The Gloss and the Text

William Perkins on Interpreting Scripture with Scripture

Andrew S. Ballitch

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781683593928
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Scripture opens itself up by its own words and interpretation.
William Perkins is the father of Puritanism, often remembered for his preaching manual, The Art of Prophecy. Much attention has been given to the Puritan movement, especially in its later forms, but comparatively little has been given to Perkins.
In The Gloss and the Text, Andrew Ballitch provides a thorough examination of the hermeneutical principles that governed Perkins's approach to biblical interpretation. Perkins taught that the Bible was God's word as well as the interpretation of God's word. Interpretation is no private matter; it is a public gift of the Spirit of God for the people of God. Ballitch's study sheds light on Perkins as a preacher, theologian, and student of Scripture.

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INTRODUCTION

William Perkins (1558–1602) has been called “the principle architect of Elizabethan Puritanism,” “the Puritan theologian of Tudor times,” “the most important Puritan writer,” “the prince of Puritan theologians,” “the ideal Puritan clergyman,” “the most famous of all Puritan divines,” “the father of Pietism,” “the father of Puritanism,” and, alongside John Calvin and Theodore Beza, the third in “the trinity of the orthodox.”1 He was the first writer to outsell Calvin in England and the first English Protestant to gain an audience in England, continental Europe, and North America.2 But most of all, Perkins earned his renown as a preacher of God’s word.

Perkins studied at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and the year he received his master of arts degree, 1584, he became both a fellow at Christ’s and a lecturer at Cambridge’s St. Andrew the Great Church. Preaching was fundamental to both of these roles. More than a decade later, in 1595, he resigned his university position to marry, but continued his preaching post at St. Andrew the Great until his untimely death from kidney stones in 1602.

Many of Perkins’s early biographers highlight his preaching. Thomas Fuller recalls Perkins’s presence in the pulpit, noting two other observations: his life matched his preaching and his sermons connected with the common people.3 Samuel Clarke recalls Perkins’s powerful ministry to prisoners, and in his personal diary, contemporary Samuel Ward praises Perkins as a model preacher.4 John Cotton attested to the conviction he personally felt under Perkins’s preaching.5 Perkins once appeared before university authorities on suspicion of nonconformity for his preaching.6 This historically consistent focus on Perkins’s preaching ministry fits his self-understanding. According to Benjamin Brook, Perkins “[wrote] in the title of all his books, ‘Thou art a Minister of the Word: Mind thy business.’ ”7

Perkins’s convictions on the ministry of God’s word are best known through his preaching manual, The Arte of Prophecying, which became a standard textbook on the subject. The volume articulated a thoroughly Protestant understanding of the nature and authority of Scripture and rooted itself in a thoroughly Reformed hermeneutic. The book also featured a fountain of homiletical advice, as Perkins detailed his method of sermon development and delivery. More than any other, the popularity of this book explains Perkins’s enduring significance in the decades and even centuries after his death.8

Perkins’s business was the ministry of the word, and it extended far beyond his sermons. He carried this commitment to the word into every genre of his writing. This consistency evidences his convictions concerning Scripture itself as well as the nature of his goals as a reformer. It is not an overstatement to say the systematic interpretation of the Bible and the presentation of its results defined Perkins’s life in the university and church pulpit. In fact, it is because of this rigorous commitment—whether in his practical materials, theological treatises, or polemical works—that Perkins started with Scripture and always applied it to the task at hand.

THESIS

William Perkins interpreted Scripture with Scripture by using three tools: context, collation, and the analogy of faith. In brief, context is a close reading of the text in terms of the argument and literary features; collation a comparison with other passages; and the analogy of faith the boundaries of the Reformed tradition. Perkins expounded Scripture throughout his works according to this method, which he presents in The Arte of Prophecying. This intense scriptural focus emanated from Perkins’s belief that Scripture is God’s word and therefore the only adequate foundation for the reformation of individuals, the church, and society. As God’s word, Scripture determined his hermeneutic—Scripture interprets itself. Though not reflected in most Perkinsian scholarship, Perkins consistently applied this method of biblical interpretation regardless of the genre in which he worked. He pursued this strategy due to both his own convictions concerning Scripture and his urgent commitment to further reformation during the reign of Elizabeth I.

