William Perkins on Predestination and Preaching

by Dr. Joel R. Beeke

“I am fully aware that liberty places me on a tightrope—a greased, slippery one—but I have no intention of falling.” So said union chief Lech Welesa when released by Soviet-backed militia in Poland.

            Similarly, when Elizabethan England’s premier Puritan preacher William Perkins (1558-1602) proceeded (eighteen years prior to his untimely death at age 44) to write, teach, and preach predestinarian theology, he stepped forward on a taut theological cable, stretched between his conviction that God must be glorified in all things and his concern for the salvation of sinful men. Perkins believed that the proper balance between divine sovereignty and human responsibility depended on preaching that was practical, experimental,[i][1] and predestinarian. Interweaving supralapsarian predestination with experimental soul-examination, Perkins attempted the daring feat of setting forth a lively order of salvation (ordo salutis) that challenged all people, whether converted or not, to search for the fruits of predestination within their own souls on the basis of Christ’s work.

            Perkins’s attempt to wed decretal and experimental theology makes his works worthy of attention. Serious study of these works isn’t enough, however; we must also become participants in applying their theology. If Perkins himself walked a tightrope of theology, his interpreters must also walk “a greased, slippery one.”

            Perkins, often called the “father of Puritanism,”[ii][2] has been evaluated by many scholars.[iii][3] They have offered positive as well as negative commentary about his political, ethical, revivalistic, and ecclesiastical interests, but many have also offered contradictory assertions about his theological stand.[iv][4] In the areas of predestination and preaching, this commentary has been particularly divisive. For example, confusion abounds on Perkins’s Christological emphasis in predestination. Marshall M. Knappen faults Perkins for following Calvin too closely in Christological predestination, while Ian Breward believes Perkins strayed from Calvin at this point. Breward complains that the “work of Christ was discussed within the context of predestination rather than providing the key to the decrees of God.”[v][5]

While Perkins cannot escape all charges of promoting confusion with his tightrope theology, his synthesis of decretal and experimental predestination is Christologically stable and a natural outgrowth of Calvinism. It is particularly faithful to the theology of Theodore Beza, which promotes a healthy combination of Reformed theology and Puritan piety.[vi][6] I reject William H. Chalker’s assertion that Perkins kills Calvin’s theology as well as Robert T. Kendall’s thesis that Beza—and thus Perkins—differ substantially from the Genevan Reformer. Rather, I concur with Richard Muller, who says, “Perkins’s thought is not a distortion of earlier Reformed Theology, but a positive outgrowth of the systematic beginnings of Protestant thought.”[vii][7]

            After a biographical overview, I’ll limit this introduction to showing that Perkins maintained his tightrope theology by focusing on how he expounded the immovable will of God and the movable and moved will of man in predestinarian preaching. Let the reader judge if I have fallen from the tightrope of interpreting the theology of Perkins.

Life and Influence of William Perkins [viii][8]

Perkins was born in 1558 to Thomas and Hannah Perkins in the village of Marston Jabbett, in Bulkington Parish of Warwickshire county. His youth was given to recklessness, profanity, and drunkenness. In 1577, he entered Christ’s College in Cambridge as a pensioner, suggesting that socially he stood “on the borderline of the gentry.”[ix][9] He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1581 and a master’s degree in 1584.

While a student, Perkins experienced a powerful conversion, which possibly began when he overheard a woman in the street chide her naughty child by alluding to “drunken Perkins.”[x][10] Most likely that incident initiated the kind of conviction and humiliation that Perkins would often write about, in which pride is stripped away and a poor sinner is confronted with his own depravity and helplessness before an angry God. At any rate, Perkins gave up his wicked ways, fled to Christ for salvation, and began to bear fruits of holiness.  He also gave up his study of mathematics and his fascination with black magic and the occult, and took up theology.[xi][11] He soon joined Laurence Chaderton (1536-1640), his personal tutor and lifelong friend who was called “the pope of Cambridge puritanism,”[xii][12] as well as Richard Greenham, Richard Rogers, and others in a spiritual brotherhood at Cambridge that espoused Calvinistic Puritan convictions.[xiii][13]

            Cambridge was the leading Puritan center of the day. Perkins’s formal training was thus Calvinistic within a scholastic framework.[xiv][14] The strict scholastic training had been modified, however, by the inroads that Peter Ramus’s  (1515-1572) “method” had made at Cambridge ever since the 1560s when it won the support of the Puritans, due to its practicality.[xv][15] Ramus, a converted Roman Catholic, reformed the arts curriculum by applying it to daily life. He proposed a logic and method to simplify all academic subjects, proposing a single logic for both dialectic and rhetoric. The task of the logician was to classify concepts to make them understandable and memorable. That was done by method, the orderly presentation of a subject. Chaderton first introduced Ramus’s Ars Logica to Cambridge students and particularly to Gabriel Harvey, a lecturer who used Ramus’s methods for reforming the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.

Perkins was impressed with Harvey’s presentation of Ramus’s method in rhetoric and applied it to his manual on preaching, The Arte of Prophecying, or a treatise concerning the sacred and onely true manner and methode of preaching.[xvi][16] Perkins’s Ramistic training at Cambridge oriented him toward practical application rather than speculative theory and gave him skills for becoming a popular preacher and theologian.[xvii][17]

            From 1584 until his death, Perkins served as lecturer, or preacher, at Great St. Andrew’s parish church, Cambridge, a most influential pulpit across the street from Christ’s College. He also served as a Fellow at Christ’s College from 1584 to 1595. Fellows were required to preach, lecture, and tutor students, acting as “guides to learning as well as guardians of finances, morals, and manners.”[xviii][18]

Perkins resigned his fellowship to marry a young widow, Timothye Cradocke of Grant Chester, on July 2, 1595. That motivated Samuel Ward, later Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, to respond in his diary, “Good Lord, grant… there follow no ruin to the college.” Men such as Ward counted it a great blessing to sit under Perkins’s teaching and to witness his exemplary living.[xix][19]

