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

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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.