Ballitch Gloss and the Text

William Perkins on Interpreting Scripture with Scripture
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68359-392-8
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 232 Seiten

Reihe: Studies in Historical and Systematic 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.

Andrew S. Ballitch (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is Associate Pastor of Preaching and Ministries at Westwood Alliance Church in Mansfield, Ohio. He co-edited William Perkins's Faith and Love: The Wholesome Doctrine of the Gospel.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ballitch, Andrew S.

Leseproben

2 PERKINS’S EXEGETICAL METHOD BIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT In 1558, William Perkins was born in Marston Jabbett, Bulkington parish, Warwickshire county. His parents, Thomas and Hannah, must have been close to gentry, as he entered Christ’s College Cambridge in 1577 as a pensioner, one able to pay the common expenses of his education. During his early student days, Perkins devoted himself to drunkenness. He also seems to have dabbled in the study of astrology and other dark arts, as evidenced by his intimate knowledge of such things in his later polemics against them. His conversion began when “he heard a woman say to a child that was being forward and peevish, ‘Hold your tongue, or I will give you to drunken Perkins, yonder,’?” as he stumbled through the streets of Cambridge.1 This event stirred his conscience, and Perkins redirected his attention and energy to the study of divinity. He eventually graduated with his bachelor’s in 1581 and his master’s in 1584. Perkins received a traditional scholastic education, Reformed in its theological content and modified by Ramism. His education was made up of three parts: the trivium, the quadrivium, and the philosophies, which included natural, moral, and metaphysical disciplines. The trivium consisted of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The quadrivium contained music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. At the time, the Ramist method was coming into vogue through the influence of Lawrence Chaderton. Chaderton served as Perkins’s tutor, no doubt exposing him to his own Puritan sympathies. Perkins’s writings reveal a wide reading in the patristic, medieval, and Protestant traditions as well, yet all this was subordinated to divine revelation. Scripture was the axiom of all his thinking and the focus of everything he produced.2 Perkins was elected fellow of Christ’s College in 1584, which launched his academic career. As a fellow, his responsibilities included preaching, lecturing, and tutoring. He also served as dean from 1590 to 1591.3 Perkins’s Armilla Aurea (1590), translated as A Golden Chaine (1591), established his reputation as a leading theologian. His productivity continued with his analyses of the Lord’s Prayer (1592) and the Apostles’ Creed (1595). In 1595 he married a young widow, Timothye Cradocke, from nearby Grantchester; this effectively ended his fellowship at Christ’s College as well as his formal academic career, though Perkins continued to write. His A Discourse of Conscience (1596) provided the foundation for his groundbreaking work in casuistry. In the crowning jewel of his apologetic work, A Reformed Catholike (1597), Perkins defends the established church and challenges the Church of Rome. The challenge was accepted by William Bishop, who responded in A Reformation of a Catholike Deformed, which released in two parts, 1604 and 1607. This was not Perkins’s only work to provoke scholarly engagement. None other than Jacob Arminius contested his 1598 treatise on predestination, though Arminius did not publish the work during his lifetime out of respect for his opponent’s untimely death. Perkins’s books became a mainstay of the Cambridge press and continued to appear in significant numbers in the years following his passing. During his time as a Cambridge fellow, Perkins appeared before the authorities twice to be questioned on his relationship to nonconformity. The first episode took place in 1587, when a three-part complaint was made against Perkins after a sermon he preached in the college chapel. He reportedly taught that it was a corruption for a minister to give himself the elements of the Lord’s Supper, that kneeling to receive the sacrament was superstitious and anti-Christian, and that facing east at particular points in the worship service was objectionable. Perkins stood before the vice-chancellor and the heads of the colleges to defend himself. He explained his reservations about such practices but denied the harsh language attributed to him. In the end, the college imposed no penalty, and no further complaints are recorded. In 1591, Perkins was called before the Star Chamber as a witness against the defendants Thomas Cartwright and Edmund Snape. All three