William Perkins was one of the best-selling and most influential English divines of the Elizabethan era (1558-1603).
While certain topics in Perkins’s corpus like predestination and conscience have received extensive attention from scholars, his use of creeds and church history has seen little dedicated discussion. A few exceptions to this paucity include one unpublished dissertation that focused on Perkins’s use of a narrow period of church history, a book chapter on Perkins’s reliance on a small window of ecclesiastical history, and a journal article on Perkins’s use of the church fathers. Moreover, when academics discussed Perkins’s utilization of creeds or church history, they have often misunderstood him by failing to read him in the context of his battles with Roman Catholicism, his use of Christian humanism, and his position at Christ’s College Cambridge.
Drawing on original research from my doctoral dissertation on Perkins, this paper argues that Perkins’s use of creeds and church history was highly context-specific and runs counter to some scholarly arguments about Perkins and English puritanism. In particular, this paper demonstrates that his use of creeds and church history was not a static or monolithic exercise, but rather a highly circumstantial and strategically deployed tool. To make this point, this paper will not limit itself to a single work like Forged Catholicism or Reformed Catholic (as the minimal existing scholarship on Perkins’s use of church history has), but instead draw on a close reading of Perkins’s entire 2+ million-word corpus with particular attention to the work type (sermon, dogmatic, etc.), the original language (Latin, English), and the intended audience (local Protestants, university theologians, Roman Catholics).
After a brief introduction to Perkins, a short discussion of his influence, and a concise review of literature on Perkins’s use of church history, this paper elucidates largely unexplored ways in which Perkins drew on historic creeds to both attack Roman Catholicism and convert Roman Catholics. Further, in ways that scholars have thus far almost entirely missed, this paper traces how the genre and audience for any given treatise highly influenced the way he used church history. This paper pays particular attention to Perkins’s use of the Nicene Creed, a topic that has thus far not received anything more than a passing mention.