November 2007 - Protestant Reformed Churches in America

Preparatory Grace in the Puritans
generation. Perkins’ massive work, The Cases of Conscience, was
published posthumously in 1606. In a chapter entitled “What Must
a Man Do That He May Come Into God’s Favor And Be Saved”
Perkins writes that God usually guides the sinner through several
stages before regeneration takes place:
God gives man the outward means of salvation, especially the ministry
of the word, and with it he sends some outward or inward cross to
break and subdue the stubbornness of our nature that it may be made
pliable to the will of God … this done, God brings a man to a consideration
of the Law … he makes a man particularly to see and know
his own peculiar and proper sins whereby he offends God … he smites
the heart with a legal fear … he makes him to fear punishment and
hell and to despair of salvation in regard of anything in himself. 2
Perkins therefore taught that, before regeneration, the stubbornness
of the sinner’s nature is subdued, his will is made pliable
to God’s will, and the dead sinner is made to see and experience
the extent of his depravity. He then comes under a legal fear
so that he despairs of salvation. However, insisted Perkins, these
actions upon the sinner’s nature, emotions, and will are not necessarily
fruits of regeneration, for, he adds “these four actions are
indeed no fruits of grace, for a reprobate may go thus far.” They
are only “works of preparations going before grace.” 3
Perkins did not teach that these preparatory steps are carried
out by man, but by God, or with God’s assistance. Perkins was
prevented by his decretal theology from “flirting with any concept
of meritorious preparation for conversion on the part of
man.” 4 Man could not produce these good things in himself, but
their outcome did depend in part on man. If both the elect and the
2. William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience,
Book I, Chapter V, pp. 50-51; spelling of original modernized, italics
added.
3. Perkins, Whole Treatise, Book I, Chapter V, p. 51, italics added.
4. Young Jae Timothy Song, Theology and Piety in the Reformed
Thought of William Perkins and John Preston (The Edwin Mellen Press:
Lewiston, NY, 1998), p. 132.
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