            Perkins served the University in other capacities. He was Dean of Christ’s College from 1590 to 1591. He catechized the students at Corpus Christi College on Thursday afternoons, lecturing on the Ten Commandments in a manner that deeply impressed the students.[xx][20] On Sunday afternoons, he worked as an adviser, counseling the spiritually distressed. “The balm which he applied most commonly to the walking wounded who shared with him their spiritual insecurities was the doctrine of divine predestination,” writes Mark Shaw.[xxi][21]

Perkins had exceptional gifts for preaching and an uncanny ability to reach common people with plain preaching and theology. He pioneered Puritan casuistry—the art of dealing with “cases of conscience” by self-examination and scriptural diagnosis.[xxii][22] Many were convicted of sin and delivered from bondage under his preaching. The prisoners of the Cambridge jail were among the first to benefit from his powerful preaching. Thomas Fuller said that Perkins “would pronounce the word damne with such an emphasis as left a dolefull Echo in his auditours ears a good while after…. Many an Onesimus in bonds was converted to Christ.”[xxiii][23]

Samuel Clarke provides a striking example of Perkins’s pastoral care. He says a condemned prisoner was climbing the gallows, looking “half-dead,” when Perkins said to him, “What man! What is the matter with thee? Art thou afraid of death?” The prisoner confessed that he was less afraid of death than of what would follow it. “Saist thou so,” said Perkins. “Come down again man and thou shalt see what Gods grace will do to strengthen thee.” When the prisoner came down, they knelt together, hand in hand, and Perkins offered “such an effectual prayer in confession of sins, … as made the poor prisoner burst out into abundance of tears.” Convinced the prisoner was brought “low enough, even to Hell gates,” Perkins showed him the freeness of the gospel in prayer. Clarke writes that the prisoner’s eyes were opened “to see how the black lines of all his sins were crossed, and cancelled with the red lines of his crucified Saviours precious blood; so graciously applying it to his wounded conscience, as made him break out into new showres of tears for joy of the inward consolation which he found.” The prisoner arose from his knees, went cheerfully up the ladder, testified of salvation in Christ’s blood, and bore his death with patience, “as if he actually saw himself delivered from the Hell which he feared before, and heaven opened for the receiving of his soul, to the great rejoicing of the beholders.”[xxiv][24]

Perkins’s sermons were of many “colours,” writes Fuller.  They seemed to be “all Law and all gospel, all cordials and all corrosives, as the different necessities of people apprehended” them. He was able to reach many types of people in various classes, being “systematic, scholarly, solid and simple at the same time.”[xxv][25] As Fuller says, “His church consisting of the university and town, the scholar could have no learneder, the townsmen [no] plainer, sermons.” Most importantly, he lived his sermons: “As his preaching was a comment on his text, so his practice was a comment on his preaching,” Fuller concludes.[xxvi][26] 

Like his mentor, Chaderton, Perkins worked to purify the established church from within rather than join those Puritans who advocated separation. Rather than addressing church polity, his primary concerns focused on addressing pastoral inadequacies, spiritual deficiencies, and soul-destroying ignorance in the church.

In time Perkins—a rhetorician, expositor, theologian, and pastor—became the principle architect of the young Puritan movement. His vision of reform for the church, combined with his intellect, piety, book writing, spiritual counseling, and communication skills enabled him to set the tone for seventeenth-century Puritans—in their accent on Reformed, experiential truth and self-examination, and in their polemic against Roman Catholicism and Arminianism. Fuller said of Perkins, who was handicapped in his right hand, “This Ehud, with a lefthanded pen did stab the Romish cause.” By the time of his death, Perkins’s writings in England were outselling those of Calvin, Beza, and Bullinger combined.[xxvii][27]  He “moulded the piety of a whole nation,” H.C. Porter said.[xxviii][28]

Perkins died from kidney stones in 1602, just before the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. His wife of seven years was pregnant at the time and caring for three small children as well as sorrowing over three additional children recently lost to various diseases. When John Cotton heard the bell toll for Perkins’s funeral, he secretly rejoiced that his conscience would no longer have to smart under such powerful preaching.[xxix][29]  Perkins’s closest friend, James Montagu, later Bishop of Winchester, preached the funeral sermon for Perkins from Joshua 1:2, “Moses my servant is dead.” Ward, deeply distressed, wrote on behalf of many: “God knows his death is likely to be an irrevocable loss and a great judgment to the university, seeing there is none to supply his place.”[xxx][30] Perkins was buried in the church yard of Great St. Andrews.[xxxi][31]

            Eleven posthumous editions of Perkins’s writings, containing nearly fifty treatises, were printed by 1635. His major writings include expositions of Galatians 1-5, Matthew 5-7, Hebrews 11, Jude, and Revelation 1-3 as well as treatises on predestination, the order of salvation, assurance of faith, the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the worship of God, the Christian life and vocation, ministry and preaching, the errors of Roman Catholicism, and various cases of conscience. His writings, popularized for lay readership, are Bible-based in accord with the principles of literal and contextual interpretation established by the Reformers. They are practically and experientially Calvinistic, continually focusing on motives, desires, and distresses in the heart and life of sinners, ever aiming at finding and following the path of eternal life. To accentuate pietistic emphases, Perkins usually employs a Ramistic method that presents the definition of the subject and its further partition, often by dichotomies, into progressively more heads or topics, applying each truth set forth.[xxxii][32]

Perkins’s influence continued through such theologians as William Ames (1576-1633), Richard Sibbes (1577-1635), John Cotton (1585-1652), and John Preston (1587-1628). Perkins’s ministry is what Cotton considered the “one good reason why there came so many excellent preachers out of Cambridge in England, more than out of Oxford.”[xxxiii][33] Thomas Goodwin (1600-1680) wrote that when he entered Cambridge, six of his instructors who had sat under Perkins were still passing on his teaching. Ten years after Perkins’s death, Cambridge was still “filled with the discourse of the power of Mr. William Perkins’ ministry,” Goodwin said.[xxxiv][34]

