect that as the early American settlers struggled with the wilderness for their survival they would have been indifferent to the liberal arts, but the reverse is true. Cotton Mather praised President Charles Chauncy of Harvard not only for “how constantly he expounded the Scriptures to them in the college hall” but also “how learnedly he…conveyed all the liberal arts unto those that sat at his feet.”49 The ministerial students at Harvard not only learned to read the Bible in its original languages and to expound theology, but also studied mathematics, astronomy, physics, botany, chemistry, philosophy, poetry, history, and medicine. One authority describes the initial tradition at Harvard as one in which “there was no distinction between a liberal and a theological education, and its two sources were first, Calvinism, and second, Aristotle.”50 For the Reformers and their heirs the Puritans, no education was complete if it included only religious knowledge. Samuel Rutherford said, for example, “It is false that Scripture only, as contradistinguished from the law of nature, can direct us to Heaven: for both concurreth in a special manner, nor is the one exclusive of the other.”51 The General Court of Massachusetts went on record as believing that “skill in the tongues and liberal arts” was “beyond all question not only laudable but necessary for educated people.”52 Here again we can see the Puritan unwillingness to set up a division between the spiritual and the natural. To this day, ministers in the Reformed and Puritan traditions are expected to have a college education plus seminary training, not simply a religious education as in some pietistic traditions. This practice is part of the Puritan heritage. “What art or science is there which a divine shall not stand in need of?” asked Richard Bernard; “grammar, rhetoric, logic, physics, mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, politics, economics, history, and military discipline” are all useful to the minister.53 In America, President Chauncy of Harvard said that “as far as it concerns a minister to preach all profitable and Scripture truths, the knowledge of arts and sciences is useful and expedient to him to hold them forth to his hearers.”54 Cotton Mather’s writings show his acquaintance with more than three hundred authors, including Aristotle, Cato, Livy, Homer, Ovid, Plutarch, Virgil, and Tacitus.55 Matthew Swallow praised his pastor, John Cotton, for excelling “in the knowledge of the arts and tongues, and in all kind of learning divine and human,” adding, “Neither did he feed his people with the empty husks of vain discourses.”56 The Puritans’ endorsement of the liberal arts is easily explainable if we keep in mind that in England the Puritan era was also the age of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a rebirth of the humanistic values of classical culture. It was based on a recovery of classical written texts, and it led to humanism—the striving to perfect all human possibilities. Although in our century the term “humanism” is sometimes used to denote purely human knowledge, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries most humanists were Christian humanists. They valued human knowledge within a context of God-centered Christianity. It would be a great mistake to set up Puritanism and the classical Renaissance as opposites. They shared much in common, including a repudiation of medieval Catholicism, a desire to return to a more distant past, and a preoccupation with ancient written texts as the key to constructive change. That is why C. S. Lewis can write that “there was no necessary enmity between Puritans and humanists. They were often the same people, and nearly always the same sort of people: the young men in the Movement, the impatient progressives demanding a ‘clean sweep.’”57 The first translators of classical texts into English were radical Protestants or Puritans.58 Both the humanistic Renaissance and Puritanism shared a zeal for education as the best means by which to change the consciousness and values of their culture.59 The Puritan ideal was a comprehensive study of human knowledge in all its branches within a context of biblical revelation. Such an integration of human knowledge with the Bible is captured in a Harvard thesis of 1670 that described the seven liberal arts as “a circle of seven sections of which the center is God.”60 Puritans of such a mind looked on piety and learning as complementary, not as opposites. The phrases they used when speaking about schools speak volumes: “seed plots of piety and the liberal arts”; “piety, morality, and learning”; “knowledge and godliness”; “progress in learning and godliness”; “that fit persons of approved piety and learning may…employ themselves in the education of children in piety and good literature.”61

