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

“默默无闻的家伙”？

• 批准号: 2583951
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: King's College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2583951
• 关键词: Obscure; Fellow; Enduring; Impact; William

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.

威廉帕金斯（1558年至1602年），研究员基督学院剑桥和讲师在大圣安德鲁教堂在同一个城市，是一个最重要的数字，在发展的英语新教思想和实践，是一个事实，以及建立双方的意见，他的同时代人，和工作的现代奖学金。但是，虽然几乎每一个专著或文章处理珀金斯将承认，他塑造了建立教会和清教徒运动深刻，有令人惊讶的是很少说，除了他的有影响力的学生和崇拜者通常名单（仅举几例，厄舍大主教，塞缪尔沃德，约翰罗宾逊，五月花朝圣者的牧师，理查德·西伯斯和威廉·艾姆斯），一个曾经鲜为人知的剑桥研究员的思想是如何成为新教正统的基准，以及对英国教会的基督教和基督教的“加尔文教派”的重大挑战的催化剂。我在伦敦国王学院的博士研究工作主要涉及从手稿和印刷的神学卷中重建对帕金斯许多重要思想中最有特色的思想的接受：他的supralapsarian soteriology和复杂的ordo salutis，从1584年他的第一部作品出版到1648年威斯敏斯特议会解散。这类研究存在着相当大的空白，需要填补：虽然近几十年来帕金斯的研究有了相对的复兴，但研究往往集中在他的教义的更精细的细节上，或者试图在从卡尔文到图雷廷的整个大陆范围内的改革宗神学家的“正典”中找到他，而没有太多地关注这位多产的神学家是如何被阅读、接受的，被几代英国牧师和神学家所接受或拒绝。帕金斯的普遍形象是一个系统的，但非原创的，思想家谁主要是担任目前的神学Beza和莱茵兰divines到英国。由于没有考虑到他的思想，特别是他的救赎论在英国语境中的独创性和影响，这幅图景是贫乏的。虽然W.B.帕特森还有很多工作要做尽管我最初的文献综述，我希望将论文分为四个大致相等的部分。第一个将包括在一个简短的传记帕金斯，纳入最新的可用信息对他的生活，一个综合他的soteriological思想来自他的广泛出版的输出和比较这些想法与思想的早期英语新教divines。第二部分将考察帕金斯在他生前和死后的影响，特别是汉普顿宫廷会议和早期的阿民念主义论争，而第三部分将重点关注帕金斯在17世纪30年代劳德统治时期受到拥护和批评的方式。最后，帕金斯的影响，审议的威斯敏斯特大会和自白，它产生的将进行评估。在研究一个时期的历史，建立教会的特点是推翻加尔文主义作为其占主导地位的理论电流，有一个巨大的贡献，可以通过研究的知识来世之一加尔文主义正统的最多产的捍卫者。