5 Puritan Women E-Book

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

What the Lives of 5 Puritan Women Teach about Holy Living and Devotion to God The writings of the Puritans have had a recent resurgence, but many Puritan women have often been overlooked or misunderstood. As mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and wives, the vibrant faith of Puritan women has much to teach modern day readers. In 5 Puritan Women: Portraits of Faith and Love, Jenny-Lyn de Klerk shows how the lives and writings of Christian women encourage the beauty of holy living and provide practical wisdom for the home and the church. Each chapter portrays a different Puritan woman—Agnes Beaumont, Lucy Hutchinson, Mary Rich, Anne Bradstreet, and Lady Brilliana Harley—telling their stories of devotion, lament, and family. By studying their faith journeys, modern readers can learn more about their roles in church history and glean insights into the Christian life.  - Accessible Introduction: An affordable, easy-to-read format to introduce readers to the neglected writings of Puritan women - Applicable: Explains the need for, and the value of, studying Puritan women today and highlights spiritual disciplines that these women demonstrate - Women in Church History: Broadens the reader's understanding of women's roles in furthering God's kingdom throughout history - Foreword by Karen Swallow Prior

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“In 5 Puritan Women, Jenny-Lyn de Klerk introduces us to five faithful saints who have gone before us. As you get to know these women through the pages of this book, you will feel as though you have met five new friends. Through their words and stories, they will instruct, strengthen, and encourage you in your faith. So grab a warm drink, sit down with your new friends, and let them spur you on to love God and live a faithful, beautiful life.”

Courtney Doctor, Coordinator of Women’s Initiatives, The Gospel Coalition; Bible teacher; author, From Garden to Glory and In View of God’s Mercies

“At some point, someone somewhere must have convinced me to believe the Puritans were boring. But as it turns out, that person was dead wrong. In 5 Puritan Women, Jenny-Lyn de Klerk shakes the dust off the stories of five women we never should have overlooked. Their remarkable strength, distinct personalities, and substantial faith offer women today an unexpected and delightful inheritance that can impact the way we express and enjoy our faith today.”

Caroline Saunders, author, The Story of Water; The Story of Home; and Good News

“We are all prone to stereotypes and misunderstanding, but part of loving our neighbors—even dead ones!—is seeking to understand them on their own terms so that we can better appreciate and learn from them. Jenny-Lyn de Klerk has written a book about five Puritan women who faced real challenges in a real world with their real God. What she also helps us (both men and women) learn from these godly mentors is significant. I’m only sad it has taken us this long to hear from these too-often-forgotten saints.”

Kelly M. Kapic, Professor of Theological Studies, Covenant College; author, You’re Only Human

“Often neglected, usually misunderstood, and grossly maligned, the Puritan women of the past are far overdue for a revival. Agnes Beaumont, Lucy Hutchinson, Mary Rich, Anne Bradstreet, and Lady Brilliana Harley should be household names. For not only did they contribute robust theological insights of their own, but they mastered the Christian life by exemplifying with profound maturity the love of Christ, a love so absent from our relationships with one another today. Who better to bring about this revival than a talented, even magical writer who embodies the spirit and theology of these Puritan women herself? Look no further than Jenny-Lyn de Klerk. She has not only become a kindred spirit with these Puritan women, but she has given them a voice. May the resiliency of their religion and the fervor of their faith infuse the church today until it becomes the spiritual family envisioned by our Lord.”

Matthew Barrett, Associate Professor of Christian Theology, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary; author, Owen on the Christian Life

“Discover the extraordinary lives and deeply inspiring and insightful writings of the five women in Jenny-Lyn de Klerk’s illuminating new book. Each of these Puritan women deserve to be better known by Christian readers. Their words are infused with the evidences of intimate, daily experience of God’s living word, and their spiritual wisdom is on par with any well-known saint in Christian history, with enduring relevance. The lives of Agnes Beaumont, Lady Brilliana Harley, Mary Rich, Anne Bradstreet, and Lucy Hutchinson traced every conceivable extreme of joy and suffering that the seventeenth century could present, and yet they demonstrated what it means to persevere in love, with mercy, and in full assurance of salvation. This is an accessible, much-needed, and soul-enriching book that you will not regret having read.”

Johanna Harris, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Exeter

5 Puritan Women

5 Puritan Women

Portraits of Faith and Love

Jenny-Lyn de Klerk

5 Puritan Women: Portraits of Faith and Love

Copyright © 2023 by Jenny-Lyn de Klerk

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Author’s Note: Archaic spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and terms (e.g., thy, whilst, hath) have been modernized in primary sources when necessary for ease of reading, except in Anne Bradstreet’s poems, in which only words likely to be unknown by modern audiences have been changed and only when such changes would not affect important aspects of the poem (e.g., sith to since, dam to dame).

