It is often the critic of those against the Reformed Faith, or who may claim to be reformed but are not Reformed in the same way as Calvin or the Reformers were, but merely hold to T.U.L.I.P which is not the same thing at all, that Reformed presbyterians, are trying to recreate something impossible. Seventeenth century puritanism in today’s world. Or there may be Reformed blelievers who have a real love of the Puritans, who think that is what they should do to hold to Reformed theology in the Puritan tradition, and yet obviously can’t! Thinking its either what we want to do, try to do, or should do, when one thinks about it, is quite, quite ludicrous. Times change, yet people and their natures don’t. God nor His Word never changes. But with changing times, in whatever era, we still have God’s Word saying the same thing for ALL time. And the Puritans above anyone both past and present, are the people who represent the fullest works, on how to apply the Bible in our lives. Applying it in our lives today though in such a different world to the one they inhabited, means often something quite different and will look quite different to the lives of the Puritans. The teachings are the same. Life and the modern world though does not reflect 17th century England or Scotland. Abortion would be one issue that was not relevant then. Yet does the Bible not say much about the sanctity of life? That is one easy example of changing times and different values in the world we inhabit. Yet the Bible has an answer for it every inch as much as the things that impinged upon the lives of puritans and needlessly threatened lives. Whether that was at the hands of the papists or through huge impoverishment.

But, lets get this idea knocked on the head! Puritanism today, should and does exist. The values, and Biblical teachings of those men, still exist and should do, because they are contained within the pages of Scripture. But to think we can recreate ourselves as 17th century puritans in the 22nd century is quite the most illogical yet all too often prevailing thought. By both its critics and its admirers. It cannot be done. It should not be done. If we was to do that, we would all take ourselves off into some little isolated corner of the world, where the moden world we live in could not affect, invade or in any way reach us, and be hermits satisfied that we are doing everything we should as todays Christians by living such a life as that. The Puritans would be horrified, appalled and abhorred at such a thought. They were active men in their world of their time; in the Church, politics, social economic factors, everything that made up the world as it was. And todays Christians, whether puritanical in beliefs or not, should take a leaf out of their book, and be exactly the same way. Not indifferent in their own little nook, or in some self-imposed isolation or exile, away from the world, (is that even possible?) that makes us no better than the papists in monastries, but taking the teachings from Scripture which those great men, (and women too) lost so much and cost them so dearly to keep keeping on in making the teachings known, heard and applied.

As J.I. Packer wrote:

If we are to profit from studying Puritan teaching on this or any subject, our approach to it must be right. For it is all too easy for admirers of the Puritans to study their work in a way which the Puritans themselves would be the first to condemn. Thus, we can have a wrong attitude to the men; we can revere them as infallible authorities. But they would scarify us for such a gross lapse into what they would regard as papalism and idolatry. They would remind us that they were no more than servants and expositors of God’s written word, and they would charge us never to regard their writings as more than helps and guides to understanding that word. They would further assure us that, since all men, even Puritans, can err, we must always test their teaching with the utmost rigour by that very word which they sought to expound. Or, again, we can make a wrong application of their teaching. We can parrot their language and ape their manners, and imagine that thereby we place ourselves in the true Puritan tradition. But the Puritans would impress on us that that is precisely what we fail to do if we act so. They sought to apply the eternal truths of Scripture to the particular circumstances of their own day—moral, social, political, ecclesiastical, and so forth.
If we would stand in the true Puritan tradition, we must seek to apply those same truths to the altered circumstances of our own day. Human nature does not change, but times do; therefore, though the application of divine truth to human life will always be the same in principle, the details of it must vary from one age to another. To content ourselves with aping the Puritans would amount to beating a mental retreat out of the twentieth century, where God has set us to live, into the seventeenth, where he has not. This is as unspiritual as it is unrealistic. The Holy Spirit is pre-eminently a realist, and he has been given to teach Christians how to live to God in the situation in which they are, not that in which some other saints once were. We quench the Spirit by allowing ourselves to live in the past. And such an attitude of mind is theologically culpable. It shows that we have shirked an essential stage in our thinking about God’s truth—that of working out its application to ourselves. Application may never be taken over second-hand and ready-made; each man in each generation must exercise his conscience to discern for himself how truth applies, and what it demands, in the particular situation in which he finds himself. The application may be similar in detail from one generation to another, but we must not assume in advance that it will be so. And therefore our aim in studying the Puritans must be to learn, by watching them apply the word to themselves in their day, how we must apply it to ourselves in ours.
This point is crucial for us who believe that modern evangelicalism stands in need of correction and enrichment of a kind which the older evangelical tradition can supply. It seems that modern evangelicalism is guilty of just this error of living in the past—in this case, in the recent, late nineteenth-century past. We are too often content today to try and get along by rehashing the thin doctrinal gruel and the sometimes questionable ideas about its ethical, ecclesiastical and evangelistic application which were characteristic of that decadent period in evangelical history. But the answer to this situation is emphatically not that we should retreat still further, and start living, not now in the nineteenth, but in the seventeenth century. Such a cure would in many ways be worse than the disease. We certainly need to go back behind the nineteenth century and reopen the richer mines of older evangelical teaching; but then we must endeavour to advance beyond the nineteenth-century mentality into a genuine appreciation of our twentieth-century situation, so that we may make a genuinely contemporary application of the everlasting gospel.
Packer, J. I.: A Quest for Godliness : The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life. Wheaton, Ill. : Crossway Books, 1994, S. 233