John Pearson (bishop)

In 1659 he published in London his celebrated Exposition of the Creed, dedicated to his parishioners of St Clement's, Eastcheap, to whom the substance of the work had been preached several years before.

For example, in relation to the Christian cross, he wrote in his commentary on the Apostles' Creed that the Greek word stauros originally signified "a straight standing Stake, Pale, or Palisador", but that, "when other transverse or prominent parts were added in a perfect Cross, it retained still the Original Name", and he declared: "The Form then of the Cross on which our Saviour suffered was not a simple, but a compounded, Figure, according to the Custom of the Romans, by whose Procurator he was condemned to die.

In which there was not only a straight and erected piece of Wood fixed in the Earth, but also a transverse Beam fastned unto that towards the top thereof".

In 1661 he was appointed Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity; and on the first day of the ensuing year he was nominated one of the commissioners for the review of the liturgy in the conference held at the Savoy.

[8] On the other hand, Jake Griesel and Stephen Hampton have observed that Pearson upheld a Calvinist position on the doctrines of election and grace both in his Exposition (1659) and his Cambridge lectures, and did so explicitly against the Arminians or Remonstrants (contra Remonstrantes, sive eos quos Arminianos vocant).

Also in 1659 was published his Exposition of the Creed in which the lectures which were given at the church of St Clement, Eastcheap, London, were included.

His last work, the Two Dissertations on the Succession and Times of the First Bishops of Rome, formed with the Annales Paulini the principal part of his Opera posthuma, edited by Henry Dodwell in 1688.

See the memoir in Biographia Britannica, and another by Edward Churton, prefixed to the edition of Pearson's Minor Theological Works (2 vols., Oxford, 1844).