Cover design: Spencer Fuller, Faceout Studios

First printing 2023

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-8210-3 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-8213-4 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-8211-0 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-8212-7

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2023-01-18 09:58:22 AM

for my husband,

who “ha[s] wisdom and virtue enough to be trusted with [my] counsels”

Contents

Foreword by Karen Swallow Prior

Preface: Discovering Kindred Spirits in Church History

Introduction: Testimonies of Love

1  Agnes Beaumont: Daughter as Evangelist, Using Memorization

2  Lucy Hutchinson: Mother as Theologian, Using Fellowship

3  Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick: Wife as Philanthropist, Using Meditation

4  Anne Bradstreet: Grandmother as Homemaker, Using Prayer

5  Lady Brilliana Harley: Matriarch as Physician, Using Spiritual Conversation

Conclusion: Spiritual Loving Care

Notes

General Index

Foreword

Imagine being the woman who hitched a ride to church one day with John Bunyan (yes, that John Bunyan), then was wrongly suspected of having an affair with the renowned Baptist preacher, and later falsely accused of murdering your own father—only to be all but written out of the pages of history.

That is essentially what happened to Agnes Beaumont, a seventeenth-century Puritan, whose fascinating but forgotten life has much to offer us today, from glimpses into an intriguing period of history, to a better understanding of longstanding denominational divisions, to personal encouragement toward Christian faithfulness amid hard trials and temptations.

Of course, history is replete with forgotten stories of faithful saints. The great cloud of witnesses is voluminous. This is why it is always a gift to the present (as well as to the future) for neglected lives from the church of ages past to be brought forward again for our edification and instruction. It is an even more precious gift when such stories are presented by a skillful researcher and talented writer whose offering is not only an act of scholarship, but also an act of faith and worship. Such is the gift Jenny-Lyn de Klerk provides here.

While every era within church history is peopled by many lives worth remembering, these stories of devout Puritan women offer particular insights that are timely for the church today.

First, the lives and beliefs of Puritans (especially Puritan women) tend often to be cloaked in misunderstandings, distortions, and expectations that obscure the power of their examples. History is where we turn to get past the stereotypes, as clearly evidenced by the histories of the women profiled here. Beneath the veneer of easy assumptions, these women display a conservative theology that cultivates richness rather than narrowness, rigor rather than weakness, and abundance rather than austerity. Even so, their stories are complex. Their lives—like the lives of many of us—are marked at times by pride, disobedience, insecurity, confusion, loss, and despair. Yet, they also exhibit—as we aspire to as well—sanctification, strength, perseverance, buoyance, and faithfulness. These women have earned their rightful places in the church among other faithful theologians, philanthropists, poets, daughters, wives, sisters, and parents simply through their faithfulness and in using their gifts for the church.

Their lives, being of particular times, places, and circumstances, nevertheless offer illuminations for our own times and applications for all believers. Though our culture seems very different from that of the Puritans, both ours and that of the seventeenth century were significantly shaped by new forms of technology. We, as they were, have been overwhelmed by new floods of information (and disinformation), debates, controversies, and divisions—all of which are multiplied and amplified by new technologies (in their case, print; in ours, digital media). Furthermore, just as it was during the Puritan age, the church of our day is heated by controversies and divided by theological debates. The believers of ages past underwent refining fires like those many of us today sense the church is undergoing. The stories of these exemplary Christian women carry all this forward into our own time for our benefit.

“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun,” the writer of Ecclesiastes tells us (Eccles. 1:9 ESV). Some, if not all, of the lives and stories of the women in these pages will be new to many readers. Yet, to a one, their testimonies, even in their uniqueness and interesting detail, remind us that God’s truths and faithfulness never change.

Karen Swallow Prior

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

Preface

Discovering Kindred Spirits in Church History

Have you ever had an emotional or intellectual epiphany so significant that it changed your way of being for years to come? When I first pulled a book by a Puritan woman off some library stacks, I was not ready for what I would find. Five years earlier I had experienced a theological awakening of sorts when I began to read John Owen and was introduced to a better way of understanding Scripture as taught by the Puritans—those seventeenth-century English believers who wanted to keep reforming the church and taught a heartfelt kind of holy living. I thought I had now moved on from this early stage, marked by the repeated thrills and inability to put a book down that comes with any new start. But now I had found something that I did not know was missing from my self-understanding as a Christian, a woman, and a writer—the wisdom of the female Puritans. The day I read my first poems and letters by Puritan women, I began another season of discovery, excitement, and insight—a spiritual awakening—as I learned from historical figures that I could relate to even more than others I had read. Questions I didn’t realize I had tucked away in the bottom of my soul for safekeeping began to rise to the surface and find expression in the words of these women, and I found my heart giving the same answers as theirs. We shared a common Christian experience.

