Friday, May 6, 2022

Baird Tipson on Puritan William Perkins (1558-1602) Appealing to the Spirit to Know of One’s Election to Salvation

  

Echoing Beza, Perkins insisted that those in doubt of their inward baptism “need not to ascend up into the heavens to learn the truth.” They had rather to “descend into our own hearts & look whether Christ have given us his spirit.” In what part of the heart was the activity of Christ’s spirit most likely to be experienced? In the regenerate conscience. “Let us ransack our own consciences,” Perkins said, “and there make search whether we feel the spirit of Christ crying in us, Abba, Father.” He concluded, “If we find this in our hearts, it is an evident and infallible sign that Christ continually makes intercession for us in heaven” (Perkins, An Exposition of the Symbol, Works 1:255). Where a late-medieval Christian might naturally turn to the rituals of the institutional church, followers of Perkins would turn within, “ransacking” their consciences for signs of God’s favor. (Baird Tipson, Inward Baptism: The Theological Origins of Evangelicalism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020], 101-2)

 

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