Thomas Boston

Overview

Thomas Boston (1676-1732) was a Church of Scotland minister best known for his devotional treatise Human Nature in Its Fourfold State and for his leading role among the “Marrow men” in the Marrow Controversy, the dispute over the republished Marrow of Modern Divinity and the free offer of the gospel.¹ Bavinck places him among the important Scottish theologians of the early eighteenth century, alongside the Seceder brothers Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine.²

Life and Ministry

Boston was born on 17 March 1676 at Duns, Berwickshire, to John Boston and Alison Trotter, both Covenanters.¹ He was educated at Edinburgh and licensed to preach in 1697 by the presbytery of Chirnside.¹ In 1699 he became minister of the small parish of Simprin, which had only about ninety examinable persons.¹

In 1704, while visiting a member of his congregation, Boston found a copy of Edward Fisher’s The Marrow of Modern Divinity, a book brought into Scotland by a Commonwealth-era soldier decades earlier.¹ On his recommendation James Hog of Carnock reprinted it in 1718, and Boston himself later published an edition with his own notes.¹ In 1707 he was translated to Ettrick, in Selkirkshire, where he remained for the rest of his ministry.¹ That same year he was the only member of the General Assembly to enter a formal protest against what he judged an inadequate sentence passed on John Simson, professor of divinity at Glasgow, who had been accused of heterodox teaching on the incarnation.¹

Cousin describes Boston, “if unduly introspective,” as nonetheless “a man of singular piety and amiability,” and calls his autobiography “an interesting record of Scottish life, full of sincerity and tenderness, and not devoid of humorous touches, intentional and otherwise.”³ Boston died at Ettrick on 20 May 1732.¹

Theological Contribution

Human Nature in Its Fourfold State

Boston’s best-known work opens with the fourfold scheme that gives it its name: “There are four things very necessary to be known by all that would see Heaven: First, What Man was in the state of innocence, as God made him. Secondly, What he is in the state of corrupt nature, as he hath unmade himself. Thirdly, What he must be in the state of grace… Fourthly, What he shall be in the state of eternal happiness or misery.”⁴ Working out the second of these states, Boston roots humanity’s corruption in its federal union with Adam under the covenant of works: “The covenant of works was the bond of our union with the natural stock; but now it is become weak through the flesh.”⁵ Fallen human nature remains bound to that covenant’s demand for perfect obedience without any longer having the strength to meet it, “like a merciless creditor” that still “apprehends Adam’s heirs” for a debt they cannot pay.⁵

A View of the Covenant of Grace

In this posthumously published treatise, Boston sets out the covenant of grace’s own parties. Following the pattern of the covenant of works, he holds that “the party upon the one side is God himself, and he only,” made “from eternity, before the world began” (Titus 1:2).⁶ Considering whether this party-contractor should be understood personally, as the Father alone, or essentially, as the whole Trinity, Boston judges “that God essentially considered, was the party-contractor in the person of the Father,” so that “the Son and the Holy Ghost have their part in the covenant, on heaven’s side,” even though a “peculiar agency” in making it belongs to the Father.⁶

The Marrow of Modern Divinity

Boston’s own contribution to the Marrow Controversy was editorial rather than merely polemical: he recommended Fisher’s book for republication and later issued his own annotated edition of it.¹ The Marrow men’s actual doctrine, as A. A. Hodge records it, was “perfectly orthodox” on the atonement’s particular design, restricted to the elect; their real distinctive lay in the other direction, in an unusually broad affirmation of the gospel’s universal offer, grounded in Christ’s universal “giving love” as against his particular “electing love.”⁷ See Marrow Controversy for the dispute’s full doctrinal and historical treatment.

Historical Significance

Bavinck situates Boston within the wider eighteenth-century Reformed world, naming him and his posthumous A Complete Body of Divinity (3 vols., 1773) alongside the Erskine brothers as the Scottish church faced its own “neonomian conflict over the doctrine of justification,” the Marrow Controversy, even as English Reformed theologians of the same period turned toward apologetics against deism.²

Human Nature in Its Fourfold State, first published in 1720, went on to become, in Cousin’s words, “one of the religious classics of Scotland.”³ Together with The Crook in the Lot and the posthumous Body of Divinity and Miscellanies, it “long exercised a powerful influence over the Scottish peasantry.”¹ Boston’s autobiographical Memoirs appeared in 1776, and a twelve-volume edition of his collected works was published in 1849.¹

Related Doctrines

References

“Boston, Thomas,” in The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), a public-domain reference used here for biographical facts not otherwise found in the secondary sources cited elsewhere in this article. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²
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
John William Cousin, A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature (London: J. M. Dent & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910), s.v. “Boston, Thomas,” a public-domain reference used here for biographical and character detail not otherwise found in the secondary sources cited elsewhere in this article. ↩ ↩²
Thomas Boston, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State (Printed for the booksellers, 1787), 17. ↩
Boston, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State, 171. ↩ ↩²
Thomas Boston, A View of the Covenant of Grace (Aberdeen: George and Robert King, 1853), 386. ↩ ↩²
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 417-418. ↩