Our Story
Hello. This is Richard Leimbach.
I want to welcome you to this new website dedicated to exploring the writings of Thomas Erskine and to tell you a little bit about how I became involved in this project.
I first learned of the writings of Thomas Erskine through an article that C. Baxter Kruger wrote for the February/March 2008 issue of Christian Odyssey. The magazine is now long defunct, and at the time I knew very little about Dr. Kruger, but what he wrote about Thomas Erskine made me immediately want to know more. He said that Erskine’s 1828 book The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel remained one of the most important books he had ever read. The reason he gave was that it had solved a critical and practical theological problem for him, and he hoped it would do the same for others.
According to Erskine, he said, the gospel is the good news that God has forgiven the human race. Forgiveness is to be proclaimed as an accomplished fact. It is universal. It is finished. It includes the whole race of humanity. And it is unconditional. He added, “Many, of course, believe this to be the plain truth of the gospel. I know I do. Yet there are many others who are deeply troubled by such an unconditional message.”
Dr. Kruger acknowledged that if we are to believe that God has forgiven all people, there are other questions that would have to be answered, and they would be, questions like: Why then is the New Testament so full of the call to faith and repentance? If we are all forgiven forever, what difference does it make if we believe the gospel or not? And what does such a free declaration mean for living the Christian life?
Even before I read the article, I had been wrestling with questions of my own about God’s love and forgiveness. The tradition I grew up in taught that if we repent and if we believe, then and only then will God forgive us, but I had been coming across passages in the Bible that seemed to say otherwise. And if God has pardoned humanity, then knowing that would solve a crucial theological problem for me as well. It would mean that God’s love is truly unconditional and universal and that His arms are open wide to all the prodigals of the world. No one is excluded. No one has to wonder if they are loved. It would mean that Jesus is the atoning sacrifice, not just for some select few known as the “elect,” but for the sins of the whole world and that the door to reconciliation with God is wide open to all who are willing to walk through it.
As much as I wanted to read Erskine’s book, in 2008 it was not an easy matter to find a copy of a book written nearly two hundred years ago. The best I could do was to save the article and hope I would be able to follow up on it at a later date.
Thirteen years later, while going through a box of old papers, I rediscovered the article and immediately realized that much had changed and that I now knew where I could find the full, unabridged text of Thomas Erskine’s The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel. Since 2004, the Google Library Project had been hard at work scanning the thousands of old and long-out-of-print books that had been preserved in university libraries and elsewhere, and those books were now available to anyone with a computer.
I read Erskine’s book and found as had Dr. Kruger that this truly was one of the most important books I had ever read, and that was not only because of what it had to say about God’s love and forgiveness but because of what it had to say about some of the most important subjects for any Christian—faith, justification, the atonement, salvation, the gospel, and the nature and character of God. No wonder those who had read Erskine held him in such high regard. What Erskine had to say two hundred years ago was as cogent today as it was in his day.
Two things occurred to me. Something needed to be done to make this nineteenth-century Scottish lay theologian and his books better known, and that now, in 2021, I might be in a position to do something about it. What if I could get Erskine’s The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel republished? I knew it would take many weeks of work to digitize Erskine’s book, but I firmly believed it would be worth it, so I started on the project immediately.
By July of 2021, I had finished the manuscript for the new, annotated edition of Erskine’s book. It was still lacking an introductory essay about Thomas Erskine himself, but that was something that could be added later.
In 2016, I had met Dr. Kruger in person at a conference in Denver, Colorado. Baxter was one of the guest speakers along with his friend and co-laborer William Paul Young. By this time, Paul Young had become world famous as the author of The Shack, and Baxter had written the companion book, The Shack Revisited. That same conference allowed me to meet several other people who beforehand I had only known through their books. Among them were Brad Jersak,1 Thomas Talbott,2 and Robin Parry.3
Significantly, the Revd. Dr. Parry, besides being a prolific writer and a speaker at the conference, was also the editor for Cascade books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. So, when the time came to seek a publisher, I emailed him about my efforts to get The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel republished. His quick response was that he too thought this was a very worthwhile project and asked to see the manuscript. After reviewing it, he suggested we submit it to Wipf and Stock for publication. Wipf and Stock accepted the manuscript with the stipulation that I add an introductory essay about Thomas Erskine, something I was glad to do.
The new, annotated edition of the book came out in the spring of 2023. Besides having the full text of Erskine’s 1828 book, it included a second section comprised of further readings from Erskine’s letters, essays, and other books. The intent of this section was to demonstrate the broad scope of Erskine’s thinking and to show that there was much more to be mined from his writings. The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel was only a good starting point.
I had quickly discovered, as I dove into Erskine’s other books, essays, and letters, that Thomas Erskine, despite being a layperson with no formal theological schooling, was a Christian thinker and theologian well ahead of his time. His views on the incarnation and the doctrine of election made me immediately think of things the great twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth had written.4 I found this quite remarkable considering that Erskine was born more than a hundred years before Barth and at a time when federal Calvinism reigned supreme in Erskine’s Scottish homeland (as well as in New England and Holland).
Like Erskine, Barth believed that God’s grace and love are unconditional and that a universal pardon has been granted to all people regardless of their awareness of it. For both Erskine and Barth, God has spoken His word of forgiveness in Christ on the cross—a word of love to all mankind.
When it came time to decide which of Erskine’s books to annotate and publish next, Erskine’s final work, The Spiritual Order and Other Papers, was the obvious choice. Erskine wrote The Spiritual Order during the last years of his life, and in some ways . . . to be continued.
- Dr. Jesak’s book, A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel, had come out only a year before the conference. ↩︎
- The Inescapable Love of God by Thomas Talbott was in 1999 something of a game changer. His brilliant defense of Trinitarian universalism put that previously taboo subject squarely on the table for open, public debate. Up until that time, no major Christian publishing house would go near the subject considering it too controversial. Talbott, commenting on the difficulty of getting his book published, had this to say, “I repeat: No publisher is under any obligation to publish anything that, for whatever reason, he or she finds unacceptable. But if one is looking for an explanation of why so many within the evangelical community, even among the more elite scholars, are so woefully ignorant of how universalists interpret the New Testament and put theological ideas together, one need only consider how few of them have ever encountered a vigorous and sustained defense of the doctrine of universal reconciliation.” ↩︎
- As an author, Robin Parry is best known for his book, The Evangelical Universalist. Parry used a pen name (Gregory MacDonald) in writing the book, largely in an effort to avoid professional repercussions and to shield the publisher from potential backlash. As it turns out, the book was, for the most part, quite well received by reviewers citing its strong biblical exegesis, intellectual rigor, and thoughtful engagement with theological and philosophical issues. ↩︎
- Both Erskine and Barth believed that in the incarnation, Christ took on a human nature, not in an idealized, pre-fall state, but in the reality of humanity’s fallen condition. In his 1837 book, The Doctrine of Election, Erskine wrote, “Jesus took the flesh, just as the ‘children’ have it (Hebrews 2:14), but that does not make him a sinner for as he was without sin in a sinful world, so he was without sin in a sinful nature. And how was he so? Was it not by a continual accordance of his whole life with that word, “not my will, but thine be done”? Was it not by a continual refusal to live to the flesh and a continual choosing to live to the Spirit? And how did he condemn sin in the flesh but by thus living and by submitting himself to the sentence of sorrow and death laid on the flesh, not merely as a righteous judgment, but as a gracious provision by which the Fatherly love of God would lead those who in filial confidence submit to it out from the horrible pit into which the nature had fallen? And the Father sealed the condemnation of the sin in the flesh by raising from the dead, without the touch of corruption, him who had thus lived in the flesh without ever consenting to live to it.
“It was thus that Jesus condemned sin in the flesh, and it was through his condemnation of it that the Father condemned it—for the Father could only condemn it as He desired to do, namely in a way consistent with the salvation of men, by doing it through the cooperation of man’s own will, and therefore He had sent His own Son into the flesh, not only to prove His love to man, but also that He might have a man, a partaker of the flesh, who would go along with Him in his condemnation of the sin in it, and who would be a witness to his brethren from his own experience that God’s will is man’s only life as it is his only guide, and that sorrow and death when received in Filial confidence, are the medicine of the soul and the way out of the corruption and who would not only be a witness to them of these things, but would also be in them and to them a fountain of the same filial life by the strength of which he himself had done this work enabling all of them who would receive it to yield themselves unto God and to become co-operators with him and co-witnesses with him of the same truth” (The Doctrine of Election, 368–369).
On the subject of the Election, Erskine wrote in a letter to a friend, “I believe that the presence of Jesus in us with His quickening (vivifiant) spirit gives to each of us the power, whether we use it or not, of joining and taking part with Him against the evils of our own hearts, and I believe that in as far as we do so, we become partakers of His nature and members of His body. I believe that Jesus is the one Elect and that those who by thus taking part with Jesus become members of His body become also members of the election and that those who continue to resist Him shut themselves out from the election. In this way also I believe that, as Christ was really given to men immediately after the Fall, all are elect in Him, He being in them all and all are reprobate or rejected in the first Adam but that we can make either our election or our reprobation sure by joining ourselves either to the one party or the other. I believe that God takes the first step to every man and draws every man by His Spirit, and that man’s part is acceptance and yielding.”
When I shared Erskine’s letter with Marty Folsom, a Barth scholar and author of a series of books titled Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics for Everyone, he pronounced it “classic Barth.” He was so struck by the similarity of thought that he checked to see if he could find any connection between the two men, but he could not, which makes it all the more amazing how well their views coincided on such important matters as the centrality of Christ, God’s love for all, human freedom, the atonement of Christ, their understanding of justification, redemption, and election, and an implied universalism that shows up in both their writings. ↩︎
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