On a cold winter’s day in December 1741, after an eighty mile ride on horseback, twenty year-old Samuel Hopkins arrived at the house of Jonathan Edwards. Hopkins, a ministerial student, remained with the Edwards family—Jonathan, Sarah, and their seven children—for a month and made frequent return visits in later years. According to Hopkins’ observations, Sarah dealt with the day-to-day running of the household, leaving Jonathan free for his duties of writing and preaching. In this respect, both Sarah and Jonathan had their own unique ministry. At the heart of the family’s routine was daily family prayers, at which they read a chapter of Scripture, and Jonathan taught the children carefully, questioning them “according to their age and capacity.”1 In this, he typified the Puritan ideal of fatherhood.

One of the great changes wrought by the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation was a renewed emphasis on the family.2 While it would be unfair to say that the medieval Church ignored the family (actually it was far more prized in the Middle Ages than it has been in modern times), the Reformers taught that one need not choose between pursuing the “ministry” and building a home. Indeed, many of the continental and English Reformers deliberately broke their priestly vows of celibacy in order to marry and have children.3 Having a family, they said, was as much a calling from God as that of a priest. In fact, they believed, one could do both.

The Puritans followed the pattern of the earlier Reformers and regarded parenting as a vital Christian vocation. The typical Puritan family was extended, not strictly nuclear. It included parents and children, but also servants, and sometimes, older relatives.4 This extended family was the basic unit of society,5 and was therefore the foundation for a godly Church and commonwealth,6 “the seminary of Church and State.”7 The Puritans assumed that as families fared so fared the Church.

While the Puritans considered the family important for the temporal health of both Church and commonwealth, they prioritized the spiritual well-being of the family members. They placed a great responsibility on fathers to govern their families’ education in the things of God and also on mothers to nurture their children in godliness.8 In sum, they regarded the family as a “little church.” According to one Puritan preacher, a father should be “the foreman in the worship of God in the family.”9 Mothers too had a vital role to play, for they “are most about their children, and have early and frequent opportunities to instruct them.” Indeed, godly nurture and instruction is “the principle service [mothers] can do to God in this world.”10

In the seventeenth century, this Puritan ideal for parents had a profound effect both in England and in the nascent American Colonies, shaping many lives for eternal good. By the mid-eighteenth century, it remained a strong influence in America, as the example of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards demonstrates.

As those who shaped several centuries of family life, the Puritans offer a challenge to modern parents. They would offer no comfort to churches populated by parents who abdicate their responsibilities in the hope that the Sunday school and youth worker will pick up the pieces of their neglect. Quite the reverse: the Church, in Puritan eyes, depended upon families for reformation. Parenting is thus a high and holy calling, one that Christians should take with the utmost seriousness, and one in which the Christian nurture of children is to be of first importance. Furthermore, the Church can offer biblical guidance to her mothers and fathers, and the topic of parenting should resonate in the community at large, thus providing channels of witness to a world baffled and anxious over its parental responsibilities.

Footnotes:
1
Samuel Hopkins, “The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Jonathan Edwards,” The Jonathan Edwards.com, http://www.jonathanedwards.com/text/Hopkins/Hopkins.htm (accessed January 23, 2006).

2
See Kairos Journal article, “The Reformation of the Clergy Family.”

3
E.g. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 630-667; idem, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 361; Roland Bainton, Here I Stand: Martin Luther (Oxford: Lion Publishing, 1978), 286-304.

4
J. I. Packer, Among God’s Giants: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Eastbourne: Kingsway, 1991), 354-356.

5
Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, 2nd ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 443-444.

6
See Kairos Journal articles, “Marriage: The First Bond of Society” and “The Foundation of National Morality.”

7
Thomas Manton, “Epistle to the Reader,” in Westminster Confession of Faith (Glasgow: Free Presbyterian Productions, 1994), 9.

8
See Kairos Journal article, “‘Make Provision for the Children.'”

9
Thomas Doolittle, “How May the Duty of Daily Family Prayer Be Best Managed for the Spiritual Benefit of Every One in the Family?,” in Puritan Sermons, 1679-1689, Being the Morning Exercises at Cripplegate, St. Giles in the Fields, and in Southwark by Seventy-Five Ministers of the Gospel in or near London, vol. 2, ed. James Nichols (1674; reprint, Wheaton, IL: Richard Owen Roberts, 1981), 237.

10
Thomas Manton, Westminster Confession of Faith, 10.

article adapted from Kairos Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located across from the Principio Health Center on Rt. 40 in Perryville, MD