10 Puritans Who Changed the World: William Perkins, the Father of Puritanism

A Puritan pastor once comforted a young man ascending the scaffold to be executed by hanging.¹ The young man looked “half dead already.”  The pastor called out to the convict, “Are you afraid of death?” “Ah no,” said the prisoner, shaking his head, “but of a worse thing.” “Do you say so?” said the pastor. “Come down again man, and you will see what God’s grace will do to strengthen you!”²

After descending from the scaffold, the pastor knelt at the foot of the ladder, hand-in-hand with the convict. The pastor proceeded to pray about the punishment of God and the vileness of sin. This led the convict to burst into tears. The pastor then began speaking in his prayer about the mercy of Jesus and His power to save from darkness and hell. The message of salvation so cheered the believing prisoner that he wept tears of joy. Those who had gathered to witness the execution were so moved that they lifted their hands in praise to God. The convict then ascended the scaffold again with joy and peace in his heart, embracing his execution as the doorway to glory. 

The name of the pastor beneath the scaffold that day was William Perkins.

Who Was William Perkins?

William Perkins, often called “the father of Puritanism,” was born in Warwickshire, England, in 1558—the first year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Although Perkins was raised in a Christian home, he lived a wicked life in his teens as a reckless blasphemer and drunkard. While a student at the University of Cambridge, however, Perkins experienced a powerful conversion that began when he overheard a woman in the street chiding her naughty child and alluding to “drunken Perkins.” This incident so humiliated Perkins that he gave up his wicked ways and fled to Christ for salvation. He abandoned his study of mathematics and his fascination with witchcraft and began to study theology instead.

Upon graduating with his Master of Arts degree in 1584, Perkins served as a “lecturer” (or preacher) at Great St. Andrew’s Church in Cambridge—a post he held until his death. On Lord’s Days, he often preached to prisoners at the Cambridge Castle jail, leading to many conversions among the prisoners. He was also a fellow at Christ’s College for ten years (from 1584 to 1594), where he preached, lectured, and mentored students.

Like his personal mentor, Laurence Chaderton (1536–1640), Perkins worked to purify the Church of England from within rather than join those who advocated separation. Instead of addressing questions about church polity, his writings focused on pastoral inadequacies, spiritual deficiencies, and soul-destroying ignorance in the church. He died at age forty-two from kidney stone complications in 1602, just a few months before Queen Elizabeth died.

Reformation Heritage Books recently edited and printed Perkins’s complete works in ten volumes in modern typeface.  

What Can Pastors Learn from William Perkins?

William Perkins teaches pastors the importance of experiential preaching, which accords with human experience in the whole person (the mind, emotions, and will). In his preaching, Perkins took theology beyond knowing doctrines in the mind to experiencing Christ in the heart. To do so, we must preach with simplicity, gospel focus, and application.

1. Preach with simplicity.

Like Perkins, reach people with simple, clear, plain preaching. Perkins’s messages were plain enough to speak to the hearts of everyday people but deep enough to delight the minds of the learned. Prepare your sermons so you can preach them with clarity, organization, and directness. Pepper your sermons with relevant illustrations to help your audience better understand God’s Word. Preach soberly and reverently—keeping with the weight of the sacred matters you handle.

Reject attempts to impress man instead of God. On one extreme, reject proud displays of learning in sermons (such as using an extremely advanced vocabulary or regular use of Hebrew or Greek words from the pulpit). On the other extreme, do not water down the message nor strive to appear popular or “cool.” Trust the Holy Spirit to work through the simple, direct, and unadorned (though passionate and relevant) proclamation of His pure Word. Above all, soak your sermons in prayer and depend on the Holy Spirit.

2. Preach with a gospel focus.

Like Perkins, preach both the law and the gospel. Show sinners the depth of their depravity, the heinousness of their sin, and the severity of God’s righteous and eternal punishment upon sinners in hell. Then, show the perfection of Christ, the sinlessness of His life, and the substitutionary atonement of His death. Call sinners to repent from their sin and believe in the spotless Lamb of God.

3. Preach with application.

In your sermons, make detailed, concrete applications to daily life. Above all, live your sermons. As one of Perkins’s friends remarked about him, “As his preaching was a comment on his text, so his practice was a comment on his preaching.”³ Preaching with application involves discrimination (an old word for “differentiation”)—application to different kinds of people in the congregation. For example, in his book on preaching, The Art of Prophesying, Perkins distinguished between seven types of sermon-hearers (including ignorant but teachable unbelievers, humbled believers, and assured believers).

In sum, Perkins encouraged ministers to honor the Bible as God’s very Word; study the text accurately and wisely; present the text’s truths, not personal opinion, and apply these truths to the hearts and lives of people; speak with Spirit-given sincerity and power; and preach Christ and His saving work.

Conclusion

The primary characteristics of Puritanism directly descend from the teachings of William Perkins. He stressed the authority of Scripture and the lordship of Jesus Christ. He promoted experiential piety—the practice of experiencing biblical truth and love for God in every area of life. Both biblical and practical, his warm-hearted theology addressed the problems of ordinary men and women with God’s Word as it arose from his passion for seeing God transform souls. May the Lord truly make us pastors who, as William Perkins wrote of faithful preachers, “preach one Christ by Christ to the praise of Christ.”

Book Recommendations from William Perkins

• The Art of Prophesying
• The Golden Chain of Salvation
• A Treatise on How to Live Well in All Estates
• The Right Manner of Erecting and Ordering a Family
• The Wholesome Doctrine of the Gospel: Faith and Love in the Writings of William Perkins 

©2023 Joel Beeke. Used with permission.

1. The first biographical part of these articles is adapted from Joel R. Beeke and Michael Reeves, Following God Fully: An Introduction to the Puritans (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019); Joel R. Beeke and Randall J. Pederson, Meet the Puritans: With a Guide to Modern Reprints (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2006); and Glenda Faye Mathes and Joel R. Beeke, Puritan Heroes (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018). Used with permission. ↩︎
2. Samuel Clark, The Marrow of Ecclesiastical History [ . . . ] (London: Thomas Sawbridge, 1675), 416–17. Spelling and punctuation have been slightly adapted and modernized in direct quotes. ↩︎
3. For more on experiential preaching, see my book, Reformed Preaching: Proclaiming God’s Word from the Heart of the Preacher to the Heart of His People (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018). ↩︎