All Truth Is God’s Truth 

The Puritan commitment to humanistic knowledge was based on the conviction that God is the ultimate source of all truth. All truth is God’s truth. Richard Sibbes asserted that truth comes from God, wheresoever we find it, and it is ours, it is the church’s…We must not make an idol of these things, but truth, wheresoever we find it, is the church’s; therefore, with a good conscience we may make use of any human author.62 Charles Chauncy said in a commencement sermon, “It cannot be denied that all truth, whosoever it be that speaks it, comes from the God of truth.”63 The doctrinal framework that allowed the Puritans to affirm both religious and human knowledge was the idea that God had revealed his truth in two “books”—the Bible and nature. In England, Edward Reynolds refuted the sectaries’ attack on human learning with the comment: there is a knowledge of God natural in and by his works: and a knowledge supernatural by revelation out of the Word; and though this be the principal, yet the other is not to be undervalued.64

 

On the other side of the Atlantic, Thomas Shepard wrote to his son at Harvard: Remember that not only heavenly and spiritual and supernatural knowledge descends from God, but also all natural and human learning and abilities; and therefore pray much, not only for the one but also for the other from the Father of Lights and mercies.65 Believing in God’s general revelation in nature as well as his special revelation in the Bible, the Puritans fully embraced the scientific study of the physical world. Whether they actually produced the rise of modern science is a question of great scholarly debate, but that they were favorable to that movement is indisputable.66 Richard Baxter wrote: Our physics, which is a great part of human learning, is but the knowledge of God’s admirable works; and hath any man the face to call himself God’s creature, and yet to reproach it as vain human learning?67 Alexander Richardson wrote that “the world and the creatures therein are like a book wherein God’s wisdom is written, and there must we seek it out.”68 For John Cotton, “To study the nature and course and use of all God’s works is a duty imposed by God upon all sorts of men.”69 The Puritans embraced the study of the arts as fully as science. In the Dorchester regulations of 1645 the master was required to instruct his pupils “both in human learning and good literature,” which meant the humanities and the classics.70 Increase Mather went so far as to tell the legislature that “some have well and truly observed that the interest of religion and good literature hath risen and fallen together.”71 Buttressing the Puritan acceptance of the liberal arts was the doctrine of common grace, which has always been prominent in Calvinism. The doctrine of common grace asserts that God endows all people, believers and unbelievers alike, with a capacity for truth, goodness, and beauty. Calvin described common grace thus: In reading profane authors, the admirable light of truth displayed in them should remind us that the human mind, however much fallen and perverted from its original integrity, is still adorned and invested with admirable gifts from its Creator. If we reflect that the Spirit of God is the only fountain of truth, we will be careful…not to reject or condemn truth wherever it appears.72 A firm grip on the doctrine of common grace allowed most Puritan educators to accept the validity of pagan learning.73 Increase Mather noted that “some among the heathen have been notable moralists, such as Cato, Seneca, Aristides, etc.”74 Based on such a view of common grace, Mather could encourage people to “find a friend in Plato, a friend in Socrates and…in Aristotle.”75 Charles Chauncy wrote, “Who can deny but that there are found many excellent and divine moral truths in Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Seneca, etc.?”76 The English Puritan Richard Sibbes believed that since “truth comes from God,” we “may read heathen authors.”77 Since all truth is God’s truth, it is ultimately one. The Puritans thus had a foundation for seeing the interrelatedness of all academic subjects. Samuel Mather commented that all the arts are nothing else but the beams and rays of the Wisdom of the first Being in the creatures, shining and reflecting thence upon the glass of man’s understanding; and as from Him they come, so to Him they tend. Hence there is an affinity and kindred of arts. One makes use of another, one serves to another, till they all reach and return to Him.78 Someone has rightly said that “in view of the Puritans’ belief in the unity of all knowledge, to surrender any of the arts and sciences…was unthinkable.”79

Ryken, Leland. Worldly Saints (pp. 159-169). Zondervan Academic. Kindle Edition.