            The translation of Perkins’s writings prompted greater theological discussion between England and the Continent.[xxxv][35] J. van der Haar records 185 seventeenth-century printings in Dutch of Perkins’s individual or collected works,[xxxvi][36] twice as many as any other Puritan.[xxxvii][37] He and Ames, his most influential student on the continent, imfluenced Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676) and numerous Dutch Nadere Reformatie (Dutch Second Reformation) theologians.[xxxviii][38] John Robinson (c. 1575-1625), the Separatist, was a disciple of Perkins. At least fifty editions of Perkins’s works were printed in Switzerland and in various parts of Germany.[xxxix][39] His writings were also translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Irish, Welsh, Hungarian, and Czech.[xl][40]

In New England, nearly one hundred Cambridge men who led early migrations, including William Brewster of Plymouth, Thomas Hooker of Connecticut, John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay, and Roger Williams of Rhode Island, grew up in Perkins’s shadow. Richard Mather was converted while reading Perkins, and Jonathan Edwards was fond of reading Perkins more than a century later.[xli][41] Samuel Morison remarks that “your typical Plymouth Colony library comprised a large and a small bible, Ainsworth’s translation of the Psalms, and the works of William Perkins, a favorite theologian.”[xlii][42] “Anyone who reads the writings of early New England learns that Perkins was indeed a towering figure in their eyes,”writes Perry Miller. Perkins and his followers were “the most quoted, most respected, and most influential of contemporary authors in the writings and sermons of early Massachusetts.”[xliii][43]

The Immovable Will of God: Preaching Predestination

A Christocentric Supralapsarian Position

Though William Perkins rejoiced with other Englishmen at the defeat of Spain—and Rome—in the Armada, the battle with anti-Calvinists was far from over.[xliv][44] Deploring the way in which students were avoiding Protestant writers, Perkins determined to tell everyone that he stood for the truth—the Calvinist doctrine.[xlv][45] Through preaching and writing, he labored to explain the tenets of Calvinism in a way that anyone could understand them.

            Primarily concerned with the conversion of souls and subsequent growth in godliness, Perkins believed that a biblical realization of God’s sovereign grace in predestination was vital for spiritual comfort and assurance. He believed that predestination worked out experimentally in the souls of believers was inseparable from sovereign predestination in Christ. Far from being harsh and cold, sovereign predestination was the foundation upon which experimental faith could be built. It was the hope, expectation, and guarantee of salvation for the true believer.

            In the introduction to his Armilla Aurea (1590), translated as A Golden Chaine (1591),[xlvi][46] in which he first articulates his doctrine of predestination, Perkins identifies four viewpoints:

· The old and new Pelagians, who place the cause of predestination in man, in that God ordained men to life or death according to his foreknowledge of their free will rejection or receiving of offered grace.

· The Lutherans, who teach that God decided to choose some to salvation by His mere mercy but to reject the rest because He foresaw they would reject His grace.

· The semi-Pelagian Roman Catholics, who ascribe God’s predestination partly to mercy and partly to foreseen human preparations and meritorious works.

· Finally, those who teach that the cause of the execution of God’s predestination is God’s mercy in those who are saved and man’s fall and corruption in those who perish, but that the divine decree concerning both has no other cause than His will and pleasure.

Perkins concludes, “Of these four opinions, the three former I labour to oppugn as erroneous, and to maintain the last, as being truth which will bear weight in the balance of the sanctuary.”[xlvii][47]

            Used in this context, Perkins’s expression “the balance of the sanctuary” (balance here referring figuratively to a scale used to weigh objects according to the weight given them in Scripture) expresses his position on the relationship between predestination and preaching. Only this kind of predestination prevents the derogation of power and glory from God and secures the eternal salvation of the saints in God through Christ. Decretal theology, which exalts God and abases man, in addition to experimental theology, by which a sinner makes his election “effectual by a life consonant with God’s choice,”[xlviii][48] are conceptually and realistically linked together.

            Perkins was a supralapsarian more for practical than metaphysical reasons. Adhering to high Calvinism for the framework of his predestination and practical theology, Perkins believed that accenting the sovereignty of God and His decree gave God the most glory and the Christian the most comfort, as well as served as the best polemic against Lutherans, semi-Pelagian Roman Catholics like Robert Bellarmine, and anti-predestinarians in England like Peter Baro and William Barrett. Though greatly indebted to Calvin, Perkins relied heavily upon such theologians as Theodore Beza (1519-1605), Girolamo Zanchi (1516-1590), Zacharias Ursinus (1534-1583), and Caspar Olevianus (1536-1587).[xlix][49] Freely admitting that he used these writers (he even added a work of Beza to his Golden Chaine), Perkins nonetheless used his gifts to add to the treasury of high Calvinism.

            The most notable feature of Perkins’s Golden Chaine is his supralapsarian doctrine of double predestination. It is outlined in his famous chart titled: “A Survey or Table declaring the order of the causes of salvation and damnation according to Gods word.”[l][50] Like Theodore Beza’s chart, though more detailed, Perkins’s chart begins with God and His decree of predestination, is divided into two chains of causes for the execution of election and reprobation, then traces the orderly progression of those executions from the eternal decrees of God to the final consummation of all things, where the elect and reprobate mutually end in glorifying God. 

            It is impossible to understand predestination without realizing how God’s decrees reveal the truth about the Godhead and its activity. Perkins sees the Godhead first in terms of its internal activity, then in terms of its external relation to the created order. When Perkins discusses the nature of God, he describes it as a lively and most perfect essence by which God is complete within Himself. Distinguishing the Father as unbegotten, the Son as begotten, and the Spirit as proceeding from both, Perkins describes the glory within their relationship—the communion of three Persons who work and will the same things. The life of God is the union of the Godhead in its glory and attributes; consequently, God’s essence may never be known outside of His attributes and glory.[li][51]

            God’s attributes make Him truly glorious and distinguish Him from all false gods. By His wisdom and through His foreknowledge, for example, God sees all things that will come to pass, while through His counsel He perceives the best reason for all things that will come into being. Furthermore, with one act, God freely willed all things that were to be; by His omnipotency God has the power to perform every work necessary to carry out His will. This nature of God, this internal activity, this life of God, this operation on behalf of man, is God’s glory.

