Liberty and Mutability

Perkins’ understanding of human willing was also defined by the traditional Augustinian definition of the four states of human nature: before the fall, after the fall in sin, after regeneration by grace, and in final glory. This chapter takes up the issue of willing in the first two states, in which the will at first is righteous and sinless but able to sin and then, following the fall, is not able not to sin. Nonetheless, the will remains free according to its nature—initially free in righteousness, and after the fall, free to determine its own choices, albeit bound to do so sinfully. The fall does not remove the inherent freedom of the will. Choice remains a genuinely contingent act, defined by alternativity within the bounds of a sinful nature.

The Nature of the Will and Its Strength

Perkins’ voluntaristic definition of the strength and power of the will allowed for various limitations, impediments, and inclinations that can influence choice. This definition, nonetheless, stressed the ability of the human will to render the final reduction of a choice to a single object or effect. Perkins, like many of his Reformed contemporaries, assumed that, although the will depends on the intellect to provide known objects for choice, the will can positively choose or reject what the intellect provides or suspend its act. The will as a free cause is not determined to one effect. In Perkins’ view, free choice is defined by alternativity and the assumption that each choice of the will could be otherwise.

William Perkins and His Contemporaries on “Free Will”

William Perkins’ thought on grace and free choice belongs to the context of the Elizabethan Settlement and developing English Reformed theology in an era of polemics with Roman Catholic adversaries. The works in which he deals with this issue exposit and defend English Reformed theology, address matters of doctrinal definitions, and deal with problems of piety, conscience, and assurance of salvation. Perkins’ several expositions of the problem of human freedom were written during a period of ongoing debate, sparked by the Reformers, between Protestants and Roman Catholics over this issue, particularly in relation to the economy of salvation and the question of the catholicity of Protestantism. His context in the particular historical stage or moment of this debate is also of significance. He has been variously identified in scholarship as a distinctly English churchman and prominent apologist of the Church of England, a “father of Puritanism,” an exponent of early Reformed orthodoxy, a supralapsarian Calvinist, and one among several ancestors of the anti-Arminian line of English theology in the early modern era.

Conclusions

Perkins’s work has been shown to stand at the intersection of the strongly traditionary and catholic defense of the Church of England against Roman polemics with the early Reformed orthodox appropriations of scholastic argumentation. Early orthodox Reformed theology, in the works of William Perkins and his contemporaries, developed a highly nuanced understanding of human free choice and divine grace, distinguished according to the four states of human nature. His resolution of the issue of divine grace and human freedom drew eclectically on arguments from the Thomist tradition and from patterns in late medieval voluntarism. At the same time, it reinforced and refined the heritage of the Reformation on the doctrine of salvation by grace alone. The Reformed orthodoxy represented by Perkins and his contemporaries insists that God guarantees the free choice of free creatures, who always must act according to their natures.

The Harmony and Consent of Divine and Human Willing

Perkins argues for the harmony of a human willing that is genuinely contingent and characterized by capacity for opposite or contrary choices with the overarching providence of God. To accomplish this, he adopts a version of the theory of a divine “premotion.” This premotion is necessary to the eventuation of any and all events, whether necessary, contingent, or free. This resolution has affinities with the argument posed by Dominican or Thomist writers in Perkins’ time against the Molinist notion of middle knowledge. Conjoined with Perkins’ voluntarist reading of freed choice, it serves to explain how divine and human will only as taken together are sufficient to explain free acts of human beings.

Introduction

This study of William Perkins’ thought on grace and free choice places his thought in the variegated tradition of the Reformation as established by writers like Calvin, Vermigli, Bullinger, and Musculus. More specifically, his thought can be placed in the version of that tradition exemplified in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and in the Elizabethan Settlement. Closer examination of Perkins’ thought in its context yields a window on the more technical understanding of the relationship of divine grace to human knowing and willing, which demonstrates its eclectic reception of late medieval scholasticism, its elaboration of the work of the Reformers, and its distance from modern theories of compatibilist and libertarian freedom. This work traces Perkins’ views on the nature of free will both as created and in the fallen and regenerate states of humanity, correlating them with the views of Reformed contemporaries, and lining out the issues that they sought to address.

Liberty Restored

Of the issues confronting Perkins’ approach to the next two states of human nature, regeneration and glorification, the restoration of the will, specifically the lost “libertie of grace,” is the most complex. This is because he has assumed that the fallen will retains its basic freedom of choice and is both bound in sinfulness and incoercible. Given its condition, grace is not an object of choice for the will. It is not chosen—it is applied by God without abridging the freedom of the will. This is done in such a way that the will is freely active toward faith, obedience, and the good in the same temporal moment as the divine act of grace.

Knowing and Willing in Freedom

Perkins’ basic understanding of human freedom drew on the resources of earlier English and continental Protestant thought, including the work of thinkers like Jerome Zanchi and Zacharias Ursinus. Early modern Reformed writers, whether of the Reformation or of the era of orthodoxy, were participants in a long history of conversation and debate over the nature of voluntary choice. This debate was rooted in theological treatments of grace and freedom extending back into the patristic era. Like the earlier English and continental Protestant thinkers, Perkins carefully worked through the traditional faculty psychology, in order to counter the accusation of Roman Catholic polemicists that Reformed theology utterly denied human freedom and responsibility. From the outset, Perkins’ approach rested on an analysis of the interrelationship of intellect and will, the creation of human beings in the image of God, and the relationship of human to divine willing.