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.But in the Elizabethan years, godly clergy traffi cked heavily in practical manuals urging the laity, as Gifford memorablyput it, to “beate [their] braine[s] more earnestly about heavenly thinges.”92As they were writing how-to manuals for the laity, the godly clergy also were theorizing about predestination in increasingly technical fashion.The most important writer of both technical and practical works was the Cambridge theologian William Perkins (1558–1602).93 Like the young Augustine, who sowedhis wild oats before converting, Perkins was reputedly promiscuous and drunken in college until a profound conversion experience turned him to a pastoral vocation.His early preaching about damnation, according to one chronicler, “left a doleful Echo in his auditours ears a good while after,” though in his “older” age (he died at 44 of an apparent gallstone), Perkins “altered his voice, and remitted much of his former rigidnesse, often professing that to preach mercie was that proper offi ce of the Ministers of the Gospell.”94 Ironically, Perkins’s powerful sense of God’s mercy toward the elect led him to articulate predestination in a way that many later critics regarded as anything but merciful.Perkins’s most famous treatment of predestination was not a treatise but a chart, specifi cally the table included in his book, A Golden Chaine, which appeared in the fi rst of many editions in 1591.95 The book’s title referred to the so-called armilla aurea (golden chain), the name used by Reformed theologians for the unbreakable sequence of salvation spelled out by the 34PredestinationChart illustrating God’s predestinarian decrees, from WilliamPerkins, A Golden Chaine (1591), photographed from the1608 edition.Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,Yale University.apostle Paul in Romans 8:30 (“Whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justifi ed: and whom he justifi ed, them he also glorifi ed”).Based on this biblical foundation and drawing on a similar chart by Calvin’s successor Theodore Beza, Perkins’s diagram systematized the ordo salutis (order of salvation) in elaborate detail, showing The Predestinarian Labyrinth35the main stages (election, effectual calling, justifi cation, sanctifi cation, glorifi cation) and the possible “tentations” (trials, temptations) of the godly.The chart likewise schematized the stages of reprobation, which together with election pointed to “Gods Glorie” and which is manifested when the reprobates receive justice and the elect receive mercy.96The chart’s most controversial feature, however, was its attempt to illustrate how predestination fi t into the sequence of God’s own logic.The top of the diagram depicted the triune God as decreeing election and reprobation prior to decreeing the creation of the world and the Fall of Adam.Here, it seemed, was absolute predestination pushed to its logical extreme: God took nothing into account—not even Adam’s future sin—in deciding to save some and to damn others.Election and reprobation were utterly gratuitous; they depended on no merit or demerit that God foresaw in individuals.Predestination was God’s great primal act and was logically infl uenced by nothing—not even the pitiable (or, viewed from a different angle, contemptible) sight of the future mass of fallen humanity.The very creation of the world was subordinate to the prior manifestation of God’s mercy and justice in the decrees of election and reprobation.Such a stark view came to be known among Reformed theologians as supralapsarian (from the Latin supra lap-sum), meaning that predestination occurred “above” or prior to the Fall in the sequence of God’s logic.(The sequence is logical rather than temporal, the dogmaticians stressed, since everything is eternally present in the divine mind.) Supralapsarianism departed from the more typical infralapsarian view, classically expressed by Augustine, that predestination occurred “below” or after the Fall, meaning that God fi rst decreed the creation and the Fall andonly then decreed to save some and damn (or “pass over”) others.97Perkins apparently devised his table as a practical aid for understanding his larger work.The only problem was that some readers looked only atthe table.98 The larger text of A Golden Chaine, along with Perkins’s later works, such as A Christian and Plaine Treatise of the Manner and Order of Predestination, revealed the complex qualifi cations in his thinking about the decrees.As Richard Muller has shown, Perkins was in some respects actually milder in his views than Calvin, though many later interpreters have assumed the opposite.For Perkins, the decrees of the creation and Fall differed in that God positively willed the former and “permitted” the latter; for Calvin,both were positively willed acts.99 Perkins also anticipated the objection thatsupralapsarianism portrayed God’s “loving” or “hating” future persons, a logical stumbling block for some critics.Perkins’s solution to this problem involved a multiplication of distinctions.He subdivided the divine decrees of election and reprobation into “double acts”—the ends and the means.The end of election was God’s eternal purpose to manifest his mercy in saving 36Predestinationcertain persons, regardless of their merits.The means of election was the actual saving of chosen persons through the merits of Christ, who as a co-eternal member of the Trinity was both the elect and the electing mediator.Perkins further subdivided the means into fi ve “degrees” involving the ordaining, promising, exhibiting, applying, and accomplishing of Christ’s mediating work.As for reprobation, its end was God’s eternal purpose to manifest his justice in forsaking certain persons, regardless of their sins.The means of reprobation was the actual ordaining of forsaken persons for destruction, which Perkins further subdivided into two “degrees” involving God’s desert-ing (or denying persons the grace to persevere in goodness) and damning (or punishing persons for the sin they freely willed “in Adam”).God therefore hated and damned actual persons for actual sins; only his initial act of repro-bating future persons was decreed in the abstract, apart from sin.100The technical heft of Perkins’s exposition of the decrees—the preceding summary reveals merely the tip of the iceberg—was typical of the output of the Protestant scholastics who fl ourished between the late sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries.The Puritan doctrines of predestination must be seen in the context of this international movement of Protestant orthodoxy in which English, Dutch, German, and other nationalities of dogmaticians shared a common language (Latin) and developed a common specialized vocabulary.101 Predestination was not the controlling principle of their systems, which attempted to elaborate all subtopics of Christian theology.Neither were the doctrines of the decrees intended to violate the unity of God’s essence
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