There are ghosts on my dining room wall. Not ghosts in the frightening sense, but reminders that the past is never quite as far away as we sometimes imagine. Hanging there are images of Pilgrims from another age, faces that seem to carry all the assumptions many of us have inherited about those who came before us. They look serious, solemn, perhaps even severe, and for many people those faces represent everything they believe they know about the Puritans.
The word Puritan carries a great deal of baggage. It often brings to mind people dressed in black, suspicious of pleasure, opposed to joy, and determined to impose rigid rules on everyone around them. History also reminds us that Puritan communities were far from perfect. Their desire to create a faithful society sometimes became coercion. Their pursuit of religious truth sometimes failed to leave room for the conscience and dignity of others. Some of their decisions caused real harm, and we do not honor history by pretending otherwise.
But human beings are rarely that simple. One of the dangers of looking into the past is our temptation to turn people into symbols rather than see them as people. We either polish them until they become heroes who can do no wrong, or we reduce them to villains from whom we have nothing to learn. Both approaches allow us to avoid the harder work of listening. The truth is that those who came before us were human beings with hopes, fears, convictions, contradictions, moments of wisdom, and moments of failure. Their complexity matters because it is through that complexity that we can ask what faithful life requires.
Recently, as those old faces watched over my dining room, I began reading Edmund Morgan’s The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. I picked up the book as part of my ongoing exploration of the theological world that eventually shaped New England ministers such as the Rev. Samuel West, who preached the Massachusetts Election Sermon in May of 1776. I expected to discover historical context. What I did not expect was to find myself drawn into the spiritual questions that shaped their lives.
Adding to that experience was the fact that my copy of Morgan’s book had already been read by someone else. Throughout the pages, another reader had underlined passages and left handwritten thoughts in the margins. I do not know who this person was, when they read the book, or what brought them to these pages, but I found myself entering into a conversation not only with Morgan and Winthrop, but with another person who had wrestled with these same ideas before me.
What surprised me most about Morgan’s description of Winthrop was how different he was from the caricature I had inherited. Winthrop did not hate the world. He did not believe that holiness required rejecting ordinary human joys. He loved his family, valued friendship, enjoyed recreation, and appreciated the beauty of creation. Morgan writes that Winthrop “liked all the things that God had given him.” The struggle was not whether these things were good; the struggle was how to love them rightly. That struggle is the heart of this essay: faithful love is not rejection, but right ordering.
That question stopped me because it is not just a Puritan question. It is a deeply human question. How do we love the gifts without forgetting the Giver? How do we enjoy creation without trying to possess it? How does divine love reorder every human love? These are the questions that guide this essay, because they ask what faithful love looks like in any age.
That last question has been central to my own theology and ministry. When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment, he did not respond with a checklist of beliefs or a series of religious obligations. He answered with love: love God and love your neighbor. The command to love our neighbor means exactly what it says. Everyone means everyone. That is not a political statement but a theological conviction rooted in the nature of God and the image of God present in every person.
Before my present ministry, part of my theological formation took place within the Eastern Christian tradition. It was there that I encountered the ancient teaching of theosis, the understanding that the Christian life is a lifelong journey of transformation into what God created humanity to become. Salvation is not simply a moment in time or a box that gets checked; it is the ongoing work of healing, restoration, and transformation by the grace of God.
Other Christian traditions have approached this same mystery with different language. The Benedictine tradition speaks of conversion of life, the daily turning of ourselves toward God. The Puritans spoke in their own way about the ordering of the heart and the transformation of life. These traditions are not identical, but they wrestle with a common question: what does a life transformed by God actually look like?
This is where Morgan’s portrait of Winthrop becomes especially interesting. For Winthrop, faith could never remain only an inward experience. A transformed heart had implications beyond the individual. Morgan writes that “living in the world demanded more than a taming of the heart. The world itself required discipline.” Faith had to move outward because love always moves outward.
This is the movement from heart, to home, to church, to commonwealth. If divine love changes us, then it changes how we relate to others. It shapes how we understand responsibility, justice, community, and the common good. This is the foundation of covenant, the idea that we do not simply live beside one another but that we have obligations to one another. In other words, the essay’s central claim is that love must be ordered outward.
More than a century later, Samuel West would inherit this ongoing conversation. Standing before the Massachusetts government in 1776, West declared, “The happiness of mankind is the sole end of all civil government.” That statement did not appear out of nowhere. It emerged from generations of wrestling with questions about God, humanity, liberty, responsibility, and the purpose of community.
The faces on my dining room wall look different to me now. Not because I have forgotten the failures of those who came before us, and not because I need them to be heroes. I do not. History becomes dangerous when we require people of the past to be either perfect saints or irredeemable villains. The more difficult task is to encounter them honestly.
The Puritans wrestled with questions they did not always answer well. Sometimes they failed to live up to their own ideals. Sometimes those failures had painful consequences. But perhaps there is something for us to learn from people who were willing to wrestle deeply with questions that remain unfinished.
How do we love rightly? How do we live faithfully? How do we allow divine love to transform not only our hearts but our homes, our communities, and the world we share? These are not separate questions. They are the question at the center of this essay.
The ghosts on my dining room wall are not asking me to defend them. They are inviting me into a conversation that has been going on for generations.
And perhaps that is the work of every generation: to continue the conversation, to learn from both the wisdom and mistakes of those who came before us, and to ask again what kind of people love is calling us to become.