men, as well as Lawrence Chaderton, were present at a 1589 meeting at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where they discussed the Book of Discipline, largely authored by Walter Travers. Perkins confirmed the defendants’ presence but testified that this was an isolated meeting and he was unaware of any discussion of the implementation of presbyteries.4 It is clear that Perkins never openly allied himself with Presbyterians and denounced the separatists; he sought to reform the church from within.5 In 1584, Perkins was appointed lecturer at St. Andrew the Great, the church across the street from Christ’s College. He held this post for the rest of his life. This appointment resulted from his growing popularity as a prison preacher. One popular story recounts the time Perkins called a frightened man down from the gallows, saying, “Thou shalt see what God’s grace will do to strengthen thee.” He then “made such an effectual prayer in confession of sins … as made the pour prisoner burst out into abundant tears.” Then the prisoner prayed to “show him the Lord Jesus,” which “cleared him up again to look beyond death, with eyes of faith, to see how the black lines of all his sins were crossed, and canceled with the red lines of his crucified saviours precious blood.” He returned to the gallows, this time professing his faith with tears of joy.6 It has been said that under Perkins’s prison ministry “many an Onesimus in bonds was converted to Christ.”7 His post at St. Andrew the Great required a connection with both university and townsfolk. One biographer recalls, “His sermons were not so plain, but that the piously learned did not admire them; nor so learned, but the plain did understand them.”8 His style and subject earned him the admiration of all. Perkins’s preaching was powerful: “He used to apply the terrors of the law so directly to the consciences of his hearers, that their hearts would often sink under the convictions; and he used to pronounce the word damn with so peculiar an emphasis, that it left a doleful echo in their ears a long time after.”9 Yet “in his older age he altered his voice, and remitted much of his former rigidnesse, often professing that to preach mercie was that proper office of the ministers of the Gospell.”10 During his eighteen-year tenure as lecturer, Perkins preached six major expositional sermon series: Matthew 5–7; Matthew 4; Revelation 1–3; Hebrews 11; Jude; and Galatians 1–5, likely in this order. The historical record shows that Perkins’s life consistently modeled what he preached. “He lived his sermons,” meaning “as his preaching was a comment on the text, so his practice was a comment on his preaching.”11 It was preaching and piety like this that set the tone for seventeenth-century Puritanism. Perkins’s personality has been described as “naturally cheerful and pleasant; rather reserved towards strangers, but familiar upon their further acquaintance.”12 The rare physical description paints a picture of one whose “stature was indifferent, complexion ruddy, hayre bright, body inclined to corpulency, which proceeded not from any lazinesse.”13 Common to his time, Perkins’s adult life was riddled with regular ailments—kidney stones in particular. After several excruciating weeks in 1602, the condition took his life at the age of forty-four. At the time, Perkins’s wife was pregnant with their seventh child while caring for three and mourning the loss of the others. His will indicates that he was survived by both of his parents, an unknown number of brothers and sisters, and a son-in-law. Christ’s College paid for his burial in the churchyard of St. Andrew the Great. His friend James Montague, who later became the bishop of Winchester, preached Perkins’s funeral sermon from Joshua 1:2: “Moses my servant is dead.”14 Little else is known about Perkins because sparse autobiographical material exists and no personal letters are known to have survived. This means his legacy is altogether left to us via his published works. Though Perkins is less known today, his works made an indelible impact in the Christian world—not just in England but across both the channel and the Atlantic. In the Dutch language alone, there were 185 seventeenth-century printings of his individual and collected works. When this is accounted for in addition to his influence on his student William Ames, it becomes clear that Perkins made no small impact on the Nadere Reformatie. His writings were also published in Switzerland and Germany; they were translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Irish, Welsh, Czech, and Hungarian.15 In America, “a 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.”16 Perry Miller notes that “anyone who reads the writings of early New England learns that Perkins was indeed a towering figure in their eyes.”17 Though Perkins would never have claimed the label “Puritan” for himself, his...