            Perkins thus defines God’s glory as “the infinite excellency of his most simple and most holy divine nature.”[lii][52] Proceeding from this internal glory, God’s decree, as well as its execution, is “the manifestation of the glorie of God.” Predestination, which is only God’s decree concerning man (for His “whole decree [is] that by which God in himself, hath necessarily, and yet freely, from all eternitie determined all things”) is “that by which he hath ordained all men to a certaine and everlasting estate: that is, either to salvation or condemnation, for his owne glory.”[liii][53]

            Predestination is the means by which God manifests the glory of the Godhead outside of Himself to the human race. He returns glory to Himself via mercy to the elect and justice to the reprobate. Both proceed from His sovereignty. Election is God’s decree “whereby on his owne free will, he hath ordained certaine men to salvation, to the praise of the glorie of his grace.” Reprobation is “that part of predestination, whereby God, according to the most free and just purpose of his will, hath determined to reject certaine men unto eternal destruction, and miserie, and that to the praise of his justice.”[liv][54]

            Through election and reprobation—the two parts of predestination—God sets the eternal destiny of men prior to viewing them as either created or fallen. Absolute sovereignty guarantees that God’s purposes and glory cannot be set aside by the actions of men. Whatever his destiny, man may be assured that he cannot move the immovable will of God. Nor can he help but glorify God in either His justice or mercy. Like Edwards, who later said that people should be brought to such God-centeredness that they will glorify God even in condemnation, Perkins teaches that the glory of God should make all persons, regardless of their end, praise the sovereign God.[lv][55]

            Pure glory and absolute sovereignty in double predestination: these are the heartbeats of Perkins’s theology. Like Beza, Perkins upheld a supralapsarian position by denying that God, in reprobating, considered man as fallen. He also used Beza’s argument for support, that the end is first in the intention of an agent. Thus God first decided the end—the manifestation of His glory in saving and damning—before He considered the means, such as creation and the fall. [lvi][56] Ultimately, predestination must not be understood in terms of what it does for man, but in terms of its highest goal—the glory of God.

As a theological tightrope walker, Perkins knew that his supralapsarian view prompted two objections: (1) it makes God the author of sin; (2) it subordinates Christ.[lvii][57] In addressing the first objection, Perkins adamantly rejected the idea that God is the author of sin. Yes, God permitted the fall of man, but that doesn’t mean that he caused the fall, Perkins said. He explained how God was not the cause of the fall by using the illustration of an unpropped house in a windstorm. As an unsupported house would fall with the blowing of the wind, so man without the help of God falls. Thus, the cause of the fall may not be imputed to the owner but to the wind.

            Likewise, when God left Adam to himself, He did not will Adam’s fall or cause his sin. Rather, Adam’s fall was due to his own wilful disobedience of God in eating the forbidden fruit. Without constraint, men willingly fall from integrity. And God leaves them to their own desires, freely suffering them to fall. As Perkins says, we must not think that man’s fall was by chance, or by God’s failure to know it, or by barely winking at it, or by permitting it, or by allowing it against his will. Rather, miraculously, it happened, “not without the will of God, yet without all approbation of it.”[lviii][58]

            God did not make Adam sin. He did not infuse corruption in any form or withdraw any gift that had been Adam’s from creation. He merely ceased for a time to give Adam the grace necessary to stand. He did not confer the confirming grace that He had every right to withhold.

            The devil and Adam—not God—are responsible for sin. The devil is guilty because he tempted Adam to sin as representative head of the entire human race, and Adam is guilty for voluntarily falling away from God and His help. The proper cause of the fall, according to Perkins, was “ the diuell [devil] attempting our ouerthrow, and Adams will, which when it began to bee prooued by tentations [temptations], did not desire Gods assistance, but voluntarily bent it selfe to fal away.”[lix][59]

            Here, then, says Perkins, is the dilemma. Though the decree of God “doth altogether order every euent [event], partly by inclining and gently bending the will in all things that are good, and partly by forsaking it in things that are euill: yet the will of the creature left vnto itselfe, is carried headlong of [its] owne accord, not of necessitie in itselfe [for the decree of the fall planted nothing in Adam whereby he should fall], but contingently that way which the decree of God determined from eternitie.”[lx][60]

            Second, Perkins defends God against the charge of authoring sin by explaining that while the decree of God is immutable so that necessity follows, such necessity does not bind God. For while necessity is tied to the decree, God was free from eternity while making the decree. God acted freely, not out of necessity, in establishing the decree.

            Furthermore, man was also free to act. To explain this, Perkins offers the necessity of infallibility and the necessity of compulsion. The necessity of infallibility refers to the consequences of the previous decree, thereby safeguarding the voluntary acts of the creature who is in no wise coerced by God’s secret decree. Since man’s actions are judged by the rule of God’s law and not by His decree, neither the sovereignty nor the necessity of God’s decree imply divine guilt in sin. Nor do they limit man’s freedom or responsibility.

            The necessity of compulsion refers to something that must be accomplished because of God’s decree without the concurrence of man. It refers to the inanimate and irrational things of creation, such as water that must flow downhill, or a sun that must rise and set. The necessity of this decree does not limit either the freedom of God or man.[lxi][61]

            Third, Perkins defends God by explaining that God would be the author of sin if nothing had intervened between the decree and the fall. The decree of reprobation did not cause damnation; rather, Adam’s voluntary sin did. His free choice to sin was followed by his willingness to lie in sin. The decree of reprobation is the foundation, but not the cause, of all manifestations of God's justice and wrath.

