Fides Quaerens Intellectum

As I’ve been making my way through professor Leland Ryken’s (father of current Wheaton College president Phillip Ryken) book Redeeming the Time:  A Christian Approach to Work and Leisure, I’ve been reminded once again of the importance of viewing life holistically.  The Puritans certainly emphasized this, and sometimes in ways that shake our sensibilities as evangelical Protestants (for those of us who fall in this category) who have assumed for so long that the main work we are to accomplish in this world is to prepare–and prepare others–for the next world…and not worry so much with the here and now.  On this view, if you have “secular” or “civil” employment, you do well to ask God to take you into full-time ministry, or at the very least see your current station mainly as a way to evangelize the lost.  This is the unfortunate and theologically truncated narrative adopted by so many faithful believers today, which resulted from the fundamentalist-modernist battles of the early twentieth century.  Now, I’m all for evangelizing the lost, but we do well to probe a little more deeply into our history.  The Puritans weren’t perfect, but they were for evangelism as well.  Furthermore, their thinking pre-dates that of the fundamentalists by a couple hundred years, and in general is far more sophisticated.  Their work ethic suggests something else, namely an endorsement of “secular” and “civil” work.  Ryken quotes the Puritan Thomas Shepard as saying:  “As it is a sin to nourish worldly thoughts when God set you a work in spiritual, heavenly employments, so it is…as great a sin to suffer yourself to be distracted to spiritual thoughts, when God sets you on work in civil…employments.”

-Quote from Thomas Shepard, Certain Select Cases Resolved, in The Works of Thomas Shepard (New York:  AMS Press, 1967), 1:306.