Posted by
ValiantForTruth on Thursday, March 10, 2011 11:05:09 AM
'So, if religion is not important to them, does that mean journalists cannot understand its importance to others? It shouldn’t. Harvard’s great scholar Perry Miller understood the Puritans better, perhaps, than any professor at any American university. But Miller himself was an atheist.' -Ken Blackwell
Re: http://townhall.com/columnists/kenblackwell/2011/03/10/purple_fingers_arent_enough/
The Puritan knows the atheist much better than the atheist can know the Puritan. The atheist may know about Puritanism, but he can not possibly know what the Puritan knows...
“If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” [John 8:31-32].
This is the New Covenant fulfillment of the Jewish practice of Jubilee; this is the declaration of real freedom and true liberty prophesied in Isaiah 61 from the Man sent to accomplish it. The Puritan is first a disciple of Christ and because of that he knows the truth and because of that he is a free man. It is not coincidence that civil liberty came to America because of Puritan influence. A man free in Christ will not be subject to the tyrant or the commandments of men.
How can a man spiritually dead in his sins know what it is to be alive in the Spirit? The dead man is so deceived that he thinks he is free when he is a slave of sin. How can he know the freedom that the Puritan knows? Only the man that has died to sin in Christ can know what it is to be free.
Now the Puritan knows the atheist because he used to be like the one walking in the futility of his mind, having his understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that was in him, because of the blindness of his heart [Ephesians 4].
The atheist is alienated from the life of God because he is blind to spiritual reality. He has suppressed the knowledge of God and exchanged it for the things of this world. And that is all he can know.