            Perkins denied that God creates anyone to damnation; rather, He creates the reprobate to manifest His justice and glory in their deserved damnation. God decreed damnation not as damnation but as an execution of His justice. Sin, therefore, is not an effect but a consequence of the decree of reprobation. Sin, however, is the meriting cause of actual damnation.[lxii][62]

            This distinction is critical for Perkins’s theological balancing act between supralapsarianism and God’s freedom from sin. God decides to forsake some men not only “in order that Adam and his posterity might know that they could fall by themselves, but also that they could not stand, much less rise again,” Perkins says.[lxiii][63] God did not forsake men because He found them in sin. Rather, as every man is like a lump of clay in the potter’s hand, so God, according to His sovereign will, makes vessels of wrath. Reprobation must not be grounded

in God foreseeing that sinners would reject Him, for this would make reprobation depend upon men. Rather, for His own wise, sovereign reasons, God fitted vessels for wrath by the first act of reprobation (sovereign will of decree) as well as by the second act of reprobation (an ordination to just punishment on account of voluntary sin).

            Here Perkins appears to synthesize supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism. The decree itself is supralapsarian, but its execution bears infralapsarian overtones that reveals itself in expressions such as “out of the mass of mankind.” Perkins asserts that though Adam’s fall allows no one to make any claim on God, the holy God wills to take His elect out of the mass of mankind for His own everlasting love and glory.[lxiv][64] The elect become vessels of God’s mercy solely out of God’s will and without regard to their good or evil. They are ordained to salvation and heavenly glory.

            While electing and ordaining are part of one act, Perkins separates them to make some distinctions. In the first act, election, God provides grace for those who have fallen, while in the second, ordaining, they are given the means by which grace will be manifested and conferred, such as the preaching of the Word. Through preaching, the elect are called to salvation while the

reprobate are reprimanded for not repenting.

            With regard to reprobation, it too can be divided into two acts: the first act, the design to abandon, lies in God alone and is absolute. The second act, the purpose to damn, is not absolute but is the result of sin. Consequently, no one is absolutely ordained to hell or perdition except on account of his sin.[lxv][65]

            Though with a supralapsarian accent, Perkins’s defense of God’s double predestination and freedom from authoring sin anticipated the Canons of Dort (1618-1619). Consistent with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed theologians, Perkins would have wholeheartedly agreed with the controversial yet soundly pious intention of the Canons to distinguish between preterition and damnation. Election and reprobation are absolute and depend solely on the immovable will of God, whereas damnation depends solely on the just reward of sin. Thus, while faith does not cause the salvation of the elect, sin does cause the eternal perdition of the reprobate.

            Along with Calvin, Dort, and Westminster, Perkins would wholeheartedly concur that reprobation is both sovereign and just.[lxvi][66] No one is the victim of injustice, for God is under no obligation to grant mercy to sinners. The decree of creation and the fall is the means God used to allow Adam and his posterity to fall away from Him, but also to carry predestination to its glorious, happy end in Christ-centered salvation. Only in the sense that Adam’s fall opened the way for the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross can Perkins call it a “happy fault,” for no matter how tragic sin may be, it cannot compare to the righteousness of Christ.

            In sum, God stands above and beyond human sin—though He chooses to save some men out of it. He is not the author of sin, for He is never unjust.  “It stands more with equitie a thousand fold, that all the creatures in heaven and earth should jointly serve to set forth the glory and maijestie of God the creator in their eternall destruction, then the striking of a flie or the killing of a flea should serve for the dignities of all men in the world,” Perkin concludes.[lxvii][67] Indeed, without sovereign predestination God’s glory would be lost and all mankind would be lost. Thus God must be glorified as divine Goldsmith for the salvation of the elect in Christ and as divine Potter for the damnation of the reprobate outside of Christ.

            As for the charge that supralapsarianism subordinates Christ, Perkins firmly maintains that not election per se, but election in Christ draws the line of separation between the elect and reprobate. Contrary to accusations, Perkins emphasizes Christ-centered predestination. For Perkins, salvation is never focused on a bare decree, but always upon the decreed Christ. The election and work of Christ is not commanded by God’s decree; rather, it is voluntarily chosen by the Son. In fact, Perkins went beyond what Franciscus Gomarus would state at the Synod of Dort, namely, “Christ in accordance with his divine nature also participated in the work of election” but may not be called “the foundation“ of election. In the following, he shows no qualms stating that Christ is the foundation, means, and end of election:

Election is God’s decree whereby of his own free will he hath ordained certain men to salvation, to the praise of the glory of his grace. . . . There appertain three things to the execution of this decree: first the foundation, secondly the means, thirdly the degrees. The foundation is Christ Jesus, called of his Father from all eternity to perform the office of the Mediator, that in him all those which should be saved might be chosen.

            Q. How can Christ be subordinate unto God’s election seeing he together with the Father decreed all things?

            A. Christ as he is Mediator is not subordinate to the very decree itself of election, but to the execution thereof only.[lxviii][68]

Perkins goes on to say that this act—i.e., the purpose of saving or conferring glory, as he explains in more detail in A Treatise of Predestination—has “no inward impulsive cause over and beside the good pleasure of God: and it is with regard to Christ the Mediator, in whom all are elected to grace and saluation; and to dreame of any election out of him, is against all sense: because he is the foundation of election to be executed, in regard of the beginning, the meanes, and the end.”

Perkins states that there are five degrees in the act of election: “the ordaining of a Mediatour, the promising of him beeing ordained, the exhibiting of him beeing promised, the applying of him beeing exhibited or to bee exhibited, and the accomplishment of the application.” He then adds: “The ordaining of a Mediatour is that, whereby the second person beeing the Sonne of God, is appointed from all eternitie to bee a Mediatour betweene God himself and men. And hence it is that Peter saith, that Christ was foreknowne before the foundation of the world. And well saith Augustine, that Christ was predestinated to bee our head. For howsoeuer as hee is the substantiall word (logos) of the Father, or the Sonne, hee doth predestinate with the Father, and the Holy Ghost; yet as hee is the Mediator, hee is.”[lxix][69]

            With approval, Perkins quotes Cyril, who wrote, “Christ knoweth his sheepe, electing and foreseeing them unto euerlasting life.” He also cites Augustine, who wrote, “Christ by his secret dispensation hath out of an unfaithful people predestinated some to euerlasting liberty, quickening them of his free mercy: and damned others in euerlasting death, in leauing them by his hidden iudgement in their wickednesse.”[lxx][70]

