“A study of Puritan sermons will show that the preachers’ constant concern, in all their detailed detecting of sins, was to lead their hearers into the life of faith and a good conscience; which, they said, is the most joyous life that man can know in this world. The Puritan concern for a good conscience lent great ethical strength to their teaching. Of all English evangelicals from the Reformation to the present day, the Puritans were undoubtedly the most conspicuous as preachers of righteousness. They were in truth the salt of society in their time, and on many points they created a national conscience which has only recently begun to be eroded.”
The late great J. I. Packer (1926-2020) was one of God’s great gifts to the body of Christ. The Anglican theologian, author and educator was one of evangelicalism’s leading lights of the past six decades, and his influence is still very much with us today. Those who want more background to the man should see this piece: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2020/07/18/notable-christians-j-i-packer/
Among other things, Packer was a great lover of the Puritans, as were other evangelical powerhouses, including Charles Spurgeon and Martyn Lloyd-Jones. He constantly referred to, and quoted from, the Puritans in his dozens of important books.
Some of his books were totally devoted to the Puritans, including his 1990 volume, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Crossway). I have already discussed this book in various articles. Six years ago I penned a piece on his chapter on Puritan preaching: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2018/08/29/packer-preaching-and-the-puritans/
Here I want to quote from his seventh chapter which discusses “The Puritan Conscience.” In it he focusses on three major topics of interest to the Puritans and how they relate to conscience:
First, this teaching reflects the Puritan view of Holy Scripture. God, said the Puritans, must control our consciences absolutely….
The Puritans themselves sought clear certainty as to God’s truth in its practical bearing, and believed that they had been given it. Their very quest sharpened both their moral sensibilities and their insight into the Bible. They would not have been interested in vague moral uplift; what they wanted was to grasp God’s truth with the same preciseness of application with which they held that He had revealed it. Because of their concern for preciseness in following out God’s revealed will in matters moral and ecclesiastical, the first Puritans were dubbed ‘precisians.’ Though ill-meant and derisive, this was in fact a good name for them. Then as now, people explained their attitude as due to peevish cantankerousness and angularity or morbidity of temperament, but that was not how they themselves saw it….
Second, the Puritans’ teaching on conscience reflected their view of personal religion. Godliness, to the Puritans, was essentially a matter of conscience, inasmuch as it consisted in a hearty, disciplined, ‘considerate’ (thoughtful) response to known evangelical truth, and centred upon the getting and keeping of a good conscience. As long as a man is unregenerate, his conscience oscillates between being bad and being asleep. The first work of grace is to quicken his conscience and make it thoroughly bad, by forcing him to face God’s demands upon him and so making him aware of his guilt, impotence, rebelliousness, defilement, and alienation, in God’s sight. But the knowledge of pardon and peace through Christ makes his bad conscience good. A good conscience is God’s gift to those whom, like Bunyan’s pilgrim, he enables to look with understanding at the cross. It is maintained through life by seeking to do God’s will in all things, and by constantly keeping the cross in view….
A good conscience, said the Puritans, is the greatest blessing that there is. ‘Conscience,’ declared Sibbes, ‘is either the greatest friend or the greatest enemy in the world.’ There is no better friend than a conscience which knows peace with God. (pp. 112-115)
Packer continues:
A good conscience is a tender conscience. The consciences of the godless may be so calloused that they scarcely ever act at all; but the healthy Christian conscience (said the Puritans) is constantly in operation, listening for God’s voice in his word, seeking to discern his will in everything, active in self-watch and self-judgement. The healthy Christian knows his frailty and always suspects and distrusts himself, lest sin and Satan should be ensnaring him unawares; therefore he regularly grills himself before God, scrutinising his deeds and motives and ruthlessly condemning himself when he finds within himself moral deficiency and dishonesty. This was the kind of self-judging that Paul urged upon the Corinthians at Communion time (1 Cor 11:31). The degree of sharp-sightedness which our consciences show in detecting our own real sins (as distinct from the imaginary ones on which Satan encourages us to concentrate) is an index of how well we really know God and how close to him we really walk—an index, in other words, of the real quality of our spiritual life. The sluggish conscience of a ‘sleepy’, ‘drowsy’ saint is a sign of spiritual malaise. The healthy Christian is not necessarily the extrovert, ebullient Christian, but the Christian who has a sense of God’s presence stamped deep on his soul, who trembles at God’s word, who lets it dwell in him richly by constant meditation upon it, and who tests and reforms his life daily in response to it. We can begin to assess our real state in God’s sight by asking ourselves how much exercise of conscience along these lines goes into our own daily living.