Ethics in the Later Reformation: William Perkins

chapter 7 Ethics in the Later Reformation: William Perkins

1 William Perkins: Moralist for a Protestant Nation

Following Tyndale’s death in 1536, a series of debates on the place of works in the order of salvation, or ordo salutis, showed that the issue of how the Christian moral life related to doctrine was a particularly live issue. Stephen Gardiner objected to Cranmer’s 1547 Book of Homilies on the grounds that they would diminish the virtues in the Christian life.1 Gardiner argued the same way that Aquinas and any scholastic moral theologian would have done: ‘faith hope & charitie be vertues given to man of god wherwt man is indewed when god iustifieth him, wch vertues be so knytt together as eche one receaveth p[er]fection or encrease of other’. This follows, as Gardiner was well aware, Aquinas, whose Summa Theologiae argued that the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (wisdom, knowledge, understanding, counsel, fortitude, piety and fear) are derived from the infused theological virtues.2 Gardiner attacks the Book of Homilies:

let him showe but one of them that teacheth as the homely doth: howe the vertues of pennance, faith charitie hope obedience ioyned together him that is iustified, faithe excludeth them in thoffice of iustification, & that in justificacon man must renounce his good deedes, & maye not doo any good deede.3

1 Weinreich, Spencer J., ‘Two Unpublished Letters of Stephen Gardiner, August–September 1547’. My thanks to Alec Ryrie for this reference. 2 S. Th. I-II. 62. 1, and 63. 1, ‘God bestows on us the theological virtues, whereby we are directed to a supernatural end’, and 68. 1. For commentary on this passage, Healy, Nicholas M., Thomas Aquinas, pp. 119–121 and 129. On Gardiner, Armstrong, C. D. C., ‘Stephen Gardiner’. Gardiner was Bishop of Winchester and was also royal secretary to King Henry VIII. 3 Weinreich, ‘Two unpublished letters’, pp. 829–830. Newman’s Lectures on Justification also link justification to the indwelling of Christ. Redworth, G., In Defence of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner, denies that Gardiner objected to the Homilies on doctrinal grounds. This is surely mistaken.

Gardiner distrusted the very idea of producing a Book of Homilies. People are ‘led to good lyfe by imitation rather than hearing’.4 The next major English theologian to write on ethics was William Perkins, born in 1558, which was the year of Queen Elizabeth I’s accession to the throne.5 Perkins too was concerned with the ordo salutis, and the place of works in salvation.6 Until recently Perkins was little studied by historians. As Ryrie says, he was largely written out of Anglican history, despite his stature in his life- time. Many Anglicans have been uncomfortable with just how Reformed or Calvinistic the theology of the sixteenth-century English Protestant church actually was.7 Perkins began his short but intense scholarly career with the publication by the Cambridge University Press of the Latin treatise Armilla avrea in 1590. Translated by one of his students into English in 1591 as A Golden Chaine, it was a study of the doctrine of salvation, and especially of predestination. R. T. Kendall called Perkins’ theology ‘experimental predestinarianism’, as opposed to ‘credal predestinarianism’. Kendall meant by this that Perkins rested his account of predestination on the experience of being saved, not of true belief.8 Perkins knew that the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, also accepted the predestination of the invisible church of the elect, but also that Whitgift was not prepared to put at risk the visible church over which he was Archbishop, in a way that privileged the elect over the mixed multitude.9 As a result, Perkins pulled back from any confrontation with the Archbishop. Perkins felt that the elect could discern their predestination by various rules. In A Golden Chaine, he argued for ‘full persuasion’ of their status. If this is lacking, they can look to evidence of sanctification. If this is also lacking, then faith

4 Pontifex, Dom Dunstan, ‘Stephen Gardiner’. Muller, J. A., Stephen Gardiner and the Tudor Reaction; id., The Letters of Stephen Gardiner. For the background to the Homilies, see, Wabuda, Susan, ‘Bishops and the Provision of Homilies, 1520 to 1547’. 5 Patterson, W. B., William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England. Dixon, Leif, Practical Predestinarians in England, c. 1590–1640, pp. 61–122, is the other recent study of Perkins, con- centrating on his theology of predestination. For a much older study, which is still worth consulting, Porter, H. C., Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge, pp. 288–313. Perkins, William, How to Live, and that Well: In All Estates and Times, Specially when Helps and Comforts Faile; id., Perkins, William, A Treatise of the Vocations, or Callings of Men, with the Sorts and Kinds of Them, and the Right Use Thereof; id., The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience; id., Christian Oeconomie, or, A Short Survey of the Right Manner of Erecting and Ordering a Familie, According to the Scriptures, all in Perkins, William, Workes. The only contemporary edition is Breward, Ian (ed.), The Work of William Perkins. 6 For a comprehensive and very clear account of Perkins and the question of the ordo salutis, Fesko, J. V., ‘William Perkins on Union with Christ and Justification’. 7 Ryrie, Alec, ‘The Reformation in Anglicanism’, p. 43. 8 Kendall, R. T., Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649. ‘Experimental’ = ‘experiential’. 9 Sheils, W. J., ‘John Whitgift’. Jinkins, Michael, ‘William Perkins’.