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

威廉·珀金斯(1558-1602)，剑桥基督学院研究员和同一城镇大圣安德鲁教堂的讲师，是英语国家新教思想和实践发展中最重要的人物之一，这是一个由他同时代的人的意见和现代学术工作很好地确立的事实。但是，尽管几乎每一本关于帕金斯的专著或文章都会承认，他深刻地塑造了老牌教会和清教运动，但令人惊讶的是，除了他有影响力的学生和崇拜者(仅举几个例子，大主教乌舍尔、塞缪尔·沃德、五月花朝圣者牧师约翰·罗宾逊、理查德·西布斯和威廉·艾姆斯)的名单外，关于这位曾经鲜为人知的剑桥人的想法如何成为新教正统的基准，以及对英国教会伊丽莎白二世和雅各布·雅各布的加尔文主义共识提出重大挑战的催化剂，几乎没有人说过。我在伦敦国王学院的博士工作主要是从手稿和印刷的神学卷中重建可能是珀金斯许多重要思想中最独特的接收：他的超宗教经文和复杂的奥多萨尔提斯，从1584年他的第一部作品发表到1648年威斯敏斯特议会解散。这样的研究存在一个相当大的空白来填补：尽管近几十年来珀金斯的研究相对复兴，但研究往往集中在他的教义的更细微的细节上，或者试图将他归因于从加尔文到特雷廷的广泛的改革后的神谕，而没有太多关注这一多产的神是如何被几代英国牧师和神学家阅读、接受、改编或拒绝的。帕金斯的普遍形象是一个系统的，但非原创的思想家，他主要是为了向英国介绍比萨神学和莱茵兰神庙。由于没有考虑到他的思想的各个方面的原创性和影响，特别是他的经世论，在英国的背景下，这幅图景变得贫乏了。虽然W.B.Patterson教授最近发表的文章已经采取了初步措施来纠正这一缺陷，但仍有许多工作要做。尽管我最初对文献进行了回顾，但我希望将这篇论文大致分为四个部分。第一本将包括珀金斯的简短传记，其中包括关于他生平的最新可用信息，从他广泛出版的作品中得出的他的经验论思想的综合，并将这些思想与早期英国新教占卜的思想进行比较。第二本书将考察珀金斯在世期间和去世后的一段时间内的影响，特别是汉普顿法庭会议和早期阿米尼亚争议，而第三本书将集中讨论珀金斯在17世纪30年代洛迪安统治时期既受到拥护又受到批评的方式。最后，将评估珀金斯对威斯敏斯特议会审议和它所产生的供词的影响。在对一个时期的研究中，建立的教会的历史特点是推翻加尔文主义为其占主导地位的教义潮流，有一个巨大的贡献，可以通过对加尔文主义东正教最多产的捍卫者之一的智力死后的研究。

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.