Only the word of God and its faithful exposition—that is, exposition in line with the hermeneutical principles stated in The Arte of Prophecying—could accomplish the monumental tasks before sixteenth-century Puritans. Perkins in particular strove to transform an ignorant and immoral people, exhorting them to live up to the Reformation principles England had officially adopted. So, in his preaching and practical works, what did he do? He expounded Scripture. A Cambridge man, Perkins also played a role in educating the clergy for pastoral ministry. So, in his practical works on ministry, what did he do? He explained Scripture. As part of an international Reformed community, Perkins was compelled to defend the precious doctrines of the Reformed tradition. So, in his theological treatises, what did he do? He exposited Scripture. As one aware of the looming political threat the Church of Rome and its allies posed to England and as one unsettled by the ebb and flow of the English Reformation, Perkins was obliged to defend his conception of the Christian faith. So, in his polemics, what did he do? He explicated Scripture. From first to last, the exposition of Scripture dominated Perkins’s endeavors.

Perkins participated in a national and international effort to establish Protestantism, more precisely the Reformed tradition. His preaching and popular writing are representative of this endeavor on the English scene, along with contemporaries such as Richard Greenham and Richard Rogers. Perkins participated in university life at Cambridge with Laurence Chaderton, William Whitaker, and others, educating men for pastoral ministry and wrestling with doctrinal precision in dialogue with university men throughout Europe. On the international stage, Perkins contributed Latin theological treatises, numbering him among Reformed divines such as Theodore Beza and Amandus Polanus. Perkins’s consistent use of Scripture reflects his and the Reformed tradition’s convictions about biblical authority. His method of interpretation—at heart a commitment to use Scripture to interpret itself, a commitment central to the Reformed tradition as a whole—reveals a conviction about Scripture’s sufficiency. This study demonstrates that Perkins’s works were a contribution to an already existing and rapidly growing Reformed Protestant exegesis that grounded, defended, nuanced, and articulated the movement’s doctrine and practice.

Of course, Perkins did not approach biblical interpretation in isolation from his theological heritage. His hermeneutical method shows both continuity and discontinuity with the medieval era. Moreover, Perkins exhibits both dependence and independence in relation to the Reformed tradition in general and his English contemporaries in particular. His pervasive stress on the Bible challenged the perceived scholastic approach to theology in the post-Reformation Reformed tradition. Perkins was a creative man of his times who devoted his multifaceted career as preacher, teacher, theologian, polemicist, and popular author to one thing: the exposition of Scripture for the purpose of further reformation.

HISTORY OF RESEARCH

While significant work has been done on the particulars of Perkins’s thought, only two monographs are devoted to him.9 Treatments of Perkins have generally focused on four aspects of his thinking: how he fits with Puritanism, his role in the development of covenant theology, his relationship to Calvin and the Westminster Standards, and his preaching method. These approaches leave much of his expository material untapped. Moreover, his biblical interpretation—which is the foundation for everything he did—remains largely absent from the discussion.

First, scholars have debated what constitutes a “Puritan,” since William Haller, M. M. Knappen, and Perry Miller introduced the Puritans into modern historical scholarship.10 A number of significant voices have weighed in over the past fifty years or so.11 Definitions generally fall into three categories: theological, political or ecclesiological, and pietistic. Definitions that depend on a single category to the exclusion of the others are unsatisfactory. Theological definitions do not work because the Puritans were not a theologically distinct group. During the sixteenth century especially, Puritans and other members of the Church of England were theologically indistinguishable. Political definitions, with their emphasis on nonconformity and active opposition to ecclesiastical authority, have little room for Puritans before the Act of Uniformity in 1662 and almost none in Elizabeth I’s reign. Pietistic definitions are evaluative to the point of being arbitrary, often including dissenters and figures after the seventeenth century. Therefore, the best definitions incorporate all three categories and do not insist on individual aspects. Such generosity toward the Puritan movement allows for Puritanism’s variety and contextual changes over its century and a half of existence.