To my shame, these women were there the whole time, and I didn’t even know it! But what I have found since then—after adding their stories to my own writings and lectures on the Puritans—is that no one else had known them either, and they had the same effect on other students (young and old) that they had on me, even in the small amount of time they spent getting to know them. Sadly, I could not find many books to suggest for further reading, especially to church folk interested in spiritual growth. Most of the academic resources I had studied would be of little use to this group at best and frustrating at worst, not only because they are too technical but also (in some cases) because they attempt to squeeze real Christian women who lived hundreds of years ago into the contrived paradigm of a practically atheistic, modern-day woman. The actual writings of the women themselves are also not easily accessible, as many are only available in expensive critical volumes or poorly formatted online versions that have no commentary to help readers make meaning out of their dulled font.

Thus, I decided to write something myself—this book—for all you lovely church folk who want to meet these women or are looking for inspiration in your spiritual journey, especially when it comes to your relationships with God and family. There are so many gems for Christians to find in reading women from church history, as aspects of their stories are not only timeless but also universal and thus relevant for believers of all sorts. In fact, the women in this book represent the Anglican, Presbyterian, and Baptist traditions. And as Lucy Hutchinson herself said, “I desire to own as brothers and sisters” all believers, regardless of their denomination.1 So whoever you are, I’m certain you’ll not only discover interesting artifacts in the pages to come but also kindred spirits you can relate to on a personal basis.

As was the case with these female Puritan authors, many friends have helped me reach the place of writing this book. First, a special thanks is due to Karen Swallow Prior for generously agreeing to write the foreword, one that does justice to the beauty and complexity of its subjects. I am also grateful for such brilliant scholars as Johanna Harris, Crawford Gribben, Raymond Anselment, and David Norbrook, whose work on Puritan women has opened my mind to new ideas and whose personal encouragements have given me confidence in my own work. Last, I would like to thank my many colleagues and mentors at Ambrose University (Calgary, AB), Regent College (Vancouver, BC), and Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (Kansas City, MO), my friends at various churches in the greater Vancouver area, and, most importantly, my family, all for helping me become the person I am now as I write this book. Your years of cherishing, teaching, and supporting have not been lost on me.

Introduction

Testimonies of Love

Advocacy, Barefaced and Unashamed

Before you read any further, I have a confession to make. If I may use the words of J. I. Packer, a long-time defender and promoter of the Puritans, “The present [book] is, I confess, advocacy, barefaced and unashamed. I am seeking to make good the claim that the Puritans can teach us lessons that we badly need to learn.”1 In other words, I wrote this book as someone who believes what the Puritans believed and commend them to us today as mentors worthy of our trust and emulation. But why is this a confession, or something that needs to be admitted? The reason Packer spoke of his teaching on the Puritans in this way was because he knew, maybe better than most, that many assume the worst of the Puritans. This group has been unfairly maligned since their own time and not much has changed, at least when it comes to popular thought.

Sadly, this is only more true for Puritan women. Of course, the writings and work of women in general have been largely neglected until the past few decades. But this is not the only reason Puritan women have been pushed aside—it is also because they do not always say what modern historians want them to say. I wish it were not true, but the proclamation to listen to women, believe women, and appreciate women as unique individuals is sometimes only applied to those who can fit within our current culture’s belief system without too much force. In fact, those who do not fit into this system are, at times, seen as a potential danger to the cause of reviving women’s writings. Now, this is not always the case; there are some excellent academic resources on Puritan women that do not feel the need to toss them out or mold their lives into a shape that looks more like ours. But my generalization remains true. I cannot count how many times I have read articles that literally argue these women said the exact opposite of what they actually said or how many times I’ve mentioned doing research on Puritan women and been met with looks of astonishment, confusion, and even disgust: “Why would such a young, smart girl like yourself want to waste her time with the submissive, uptight, quintessentially puritanical wives of those patriarchalists?” “Do you often come across stories of neglect, sexism, and abuse?” “I’m sure they could not even file for divorce!”

