‘Oh the unfaithfulness of men seeming pious’, complained Richard Baxter in 1657, ‘the good bishop must be what everyone will say of him … one feigneth him to be of one extreme, and the other of the other extreme’. His complaint was fully justified. Then, as subsequently, James Ussher was claimed in support of a bewildering range of views. It was partly his own fault — he was often indirect in the way he expressed his opinions, hiding them amidst a welter of quotations from other authors. But it was also a product of his considerable intellectual stature — his endorsement was eagerly sought by writers looking to bolster their own views and standing. The result is that those who write about Ussher need to have their wits about them. The tendency in historical theology to lump past figures into ideological straightjackets such as Calvinist or Arminian has to be guarded against, and requires an acute sense of the distinction between exegesis and eisegesis — the tendency of people, in expounding Ussher's views, to read into them their own theological commitments. In short, that all-too-rare quality of scholarly self-awareness, of knowing where the writer and the reader are coming from, is essential in Ussher-studies; that, and also a respect for the sheer messiness of history.

Harrison Perkins's doctoral thesis-based book is a very welcome addition to the genre, for two reasons. First, because of his self-awareness; currently a Presbyterian minister in London, he is a product of Westminster Seminary California, an American theological institution which seeks to preserve orthodoxy by requiring faculty members to sign up to a doctrinal statement (six of them, actually, including the Westminster Confession). He sees his mission as being ‘to teach biblical truth as expressed in the Reformed confessions’ and characterises his academic writing as ‘expanding on the development of Reformed doctrine with a view to recovering historical categories for use in constructive dogmatic theology’ (https://uk.linkedin.com/in/harrison-perkins-429404a1). He continues the recent trend — established so successfully by Richard Snoddy in his Soteriology of James Ussher (Oxford, 2014) — of detailed investigation of Ussher's theology. Ussher up to now has been seen as something of a theological maverick: even his Calvinism was questioned by his foremost nineteenth-century biographer. Even if locating him within the reformed tradition, he was very much his own man.

The book tackles one of the major ideological innovations of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Calvinism — covenant theology. This was a necessary result of the remoteness of the Calvinist God. If he was so different from us, how could we hope to approach or understand him? The answer was that God voluntarily condescended to meet us more than halfway by expounding in the scriptures two covenants: the covenant of works, when he promised Adam he would be saved on condition of perfect obedience; and, the necessary consequence of the fall, the second covenant of grace where God promised to save sinners on condition that they believed in Christ. Perkins sets out his stall in the first sentence of his first chapter: Ussher ‘made one of the most important contributions to the development of the covenant of works within the history of Reformed Protestant theology’ (p. 4). He goes on to explore Ussher's ideas on the covenant of works and their originality. Ussher, he argues, was responsible for turning the covenant of works from a theological speculation into a firm confessional belief for reformed Calvinism. There is no doubt that this happened during the first half of the seventeenth century. The two covenants are placed on equal terms in chapter seven of the 1646 Westminster Confession of Faith. What has to be proved, though, is the centrality of Ussher's role in this process.

The difficulty is that Ussher never wrote his planned great work of theological synthesis. Perkins has, as a result, to piece together his views from a variety of locations, and he is to be congratulated on the thoroughness with which he has unearthed both printed and manuscript sources. It is here, though, that doubts begin to emerge. The Body of divinity, published under Ussher's name in 1645, is a compendium of contemporary Calvinist writers, including some of Ussher's own writings, strung together to form a kind of theological text-book. Ussher himself reportedly disclaimed authorship, saying that it was ‘in divers places dissonant from my own judgement’, and the nineteenth-century editor of the work showed that large chunks of it were simply copied from other Calvinist authors. Since it represents a firmly Calvinist theology, Perkins clearly wants Ussher to be the author, rather than the editor. Unfortunately, the evidence he produces for overturning Ussher's own disavowal of authorship is not convincing. The Body tells us what Ussher thought contemporary Calvinist orthodoxy consisted of, but it does not necessarily tell us about Ussher's own theology. On theological issues, there are some disagreements with Snoddy on topics such as the distinction between definitive and progressive aspects of sanctification. Where Snoddy seems sensitive to Ussher's nuances and contemporary context, Perkins has a tendency, first, to claim too much originality for Ussher's views, and, second, to seek to recruit him as a fully paid-up member of the Presbyterian church.

As Perkins admits, Ussher's role in the development of covenant theology has been missed by contemporaries and later scholars. He makes the case that this neglect is unjust. On the other hand, it is also possible that, while many important ideas may be found in Ussher, others may more justly claim the credit for developing and bringing them into wider circulation. It is, as a result, at the very least questionable whether Ussher ‘made one of the most important contributions to the development of the covenant of works within the history of Reformed Protestant theology’. It may have been a mistake to state so clearly the claim for Ussher's originality as fact at the start and then spend the rest of the book justifying it. A better approach might have been to explore Ussher's views with a more open mind and try to assess his originality and the extent of his influence on contemporaries — that might have produced a more nuanced interpretation, though it might also, of course, have diminished Ussher's importance. It may well be that the author has fallen prey to that natural temptation of doctoral dissertations, to overstate the significance of the object of study. That said, this book is nevertheless to be heartily welcomed as a further stage in the exploration of Ussher's theology, which foregrounds, in a way which has never been done before, his thinking on covenant theology.