            Perkins was more Christ-centered in his predestinarianism than most scholars realize. Though criticism is expected of Chalker, Kendall, Miller, and the like, even Breward, who is usually sympathetic to Perkins, attributes the “withering Christ” view to Perkins. Breward is correct in saying that Perkins’s “definition of theology was a combination of Peter Ramus and John Calvin, and the arrangement of the whole work [A Golden Chaine], prefaced as it was by a formidable looking diagram, owed a good deal to Ramist categories of arrangement and aristotelian logic.”[lxxi][71] But he errs in failing to add Perkins’s “in Christ” note in this summary: “Calvin insisted that Christ was the mirror in which we contemplated election; Perkins taught that predestination was a glass in which we beheld God’s majesty.”[lxxii][72]

            Though Perkins centered predestination in a Trinitarian framework more than Calvin did, by no means did his views denigrate Christ. It is true that Perkins was influenced by the Italian, Girolamo Zanchi, who was less Christocentric in predestination and was more grounded in scholastic theology and aristotelianism. For this reason, some scholars, including Breward, have assumed a lack of Christocentrism in Perkins, which is unfortunate as well as unjustified.[lxxiii][73]

            Muller offers a more accurate picture of Perkins’s Christocentric predestination. A systematic analysis of the relation of the persons of the Trinity to God’s works permits Perkins to avoid the problem of most supralapsarians: the subordination of Christ to the decree. The decrees of predestination are prior even to God’s decree to create. Christ is the “foundation of election” before all worlds. Although the Son incarnate subordinates himself to the execution of the decree, the Son as eternal God stands prior to the decree. With the Father and the Spirit, the Son sets forth the decree in eternity.

            Calvin hinted at such a resolution of the problem, Muller concludes. Beza included a Christological exposition at the heart of the Tabula. But prior to Perkins’s time, no one had so meticulously placed the Mediator in such a central relation to the decree and its execution. The ordo salutis originates and is effected in Christ.[lxxiv][74]

            Muller takes Perkins seriously when Perkins says that to dream of an election outside of Christ is “against all sense!”[lxxv][75] From the framework of High Calvinism, specifically, a Christocentric, supralapsarian position, Perkins believed that preaching predestination meant proclaiming the whole counsel of God from eternal, decretal sovereign pleasure to eternal, sovereign glory via a divine soteriological chain of election and reprobation. To this chain, viewed from God’s side as the means of decretal execution, we must now turn.

Sovereign Pleasure to Sovereign Glory: A Golden Chain of Election and Reprobation

In his most famous work, Armilla Aurea (A Golden Chaine, 1591), Perkins

stresses that the will of God in Christ is immovable, not only in sovereign decree, but also in the execution of sovereign decree. The title page expresses this conviction by describing A Golden Chaine as

THE DESCRIPTION OF

THEOLOGIE,

Containing the order of the causes of Saluation and

Damnation, according to Gods word. A view whereof is to be seene

in the Table annexed.

Hereunto is adioyned the order which M. Theodore Beza

vsed in comforting afflicted consciences[lxxvi][76]

The next page, which contains “The Table,” shows that Perkins bases his soteriological system on election and reprobation as the primary structuring principle of his theology. “The redde [gray] line sheweth the order of the causes of saluation from the first to the last [and] the blacke line, sheweth the order of the causes of damnation,” Perkins says.  This order of causes leads to the image of a chain in which all the links are inseparably united.[lxxvii][77] Thus, every individual is tied to his predetermined destiny, which is inescapably linked to divine covenant grace in Christ or inevitable divine wrath outside of Christ. Neither the elect nor the reprobate is able to break out of this chain of eternal destiny; any attempts to do so will be futile, for all are tied to the eternal decree of predestined election or reprobation.

The foundation of Perkins’s theology is that God not only decreed man’s destiny but also the means through which the elect might attain eternal life, and without which the reprobate could not be saved.  The means are grounded in the execution of predestination, which involves its foundation in Jesus Christ; its being carried out in the covenants of works and grace; and its becoming made evident through calling, justification, sanctification, and glorification.

The Foundation of Decretal Execution: Jesus Christ

Predestination does not affect anyone apart from the work of Jesus Christ. Thus Perkins states that, from God’s viewpoint, the reprobate has no possibility of salvation because he has absolutely no link with Christ in the golden chain. Without Christ, man is totally hopeless.

Christ is the foundation of election, as the center column of Perkins’s chart shows. He is predestined to be Mediator. He is promised to the elect. He is offered by grace to the elect. And, finally, He is personally applied to their souls in all His benefits, natures, offices, and states.[lxxviii][78]

This Christ-centeredness is what sets Perkins’s theological chart apart from Beza’s Tabula.[lxxix][79] Perkins’s chart is similar to Beza’s in showing the following contrasts:

· God’s love for His elect versus His hatred for the reprobate

· The effectual calling of the elect versus the ineffectual calling of the reprobate

· The softening of the heart of the elect versus the hardening of the heart of the reprobate

· Faith versus ignorance

· Justification and sanctification versus unrighteousness and pollution

· The glorification of the elect versus the damnation of the reprobate.

Kendall errs, however, in stating that “Perkins’ contribution to Beza’s chart was merely making it more attractive and more understandable.”[lxxx][80] The greatest contrast between Beza’s and Perkins’s tables is the center of the diagram. In Beza’s Tabula, the execution of the decree is a two-part process. The central column of Beza’s table, running parallel to election and reprobation, is an unmarked pathway between the fall and the Final Judgment.  By contrast, the center of Perkins’s table is the work of Christ as “mediator of the elect.”  Perkins draws lines connecting the work of Christ with the progress of the Christian life, showing “how faith apprehends Christ and applies him to justification and sanctification.” Perkins is well aware of the believer’s sense of spiritual combat. Like election, Christian volition and faithful obedience are meaningful only in Christ. Christ is thus central to predestination.