Sparking a Reading Revival

You may think I am joking, but this is not far from real conversations I have had and gets to the heart of what I want to say in this introduction: that there is a need to revive the writings of Puritan women for Christians today by reading them on their own terms, which is what this book seeks to do. Contrary to how many imagine these women, they were not forbidden from leaving the house, prevented from using their human agency, or even incapable of getting divorced.2 Rather, they were Puritans in their theology and regular human beings with unique personalities, strengths, struggles, interests, backgrounds, and accomplishments. They grappled with the same questions others of their age (and ours) sought to answer. In some ways they upheld the status quo of gender roles, but in other ways they challenged and even outright rejected it; they suffered from injustice but also found ways to fulfill their life callings in spite of the societal restrictions placed on them. In fact, I would describe the women in the following chapters as strong-willed and bold, much more than I am, a millennial living in Vancouver with four university degrees and zero kids. Their stories inspire me to be more confident, grounded, and resilient, and less self-conscious, complaisant, and fragile. Regardless of whether or not we agree with them on every point, the fact is, they deserve to be studied just like any other group of women from the past. And, though this has not always been the case, they deserve to be interpreted with generosity, not disdain. Reading their words as they intended—for example, as Lucy Hutchinson termed one of her writings a “testimony of . . . love”—is simply doing good history.3

More than this, Puritan women are valuable subjects of study for believers today—you and me—because they had great insight into the Christian life and good instincts regarding matters of human relationships. This is partly because the Puritans as a whole stand out in church history for being particularly skilled at applying the Bible to all areas of existence, making them some of the best figures to consult on various topics of Christian living even hundreds of years later. As Packer said, they had a spiritual maturity—“a compound of wisdom, goodwill, resilience, and creativity”—that was born out of hardship and is often lacking in our time of “ease and luxury.”4 And, I would add, Puritan women frequently wrote about aspects of daily life, thus revealing to us what their relationships with God, family, church, and society were really like—the good, the bad, the ugly, and also the beautiful. As Mary Rich said about the godly women in her time, they may have looked “plain” on the outside, but they were “velvet within.”5

Thus, this book seeks to retell the stories of five Puritan women as they told them—rather than as we might have expected or wanted them to be told—in order to appreciate who they really were. By doing this, it is my hope that we will not only learn about them but also learn about ourselves, foster a sense of comradery among Christian women today, and open our minds to the existence of other women who deserve to be studied. Now you may be asking, “Isn’t this a book about Puritan women, not other women today or in the past?” Yes. But there are some wonderful ripple effects of such a study.

First, by reading their stories, we will be able to better interpret our own stories, because—as the novel-readers, artist-lovers, and movie-goers of the world will tell you—there are lessons that cannot be learned (or at least are hard to learn) from direct instruction. Sometimes, it is only when we take a step back from our lives and enter the life of another person—messy and complex as it always is—that we are able to gain the perspective needed to think creatively about our own greatest problems and deepest desires, especially as they relate to the people we love most in this world. More than this, because their stories are true, real-life ones, reading them drums into our brains that God is in control and we will be okay. Seeing the spiritual success of women in church history is like seeing a science experiment done over and over again with different variables but the same results—it shows us that yes, it can be done! You can get through heartache, slander, illness, the death of a loved one, war, anything, because so many women, filled with the Holy Spirit, have already done it.

Further, I hope that Christian women who read this book will be encouraged to see themselves as part of a whole, that is, all women of the Christian faith. The reason I think this is especially valuable right now is because the topic of gender roles has become so volatile and divisive that it has wearied half of the church and turned sisters into strangers, even enemies. Though these debates are often conducted by male theologians and biblical scholars, it is usually women—both egalitarians and complementarians—who end up bearing the emotional burden of the debates. Having who you are as a person constantly discussed by other people in a contentious way can make you feel on edge about your own identity. These debates can also pit us against each other by making a secondary theological issue seem like the most important issue to you because you are included in the debated topic, thus permanently separating you from those on the other side.

So what does this have to do with reading about Puritan women? In my experience, I’ve found that one way to counteract the negative effects of these debates about gender is to celebrate how God used all sorts of women in the past to build up his church. What happened in history happened, whether we like it or not; the women who existed in history existed, whether they were who we hoped they would be or not. And it is these real women from the actual past—who came from various backgrounds, held to different theological convictions, made mistakes, and dealt with gender controversies of their own time—that passed on the faith to the next generation. Christian women have so much more to share with each other than they have to fight about, and I hope this book can help us embrace that fact and thus develop a deeper appreciation and respect for each other as well as a sense of connection with our spiritual heritage.

Finally, by reading about Puritan women, we not only gain an understanding of who they were as a group, but also get a taste of the vast contributions of women throughout church history. You see, not all women were exactly the same—not even these five Puritan women, who had much in common. This means that the more we read women’s writings with our own eyes, the more our minds will be opened to the existence of lots of other women, who did lots of different things and wrote about lots of different things! So, in this book you will not only meet a handful of Christians who lived over four-hundred years ago but also be prompted to consider how half of God’s people have built up the church in ways that we may have not noticed before. If this is the first time you’re reading about women in church history, I expect it will not be the last.

Five Women, Five Homes