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Originally Posted by KenPierce 
Okay, now I must pull out the big guns, with thanks to Iain Murray. The following are quotes from the much valued secular historian and eminent late Harvard Professor Perry Miller. Sounds like he is a valuable source on the Puritans to me (note the sarcasm? It's friendly sarcasm!)
Shouldn't an "objective" historian, so well-regarded have a bit more objectivity than that? I must agree with Pastor Murray in his much maligned but very readable and scholarly Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography.
Question for Mr. McFadden: Must Marsden be an effective spoken communicator to be a valuable scholar? Why , then according to your dear Professor Miller, we must write off America's greatest philosopher theologian! :-)
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1. I am NOT a Perry Miller fan. However, cherry picking a few of his most extreme quotes does not make a fair critique either. Here are some other Miller quotes:
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To seek no further, it was the habit of proponents for the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment during the 1920’s to dub Prohibitionists ‘Puritans,’ and the cartoonists made the nation familiar with an image of the Puritan: a gaunt, lank-haired kill-joy, wearing a black steeple hat and compounding for sins he was inclined to by damning those to which he had no mind. Yet any acquaintance with the Puritans of the seventeenth century will reveal at once, not only that they did not wear such hats, but also that they attired themselves in all the hues of the rainbow, and furthermore that in their daily life they imbibed what seem to us prodigious quantities of alcoholic beverages, with never the slightest inkling that they were doing anything sinful. … if first of all we wish to take Puritan culture as a whole, we shall find, let us say, that about ninety per cent of the intellectual life, scientific knowledge, morality, manners and customs, notions and prejudices, was that of all Englishmen … They were not unique or extreme in thinking that religion was the primary and all-engrossing business of man, or that all human though and action should tend to the glory of God.”
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Ken, my concern was to get it correct. Fault Miller for his theology, but at least allow that the total impact of his work was not to slander the Puritans. Miller, NOT a friend of evangelical Christianity, is remembered for his rehabilitation of the reputation of the Puritans. That is the bottom line, not what the unbelieving Harvard scholar saw as the faults of Edwards or the Puritan divines of the previous century. Can we learn from the history of Perry Miller? Surely. Would he be MY choice for a writer on the topic? NEVER. Give me Beeke, Packer, or Ryken any day.
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Marsden is the one who spoke highly of Miller's importance in his course on Jonathan Edwards. You cannot cite Marsden to diss Miller without allowing that in his course on Jonathan Edwards,
he praises Miller (not uncritically, but genuinely).
3. Miller is not my "dear professor" AND I'm the one who brought up Marsden's fine work in
Reforming Evangelicalism. Marsden's scholarship (not unlike Miller's) is top drawer. Both of them are recognized by both secular and Christian academics for the quality of their work. And, while Marsden is much closer to God and the angels than Miller, he is several degrees too liberal for me. Frankly, I think that Marsden spent too much time hanging out with Richard Mouw (Fuller pres) when they were teaching at Calvin together.
Sorry I didn't communicate clearly enough in my past post. Here is my bottom line:
* Miller is not one of "us."
* But Miller was a fine historian (although certainly not objective) who helped change academic attitudes toward the Puritans for the better.
* Marsden is a professing Reformed Christian with an evangelical background. Still, I consider him too progressive for my tastes and doubt that he would feel comfortable on the PB.
* I prefer Murray, Packer, Ryken, and Beeke on the Puritans to any secular authors.