In his diagram, Perkins shows that the “imputation of righteousness” to

believers is achieved only through faith in Christ. Faith is grounded in “the holiness of [Christ’s] manhood,” and His “fulfilling of the law.”  Sanctification follows the imputation of righteousness. The mortification of sinful flesh, results from faithful apprehension of Christ’s accursed death, His burial, and His “bondage under the grave.” The believer’s new life grows out of Christ’s resurrection. Perkins’s diagram, therefore, emphasizes how Christ’s work applies to every part of the order of salvation. In sum, Perkins’s chart asserts that the God-centeredness of election is paralleled by the Christ-centeredness of salvation.[lxxxi][81]

The Means of Decretal Execution: The Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace

After introducing Christ as the foundation of election, Perkins explains how election is carried out through the two covenants.  Although his chart does not show this connection, a major part of his discussion falls under covenantal headings.[lxxxii][82]

Incorporating parts of Calvin’s covenant concept as well as Beza’s system, Perkins explains that God’s covenant is “his contract with man concerning the obtaining of life eternall, upon a certen condition.  This covenant consisteth of two parts: God’s promise to man, Man’s promise to God.  God’s promise to man, is that, whereby hee bindeth himselfe to man to bee his God, if hee performe the condition. Man’s promise to God, is that, whereby he voweth his allegiance unto his Lord, and to performe the condition betweene them.”[lxxxiii][83]

In a dipleuric view of covenant, the pact between God and man implies voluntary action: God makes demands, and man obeys. This view is consistent with Perkins’s emphasis on apprehending Christ’s benefits to unbolt the door that prevents the application of such benefits. To this Perkins adds a monopleuric view of covenant as a testament in which sinners are made heirs through God’s gracious and unmerited gift of salvation in Christ.

Perkins combines these views of covenant as if no tension exists between them. He validates both, first by making a sharp distinction between the antelapsarian covenant of works and the postlapsarian covenant of grace. The former is God’s covenant “made with condition of perfect obedience and is expressed in the moral law.”[lxxxiv][84] After the fall, the covenant of works still finds expression in the Ten Commandments. This law contains two parts: the edict, which commands obedience; and the condition, eternal life to those who fulfill the law. No fallen man can obey the law, of course, which only serves to bind man to God and His grace all the more. After a lengthy discussion of the Ten Commandments, Perkins states that the use of the law is:

· “To lay open sinne, and make it knowne”

· “To effect and augmente sinne”

· “To denounce eternall damnation for the least disobedience, without offering any hope of pardon” which shows man his need for God and leads him to repentance that “frees” him in Christ

· To guide the regenerate “to new obedience.”

Because the law condemns man, God has established the covenant of grace, “whereby God freely promising Christ and his benefits, exacts againe of man, that hee would by faith receive Christ, and repent of his sinnes.” Just as the law is linked with the covenant of works, so the gospel is tied to the covenant of grace. [lxxxv][85]

By teaching how this covenant of grace operates, Perkins offers another way to relieve the tension between God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility. Without the covenant of grace, man cannot fulfill God’s demands, whereas with it, man finds his will renewed through the Holy Spirit to the point that he is capable of choosing repentance. In Perkins’s diagram, man becomes active in “mortification and vivification” which lead to “repentance and new obedience.” For Perkins, conversion is the point of reconciliation around which the monopleuric and dipleuric aspects of covenant theology can unite.  This allowed the Christian life, considered as a covenantal warfare of conscience, to be systematized and stated as a vast series of  “cases of conscience.” It also allowed the covenant to be presented in the form of a voluntary act by the regenerate in their search for personal assurance. The greatest case of conscience would naturally be “whether a man be a childe of God or no,” that is, whether a man is savingly brought into the covenant of grace and converted.[lxxxvi][86] Consequently, Perkins could say that though faith and repentance are the conditions of the covenant of grace, man is totally incapable of initiating or meriting the covenant relation through any goodness or obedience in himself. Ultimately, the decree of election and the covenant of grace is based upon the good pleasure of God. God chooses to be in covenant with man; God initiates the covenant relation; God freely, out of His sovereign will alone, invites man into the covenant of grace by granting him conditional faith and repentance. The decreeing, establishing, and maintaining of the covenant are all dependent on the free grace and sovereign will of God. Man does not tie up God, as Perry Miller claims; rather, God ties Himself to man in covenant.

Perkins’s view of the Incarnation is that God binds Himself in covenant with the elect sinner, thereby limiting His freedom, as it were, for man’s sake. For Perkins, the covenant of grace is not just a contract, because covenant must always be understood in terms of divine predestination. Hence, all conditions, including both faith and repentance, remain gifts of the gracious, sovereign, covenant-establishing Jehovah.

For Perkins the covenant of grace from a divine perspective is one-sided

and initiated by grace. God’s dealings with Abel and Cain, Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and Esau are examples of His role as the divine Initiator of the covenant. From them we learn that “when God receiues any man into couenant of eternall life, it proceeds not of any dignitie in the man whom God calleth, but from his mercie and alone good pleasure. . . . As for the opinion of them that say, that foreseene faith and good workes are the cause that mooued God to chose men to saluation, it is friulous [frivolous]. For faith and goode workes are the fruits and effects of Gods election.”[lxxxvii][87]

Since God’s covenant is made with man, apart from any effort put forth by him, “in this covenant we do not so much offer, or promise any great matter to God, as in a manner only receiue.” In its fullest manifestation, the covenant is the gospel itself as well as “the instrument, and, as it were, the conduit pipe of the holy Ghost, to fashion and deriue faith unto the soule: by which faith, they which beleeue, doe, as with an hand, apprehend Christs righteousnes.”[lxxxviii][88] Far from being capricious, God’s covenant assures man that God can be counted on graciously to fulfill the golden chain of salvation in the hearts of the elect (Rom. 8:29-30). Thus the covenant of grace forms the heart of salvation itself. Perkins writes,”We are to know God, not as hee is in himself, but as hee hath reuealed himself unto us in the couenant of grace; and therefore we must acknowledge the Father to bee our Father, the Son to bee our Redeemer, the holy Ghost to bee our comforter, and seek to grow in the knowledge and experience of this.”[lxxxix][89]

Without abandoning the Calvinist view of God’s eternal decrees, Perkins’s covenant emphasis helps us to focus on God’s relationship with man. By focusing on the covenant, Perkins and other Puritans reduced the inscrutable mystery of God’s dealings to laws that are understandable to us. They saw, though through a glass darkly, the movement of God’s secret counsels in the revealed covenants, and His concern for man particularly in the covenant of grace.

