'An Obscure Fellow'? The Enduring Impact of William Perkins' Soteriology upon English Protestantism, 1584-1648

威廉·珀金斯（William Perkins, 1558-1602）是剑桥大学基督学院的研究员，也是该镇大圣安德鲁教堂的讲师，他是英语新教思想和实践发展中最重要的人物之一，这一事实得到了同时代人的观点和现代学术工作的充分证实。然而，尽管几乎每一本与珀金斯有关的专著或文章都会承认，他深刻地影响了英国国教和清教运动，但令人惊讶的是，除了通常列出的他有影响力的学生和崇拜者(仅举几例，厄舍大主教、塞缪尔·沃德、约翰·罗宾逊，五月花号清教徒的牧师，理查德·西贝斯（Richard Sibbes）和威廉·艾姆斯（William Ames）)，一个曾经鲜为人知的剑桥学者的思想如何成为新教正统观念的标杆，以及对英国教会伊丽莎白一世和詹姆士一世的“加尔文主义共识”提出重大挑战的催化剂。我在伦敦国王学院的博士工作主要是根据手稿和印刷的神学卷，重建帕金斯许多重要思想中最独特的观点：他的超然救世论和复杂的上帝救赎论，从1584年他的第一部作品出版到1648年威斯敏斯特议会解散。这样的研究存在着相当大的空白：虽然最近几十年帕金斯的研究出现了相对的复兴，但研究往往集中在他教义的细节上，或者试图把他放在从加尔文到特雷丁的整个大陆的改革宗神学“正典”中，而没有太多关注这位丰富的神是如何被一代又一代的英国牧师和神学家阅读、接受、改编或拒绝的。珀金斯的普遍形象是一个系统的，但不是原创的思想家，他主要是为了向英国介绍贝萨和莱茵兰的神学。由于没有考虑到他思想方面的独创性和影响，特别是他的救赎论，在英国的背景下，这幅画是贫乏的。虽然w·b·帕特森教授最近发表的文章为纠正这一缺陷采取了初步步骤，但仍有许多工作要做。尽管我进行了初步的文献综述，但我希望将论文分为四个大致相等的部分。第一部分将包括帕金斯的简短传记，包括有关他生活的最新信息，综合他的救赎论思想，这些思想来源于他大量出版的作品，并将这些思想与早期英国新教神学家的思想进行比较。第二部分将考察帕金斯生前及其死后的影响，特别涉及汉普顿宫廷会议和早期阿民念主义之争，第三部分将重点关注1630年代劳德派统治时期，帕金斯受到的支持和批评。最后，将评估帕金斯对威斯敏斯特议会审议及其产生的忏悔的影响。在这一时期，国教历史的特点是加尔文主义被推翻，成为其主要的教义潮流。研究加尔文主义正统最多产的捍卫者之一的思想来世，可以做出巨大贡献。

That William Perkins (1558-1602), Fellow of Christ's College Cambridge and lecturer at Great St. Andrew's church in the same town, is one of the most important figures in the development of Anglophone Protestant thought and practice, is a fact well established by both the opinions of his contemporaries, and the work of modern scholarship. But while virtually every monograph or article dealing with Perkins will acknowledge that he shaped both the Established Church and the Puritan movement profoundly, there has been startlingly little said, beyond the usual lists of his influential pupils and admirers (to name but a few, Archbishop Ussher, Samuel Ward, John Robinson, pastor of the Mayflower Pilgrims, Richard Sibbes and William Ames) as to how the ideas of a once little-known Cambridge Fellow became both a benchmark of Protestant orthodoxy, and a catalyst for momentous challenges to the English Church's Elizabethan and Jacobean 'Calvinist Consensus'. My doctoral work at King's College London is chiefly concerned with reconstructing from both manuscript items and from printed theological volumes the reception of probably the most distinctive of Perkins' many important ideas: his supralapsarian soteriology and complex ordo salutis, from the publication of his first works in 1584 until the dissolution of the Westminster Assembly in 1648. A sizeable gap exists for such research to fill: while there has been in recent decades a relative renaissance in Perkins research, studies tend to focus on the finer details of his doctrine, or to try to locate him in a broad continent-wide 'canon' of Reformed divines from Calvin to Turretin, without giving much attention to how this prolific divine was read, accepted, adapted or rejected by generations of English ministers and theologians. The prevailing image of Perkins is of a systematic, but unoriginal, thinker who chiefly served to present the theology of Beza and the Rhineland divines to England. This picture is impoverished by a failure to consider the originality and impact of aspects of his thought, particularly his soteriology, in an English context. While initial steps were taken towards redressing this deficiency by recent publications from Professor W.B. Patterson, much work remains to be done. Notwithstanding my initial literature review, I hope to divide the thesis into four roughly equal sections. The first will consist in a brief biography of Perkins, incorporating the latest available information on his life, a synthesis of his soteriological ideas derived from his extensive published output and a comparison of these ideas with the thought of earlier English Protestant divines. The second will examine Perkins' influence during his own lifetime and in the period immediately following his death, with particular reference to the Hampton Court Conference and the early Arminian Controversy, while the third will focus upon the ways in which Perkins was both championed and critiqued during the period of Laudian ascendency in the 1630s. Finally, Perkins' influence upon the deliberations of the Westminster Assembly and the Confession which it produced will be assessed. In the study of a period where the history of the Established Church was characterised by the overthrow of Calvinism as its dominant doctrinal current, there is an enormous contribution which can be made by research into the intellectual afterlife of one of Calvinist orthodoxy's most prolific defenders.