Lori Branch

“As William Bouwsma pointed out, the late medieval and early Renaissance crises of representation did not stall out at their skepticism of the old systems but rather progressed to an even more urgent defense of objective boundaries and quantifiable truths.27 In “The Secularization of Language in the Seventeenth Century,” Margreta de Grazia has shown how this pursuit of certainty led to a skepticism about language itself that dissociated words from God and deverbalized God’s message, prompting thinkers from Thomas Sprat of the Royal Society to Hobbes, Robert Hooke, Galileo, and Newton to seek cer- tainty in mathematical knowledge; quantifiable, identifiable substances; and trial, experiment, and experience.28 As Puritan propagandist Vavasor Powell put it in the middle of the seventeenth century, “Experience is like
42 Rituals of Spontaneity
steel to an edged tool, or like salt to fresh meat, it seasons brain- knowledge, and settles a shaking unsetled soule.” Paralleling more sec- ular quests for certainty, the Puritan quest for grounding religious knowledge in a literalist reading of Scripture focused ever more intensely on manifest, genuine experience confirming salvation and the personal application of scriptural truth. The spontaneous “pouring out of the heart” in prayer was just such an evidentiary experience.”
― Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth

“Bunyan points out, for example, how the Pharisees of Jesus’ day no doubt phrased their prayers well but were condemned because they fell short of “pouring out” their hearts to God (IWP, 38). Without help from the Holy Spirit in purifying and pouring out the heart, he writes, one who prays is “hyp- ocritical, cold, and unseemly” and “abominable to God” (IWP, 37).
The hypocrisy God detests, then, is importantly not a matter of say- ing one thing and doing another, but of saying one thing and feeling another: of a disjunction between the logocentric intellect and the heart, between the propositional truths of abstract doctrine and the emotions which are substantively to mirror and confirm it.”
― Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth