A series of seeming coincidences was used by God to help a young minister named Thomas Boston to discover and read an out-of-print book called The Marrow of Modern Divinity. Boston was visiting a member of his congregation when he saw the book sitting on a window ledge and borrowed it. He found it extremely helpful to his ministry and his preaching. Some seventeen years later in 1717, he recommended The Marrow to another minister, which led to it being reprinted in 1718. In May of 1720, the Committee for Purity of Doctrine of the Church of Scotland strongly condemned the book and instructed ministers of the denomination to warn their people not to read it, which meant a previously obscure book was brought to the attention of many who then bought and read it carefully. The Marrow Controversy was born.
Boston and others found that The Marrow of Modern Divinity helped them to discover the whole Christ and preach it, often with great fruitfulness. It wrestles with a doctrinal issue the is still within the church today—preparationism. The Westminster Confession of Faith underlines that we cannot do anything to prepare ourselves, or qualify for salvation in Jesus Christ. “It really is a free gift, and Christ is presented to us as a free gift.” The Marrow challenged a medieval way of thinking about salvation, namely that grace begins to work in you to prepare you to believe in Christ. Reading the Bible, attending worship, listening to sermons, praying to receive the Holy Spirit, disposes you to receive God’s grace.
Ferguson said this preparationism is still dormant in the thinking and preaching of many Christians today. “It is so difficult for us to believe that salvation is by grace.” Surely there is something we need to do or contribute, “something I need to do to qualify for salvation.” This turns the gospel into a moral lecture. “We don’t point people first to the secret work of the Holy Spirit, but to Jesus Christ.” Christ must be up front and center in the proclamation of the gospel.
One of the issues raised by this for our spiritual and doctrinal thinking has to do with the order of salvation, the ordo salutus. This has to do with the way in which different aspects of the application of redemption are related to one another. Here Ferguson turned to a work of William Perkins, a central figure in English Puritan and Reformed theology. When Perkins graduated from Christ’s College in Cambridge in 1584, most people could not read and write. Therefore in 1591, he composed what he called an ocular, visual catechism. He illustrated how various aspects of the application of redemption work in salvation: regeneration by the Holy Spirit; faith; repentance; adoption; and sanctification. He contrasted what happens to someone who becomes a Christian, the elect, and someone who doesn’t become a Christian, the reprobate.
In the middle of Perkins’ so-named “Golden Chain,” is Jesus Christ and what Christ has done. “Everything is related to Jesus Christ.” But Christ is divorced from salvation when people suppose regeneration precedes faith. It happens when an Arminian preaches the gospel and says: “You come to Christ and Jesus will then give you the gift of new birth;” and again if a Calvinist preaches the gospel and says, “You can’t see or enter the kingdom apart from the new birth.” In both cases, regeneration is prior to faith, which leads to salvation.
The reasoning used here goes like this: Regeneration causes faith; faith then causes repentance and sanctification. The language used here speaks of a chain of salvation and begins to drift into a description of the experience of salvation that has lost sight of the centrality of Christ. People refer to Romans 8:28-30 when they speak of the chain of salvation or redemption. But where is the chain in the text? Where does Paul speak of a chain? When you step back and ask this question, you begin to see that you have linked a chain into your reading of Romans 8:30: “Whom he predestined he also called, and those who he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”
When you do this, logically chaining one experience after another, you fail to immediately relate the experience of predestination, calling, justification and so on, to the person of Jesus Christ. Our experience of salvation in space-time may be a chain of causality, but in reality, it occurred outside of time all at once (if we can use a space-time reference), when we encountered Christ.
When you think like this, there is an obvious tendency to ask, where am I in the chain? How am I progressing? This has a built-in tendency to divert attention from the Lord Christ in whom I am elect, called, justified, sanctified, adopted, and glorified. “In a biblical perspective, I’m never to separate any of the blessings of the gospel from Jesus Christ, the benefactor.” The danger is, when focusing your attention on how this is working out in your life, on where you are in the chain, on what is the next link, you are turning back on yourself. As Martin Luther warned, you are becoming ‘incurvatus in se,’ meaning life turning in on oneself.
We need the gospel to come and lift up our head, and we need the voice of the Word of God to say, “You’re beginning to lose sight of Christ.” You are fussing about how much repentance you’ve experienced, and you’re not thinking about the Lord Jesus any longer. You are thinking about how much has been accomplished in you without realizing that nothing is accomplished in you that hasn’t been first accomplished exclusively for you in Christ.
The gospel teaches us to look out to Him. To live in fellowship with Him. To live in union with Him. So that we are delivered from that constantly subjective call many Christians experience: is there enough in me for Him to be pleased with me? When the gospel is saying, “He’s not pleased with you because of anything that’s in you. He’s pleased with you only because you are in Jesus Christ.”
The gospel does not begin with Christ indwelling us; the gospel begins with us coming to faith in Jesus Christ and dwelling in Him.
This preparationism often continues to linger in Christians’ thinking and living in such a way that it distorts their view of God. One of the ways this is expressed is when preachers say the following when preaching the gospel: “God loves you because Christ died for you.” This is false teaching. The implication here is: “If the Father loves me only because Christ died for me, then in some sense the Father in Himself doesn’t really love me.” The Son has to, as it were, negotiate with the Father, saying: “If I die for them, will you love them?”
“Jesus died because the Father already loves you.” One of the most common pastoral situations Christian ministers encounter is Christians who believe the Father only loves them because Christ died for them. This is despite the teaching of John 3:16, “For God (the Father) so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” The Father loves you just as much as the Son. “The Father’s unconditional love for sinners is the root of Him sending his Son to die for us on the cross.”
And so, this Marrow Controversy that seemed to be about … pretty narrow and small areas, almost technical areas … was really getting underneath the human psyche and spiritual life, in order that Christians might be bathed in a sense of the sheer wonder of God’s love for us.
This article has been based on “Preparation, Distortion, Poison” the third video in Sinclair Ferguson’s teaching series, The Whole Christ, from Ligonier Connect. Here is a link to Ligonier Connect. The video series is itself based upon his book of the same name. You can review further summaries of the Marrow Controversy here and here. If the topic interests you, look for more of my ruminations under the link, The Whole Christ.