Everyone has heard it. I mean, the heaping of opprobrium upon someone or some view (perceived to be) sexually repressed or inhibited: "Oh, how puritanical." It's a nasty designation. Ouch! It hurts. Who wants to be puritanical? After all, the Puritans, as we all know, were sexually repressed and wierd. And we today are so liberated, enlightened, free.
Oh really? Are we? And were they? I would submit that we haven't begun to catch up with their holy and healthy views on sex and marriage. We could learn much from the Puritans. Us, you say? Yes. Us. The Puritans were a robust Christian people who enjoyed all of life in submission to God's word, a word that speaks robustly of sexual love.
Some years back Leland Ryken wrote a fine and balanced treatment of the Puritans called Worldly Saints. In chapter 3 on "Marriage and Sex," he show us just how unpuritanical the Puritans really were (and so the subtitle of the book The Puritans as the Really Were really fits).
Here's a sampling (more to come): "When a New England wife complained, first to her pastor and then to the whole congregation, that her husband was neglecting their sex life, the church proceeded to excommunicate the man."
Such was their high view of the place of the marriage bed. Neglecting it was, at least in one Puritan church, grounds for excommunication!
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