Definitions of Puritanism have been offered with Perkins specifically in view. Packer summarizes his understanding of Puritanism as “an evangelical holiness movement seeking to implement its vision of spiritual renewal, national and personal, in the church, the state, and the home; in education, evangelism, and economics; in individual discipleship and devotion, and in pastoral care and competence.”12 Perkins fits comfortably within this definition. More recently, W. B. Patterson saw Puritanism as a “radical attack on the established Church from the Protestant side.”13 This definition limits Puritanism to those chafing under the Church of England’s officially prescribed worship forms and authority structures, specifically during Elizabeth’s rule; the opposition in the vestiarian controversy of the 1560s; the classical movement of the 1570s and 1580s; and those responsible for the Martin Marprelate tracts of the late 1580s and early 1590s. Patterson’s central thesis is that Perkins was not a Puritan by virtue of his loyalty to the Church of England. On this last point, Patterson affirms the majority position among scholars. His attempt at revision, however, is not helpful. It does not explain why later Puritan, nonconformist, and dissenting groups claimed Perkins as their forefather. Indeed, Perkins was not an active opponent of the established church, but he was an active proponent of further reformation, even if primarily through individual spiritual renewal.

On this point, Ian Breward’s comment is instructive: “Attempts to draw confident distinctions between ‘anglicans’ and ‘puritans’ during this [Elizabethan] period are hazardous in the extreme.” He goes on to offer his own definition, arguing Puritanism “can broadly be applied to those who by reason of their religious experience and theological convictions were dissatisfied with the government and worship of the Church of England, but nonetheless refused to separate.”14 As Patrick Collinson famously wrote, what separated the godly was degree. They were the “hotter sort of Protestants.”15 Perkins fits nicely with these definitions, especially when open political opposition does not become the measure of dissatisfaction and intensity. The most adequate definitions of Puritanism insist that Puritans were orthodox English Protestants from Elizabeth’s reign through the seventeenth century who sought further reformation either at the corporate or individual level.16

Second, Perkins’s covenant theology has received significant attention.17 Miller popularized the idea that the Puritans developed covenant theology in response to what they saw as deficiencies in Calvin’s theology—namely, a lack of motivation for holiness and the impossibility of assurance due to God’s sovereignty.18 However, many scholars see covenant theology emerging from factors already present in Reformed theology.19

Jens Møller and Michael McGiffert argue Perkins and the Puritans picked up the bilateral covenant tradition of the Zurich-Rhineland Reformers as opposed to the unilateral covenant of Geneva.20 McGiffert sees Perkins’s Golden Chaine as a charter document of English federalism, which conflated the moral law with the Adamic covenant of works, making the law work in opposing ways depending on which covenant it operated under.21 Lyle Bierma and others challenge this thesis, seeing agreement between Geneva and the Zurich-Rhineland Reformers and therefore between Calvin and the Puritans. The distinction, Bierma persuasively argues, is a difference of emphasis on divine sovereignty or human obedience respectively. But neither tradition—and this is certainly true with Perkins—emphasized one element of the covenant to the exclusion of the other.22

John von Rohr and Young Song propose a diversity-within-unity approach to understanding the relationship of Calvin and the Zurich-Rhineland Reformers.23 Song, like Bierma, acknowledges diversity of emphasis but appeals to a methodological distinction between Calvin and the Zurich-Rhineland Reformers to account for it. He understands the former to take a logical and the latter a historical approach to covenant theology.24 Mark Shaw concludes:

[Perkins’s] covenant theology enabled him to follow a consistent line of co-action which gave strong emphasis to God’s sovereign grace in Christ as the ultimate cause of salvation while at the same time emphasizing the necessity of human response.… He developed a strong linkage between sanctification and justification.25

Shaw’s evaluation accurately summarizes Perkins’s nuanced theology of the covenants. As Andrew Woolsey affirms, “There were both unilateral and bilateral sides to the covenant. The precision and balance of Perkins’s theology of the covenant in this respect is quite remarkable.”26

In the third place, closel...