Marrow Controversy

The Marrow Controversy (1718-1723) was a dispute in the Church of Scotland over the republication of Edward Fisher’s The Marrow of Modern Divinity (1646), a work on the free offer of the gospel.¹ Thomas Boston, James Hog, and the brothers Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine, known as the “Marrow men,” defended the book’s teaching that Christ’s death has a sufficiency offered to everyone, distinct from the atonement’s saving design, which they held to be particular to the elect.² The General Assembly condemned the republished book in 1720 for allegedly favoring antinomianism.¹

Confessional Definition

The Second London Baptist Confession never mentions the controversy; it was written decades after the dispute closed, in a different national church. But its own chapter on Christ’s satisfaction states the particular-redemption doctrine both the Marrow men and their opponents took for granted: Christ “hath fully satisfied the justice of God, procured reconciliation, and purchased an everlasting inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, for all those whom the Father hath given unto Him,”³ not for all people without exception. According to A. A. Hodge, the Marrow men were “perfectly orthodox” on this very point: their dispute with the Assembly was never about whom the atonement actually saves.²

The confession’s chapter on assurance touches the controversy’s other emphasis. It teaches that a true believer “may in this life be certainly assured that they are in the state of grace,”⁴ resting not on “a bare conjectural and probable persuasion” but on “an infallible assurance of faith founded on the blood and righteousness of Christ,”⁵ while also stating that “this infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it.”⁶ Both sides in Scotland claimed to be defending the same Westminster confessional family’s doctrine of justification by faith alone,⁷ so the confession’s language here states the wider Reformed position each party invoked for itself rather than settling which side applied it correctly.

Historical Development

Fisher’s Marrow and its Scottish revival

Edward Fisher’s The Marrow of Modern Divinity was first published in England in 1646 and republished there in 1700 and 1718.¹ A Scottish edition found its strongest advocates in Thomas Boston, a country minister who recommended the book, and in James Hog, Ralph Erskine, and Ebenezer Erskine.¹ In 1720 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland condemned the republished work for allegedly favoring antinomianism, the position that holiness is not necessary for those under grace.¹ The ministers who continued to defend the book, including Boston, Hog, and the Erskines, became known as the “Marrow men.”²

A universal offer, a particular design

Hodge records that the Marrow men held to the atonement’s actual reference to the elect alone, like other Calvinists of their day; their distinctive teaching concerned the gospel’s offer, not its design.² They taught that Christ’s sacrifice has a “legal, federal sufficiency” for every human being, and that this sufficiency is the ground of a universal offer: everyone may be told there is good news for them, that “Christ is dead for them,” meaning a Savior has been provided and is available, without the further, unknowable claim that “Christ died for them” in the sense of having secured their salvation.⁸ Fisher’s book, as the Marrow men read it, distinguished Christ’s “giving love,” which is universal, from his “electing love,” which is particular to those he has chosen; God, on this reading, “made a deed of gift and grant of Christ unto all men.”² Addressing the Synod of the United Secession Church in 1845, Dr. John Brown of Haddington stated the position’s boundaries against its neighbors: not the Universalist claim that Christ’s death secures salvation for all, not the Arminian claim that it purchases easier terms of salvation for all, but the claim that Christ died “to remove legal obstacles in the way of human salvation by making perfect satisfaction for sin,” on which ground alone he “died for all men.”²

Bavinck places this teaching within a longer Reformed argument over the extent of the atonement. Early in the eighteenth century a “moderate” group represented by Richard Baxter in England and by Amyraldism in France had already distinguished a conditional decree, by which Christ satisfied for all, from a further, particular decree granting the faith that actually secures salvation.⁸ The same question returned in Scotland in the 1820s when John McLeod Campbell began teaching that Christ died for all men because he was perfectly obedient to the law of loving one’s neighbor; the Church of Scotland deposed Campbell in 1831, but his teaching contributed to the eventual, wider abandonment of a strictly limited atonement among Reformed churches.⁸

Neonomianism and antinomianism, in both sides’ own words

Carol Chen’s account of the controversy sets the Marrow men against opponents who, in stressing the covenant of grace’s own conditions, tended toward neonomianism, the position that the covenant imposes new legal terms on the believer, while the Marrow men themselves stressed the doctrine of assurance resting in the gospel’s own promises and held the covenant of grace to be unconditional.⁷ Citing David Como’s history of English antinomian controversies, Chen reports that the Marrow men described Fisher’s book as “a powerful practical exposition of the doctrine of grace,” while their opponents called it “a deceptive threat to the orthodoxy of the Church, a work of disguised antinomianism.”⁹

Objections and Responses

Did the Marrow men teach antinomianism, that holiness does not matter for those under grace? This was the Assembly’s own charge in 1720, but Hodge’s account of their actual doctrine does not bear it out: their dispute concerned the extent of the gospel’s offer, not the necessity of obedience, and on the atonement’s saving design they agreed with the Assembly that Christ’s death secures salvation for the elect alone.² Chen likewise notes that both the Marrow men and their opponents claimed to hold the same Westminster confessional doctrine of justification by faith alone; the dispute was over how far that doctrine’s own logic extended to the gospel’s offer, not over whether it required a holy life.⁷

Doesn’t teaching that Christ’s death is “dead for” every person amount to universal atonement? The Marrow men’s own distinction between Christ’s universal “giving love” and his particular “electing love”² keeps the atonement’s sufficiency, offered to all, distinct from its efficacy, secured only for the elect, the same distinction the wider Reformed tradition draws between Christ’s death being sufficient for all but efficient only for the elect. Brown’s 1845 statement draws the same line: Christ died for all only in the sense of removing every legal obstacle to salvation by his satisfaction, not in the sense of having purchased salvation itself for everyone.²

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 417-418. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 5. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 18, “Of the Assurance of Grace and Salvation,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 18, para. 2. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 18, para. 3. ↩
Carol Man Fen Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 32-33. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 16, “The Exalted Lord Christ.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 33, citing David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 1. ↩