While retaining Calvin’s concern for the glory of God, Perkins offered more emphasis on the conversion of man. As F. Ernest Stoeffler says, “Hand in hand with this reorientation goes his . . . concern for the practical aspects of Christianity which is typical of all Pietistic Puritanism.”[xc][90] This is particularly evident in Perkins’s Golden Chain, of which the vast majority is devoted to practical concerns rather than theoretical aspects of theology. For both Calvin and Perkins, predestination was crucial, but their emphases differed in how that worked out. For Calvin, predestination was the platform from which God’s justice and mercy were proclaimed whereas, for Perkins, it was more crucial to understand how predestination served via covenant to carry theology from the immovable divine will to the moved human will in conversion. Perkins did not use covenant to compromise the unconditionality of predestination. Rather, he used it to explain “how persons were related to the divine initiative” as well as to assist practical piety and personal assurance.[xci][91]

In sum, for Perkins, the covenant brings to our understanding in time what God has already done past understanding from eternity.The covenant is God’s condescending love, which, far from dragging God down to man’s level—as Perry Miller implies[xcii][92]—constrains the elect to exalt their sovereign God all the more. For Perkins, God retains sovereign control of the covenant: predestination

is the primary structuring principle of theology, and covenant the way in which God works it out via preaching.

The Degrees of Decretal Execution: Effectual Calling, Justification, Sanctification, Glorification

According to Perkins, God shows “degrees of loue [love]” in carrying out election in Jesus Christ by means of covenant. Effectual calling, the first part of the process, represents the saving grace “whereby a sinner beeing severed from the world, is entertained into God’s family.”[xciii][93]

The first part of effectual calling is a right hearing of the Word by those who were dead in sin; their minds are illuminated by the Spirit with irresistible truth. The preaching of the Word accomplishes two things: “the Law shewing a man his sin and the punishment thereof, which is eternall death” and “the Gospel, shewing saluation by Christ Jesus, to such as beleeue [believe].” Both become so real that “the eyes of the mind are enlightened, the heart and eares opened, that he [the elect sinner] may see, heare, and vnderstand the preaching of the word of God.”[xciv][94]

The second part of this process is the breaking of the sinner’s heart. It is “bruised in peeces [under the preaching of the Word], that it may be fit to receiue Gods sauing grace offered vnto it.”  To accomplish this, God uses four “principall hammers”:

· The knowledge of the law of God

· The knowledge of sinne, both original and actual, and what

punishment is due vnto them

· Compounction, or pricking of the heart, namely a sense and feeling

of the wrath of God for the same sinnes

· An holy desperation of a man’s own power, in the obtaining of

eternall life.[xcv][95]

The product of effectual calling is saving faith, which Perkins defines as “a miraculous and supernatural facultie of the heart, apprehending Christ Iesus being applyed by the operation of the holy Ghost, and receiuing him to it selfe.”[xcvi][96] The act of receiving Christ is not something that man does in his own strength; rather, by Spirit-wrought faith the elect receives the grace that Christ brings, thereby bringing the believer into union with every aspect of Christ’s saving work through faith. As Munson says, “Faith then saves the elect, not because it is a perfect virtue, but because it apprehends a perfect object, which is the obedience of Christ. Whether faith is weak or strong does not matter for salvation rests on God’s mercy and promises.”[xcvii][97] According to Perkins, God “accepts the very seeds and rudiments of faith and repentance at the first, though they be but in measure, as a grain of musterd seede.”[xcviii][98] Once a sinner has been effectually called, he is justified. According to Perkins, justification, as the “declaration of God’s loue,” is the process “whereby such as beleeue, are accounted iust before God, through the obedience of Christ Iesus.” The foundation of justification is the obedience of Christ, expressed in “his Passion in life and death, and his fulfilling of the Law ioyned [joined] therewith.” Christ frees the elect from the debt of fulfilling the law “every moment, from our first beginning, both in regard of purity of nature and purity of action,” and of making “satisfaction for the breach of the law.” Christ is become our surety for this debt, and God accepts His obedience for us, “it beeing full satisfaction.” Justification thus consists of “remission of sins, and imputation of Christ’s righteousnesse.”[xcix][99] It takes place when a sinner is brought before God’s judgment seat, pleads guilty, and flees to Christ as his only refuge for acquittal.[c][100] Justification is clearly a judicial, sovereign act of God’s eternal good pleasure.

Justification includes other benefits as well. Outwardly it offers reconciliation, afflictions that serve as chastisements rather than punishments, and eternal life. Inwardly, it offers peace, quietness of conscience, entrance into God’s favor, boldness at the throne of grace, an abiding sense of spiritual joy, and intimate awareness of the love of God.[ci][101] Sanctification, the third part of this process, receives more attention from Perkins than any other part. He defines sanctification as that work “By which a Christian in his mind, in his will and in his affections is freed from the bondage and tyranny of sin and Satan and is little by little enabled through the Spirit of Christ to desire and approve that which is good and walk in it.” Sanctification has two parts. “The first is mortification when the power of sin is continually weakened, consumed and diminished. The second is vivification by which inherent righteousness is really put into them and afterward is continually increased.”[cii][102] Sanctification includes a changed life, repentance, and new obedience—in short, the entire field of “Christian warfare.” All the benefits of salvation that begin with regeneration are tied to a living relationship with Jesus Christ, to whom the believer is bound by the Holy Spirit. Perkins was optimistic about sanctification, not because of anything in man, but entirely because of Christ Jesus (1 Cor. 1:30).

Perkins taught that just as a fire without fuel will soon go out; so, unless God of His goodness, by new and daily supplies continues His grace in His children, they will grow cold and fall away.