Excerpted from “The Influence, Direct and Indirect, of the Writings of Erskine of Linlathen on Religious Thought in Scotland,” the doctoral thesis of Robert A. Reid, University of Edinburgh, 1930.
An earlier edition of this work had been much criticized. It was asserted there were evidences of confused arrangement, the logic was at fault, and old and familiar truths travestied. It was to meet these criticisms that Erskine revised and re-wrote the Essay on Faith. Evidently some of the criticism was of a captious nature for there is just a soupçon of impatience in the following words of Erskine. “I do not think that any reader of the edition will suppose I consider a man entitled to reject the doctrines of the Bible because he cannot explain them or that I held Christian faith to be mere assent to the terms of a proposition.”
What led Erskine to publish his thoughts on religion to the world? He desired to simplify the Gospel by freeing the divine message from the network of the logician. Religion, hitherto, in Scotland and elsewhere was too much a Gospel of logic, whereas Erskine viewed the Evangel in terms of the heart. Calvinism had made the Gospel a message of Sovereignty, but Erskine, whilst not denying a place to Divine Sovereignty, emphasized the Divine Love. This love was so clear and simple that even the man running past the noticeboard might read and understand.
The Essay on Faith at times is obscure, but it betrays no lack of patience in pursuit of truth. The Essay is a product of the heart and is among the simplest of the works of Erskine. The illustrations from the classics cast a light on one of the author’s obiter dicta that had he been endowed with health and eyesight he might have been a learned man. He had something better, intuitive genius. Another reason for this little book was his desire, begotten from a profound experience of the love of God, to share his gift with others. “That love,” as one has said, “had come to him with a power and totality of conviction which it is given to few to realize.”
Erskine found in the Scriptures different definitions or descriptions of faith, and hence, the precise meaning must be set out to avoid mistakes. This effort to reach an understanding of the term was not a needless bit of work. The need for such an inquiry was all the more apparent when it was held that eternal happiness and eternal misery was involved in the possession or non-possession of faith. The purpose of the book is to explain the rank of faith in the Christian system by showing its natural relation to the human faculties and its influence on human character.
To some, faith was a symbolic expression for the whole regenerate character, just as unbelief was taken by others to represent all vices. Again, faith stood as one of two necessary conditions of pardon, the other obedience, and the absence of either made the other nugatory and effectively excluded from the divine favor.
How could these two views be reconciled or explained? The only form of reconciliation was clear enough to Erskine who says faith was belief and belief developing through obedience unto holiness, whereas others disparaged holiness and obedience and regarded faith only as the channel of Justification merely in virtue of an arbitrary appointment of God without any reference to its moral effect on the human character.
There was evidently a fallacy in the idea that the belief of facts is always independent of the will or moral state of the mind and therefore out of the reach of praise or blame. When a fact is closely related to a general principle, the fact is affected by our view of the principle. This explains the diversity of beliefs among politicians and moralists. Nero, because of his character, could not understand the gentleness of Codrus. Now, the special feature about the facts of the Bible is that these facts are vitally connected with moral principles, and therefore belief in the facts is affected by the appreciation or otherwise of the principles. Hence there is a close relation between belief and character. This is at the basis of the declaration of Jesus, “Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.” Faith, then, is connected with Justification and has a direct bearing on Sanctification. There is no merit in the former, i.e. from works, whereas, in regard to Sanctification, Faith is said to purify the heart, to work by love, and to overcome the world. There was danger, then, both in the view of the hyper-evangelical and the moderate. It is equally erroneous to say either that faith produces justification as the cause of deliverance or to affirm there is merit in faith by works. Trying to conquer sin will not bring victory over evil. To hate sin is not to overcome it: only belief in the love of God to sinners as seen in the cross can accomplish this change. Faith is not that with which we can purchase Justification; and faith is not a work. These errors lead to spiritual pride, which means we trust to our own faith and work to elevate us rather than in the cross to humble us. Faith, too, is often misunderstood when emphasis is laid on the act of belief rather than on the object believed. Reason has no place in the presence of Divine authority. There could be no allowance for doubts in regard to the contents of the Bible. The words of Isaiah, “Come let us reason saith the Lord,” were set aside in orthodox belief, and the saying of Jesus, “Judge ye,” was ignored. Such a line of argument was not honoring but “dishonoring to God, and derogatory to an intelligent Being who teacheth man knowledge.” Faith without the understanding is an error; no less is pardon as the reward for believing or for doing anything else. Pardon comes only through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. What then is the use of faith? What is its relation to pardon? The curse of sin involves the thoughts and feelings. These are disorder. Pardon therefore must reach the thoughts and feelings. How? By opening the being to the character of God. This subtle dialectic of Erskine was called forth because of the religious errors of his day when authority eclipsed fatherhood and where religion was more a matter of the intellect than of the heart. Religion then was doctrine not life. The fact of the atonement is a revelation of the love of God for all mankind, but, so far as the orthodox view was concerned, it failed to give a true conception of the Divine Nature. Justice was emphasized but the love of God passed over. The new evangelism had a place for love in its teaching, but that love was more a matter of the will than of the character in God. The working out of the principle implied in the words “out of his mere good pleasure” was therefore of such a nature as to have no direct influence on the character of man.
Erskine’s view of the atonement was wider than that in the minds of the reformers who based the atonement on the justice of God, which to them also was the proof of the Christian religion.
It is quite evident that Erskine was moving to new ground when he states in regard to the atonement, first that it rests on the character of God, and secondly that the atonement produces character in man. For Erskine religious experience verifies the doctrines of Christianity, and he emphasizes the necessity for Christianity to be powerful in the building up of Character. It is when he continues to hold by the doctrines of penal substitution he proves he is either not conscious of the difficulty and inconsistency or he is anxious not to be unmindful of his weaker brethren.
What then is Faith? How shall we define or describe it? It is an appanage to those faculties through whose powers we receive material or immaterial impressions. Faith stands at the entrance of mind and stamps with authenticity all information that goes in. Faith, therefore, cannot exist or sanction with authenticity information unless the informing faculty exists. To a blind man light cannot be a matter of faith according to the definition of Erskine. If an impression of a real object is produced, there must be persuasion of reality. So, it is with the mathematician. He must have a sense of numbers. So, it is with knowledge and belief of subjects that come before our moral faculties. As we have outward senses to receive impressions from the outward qualities of things, so the inner qualities of things, their spirit and meaning are received by the inward sense. To Erskine, therefore, the soul of man had powers corresponding to the nerves of the body. Each sense in the body must do its own work. The external in like manner cannot take the place of the internal or spiritual.
As we become acquainted with the concepts fear and danger, so we know moral and spiritual worth. In morals, Erskine says, we only know what we feel.
In the Gospel, therefore, facts are set forth to establish the relation of the Divine to the human and so impressions of the facts must be made on our internal senses corresponding to the moral meaning, which constitutes their whole value and importance as a message from God. The center of revelation is the death of Christ. The love of God appeals to conscience for to conscience evil is a stern reality. Man’s affections are touched in view of the boundless nature of God’s love. The human imagination is quickened in the call or urge of eternity. Man’s sense of preservation, or, as Erskine calls it, our prudential judgment is aroused to value everlasting life over against perishing miserably. The love of God in the atonement is immeasurable, but along with that love, there is the expression of a heart set on holiness, which required the sacrifice of the Son. Sin is departure from God and implies misery; union with God through willingness to see things in the light of the Eternal is happiness. We must understand these Gospel truths in order to believe them, and we must feel them in order to understand them. There are, however, hindrances in the way—a polluted conscience and disordered affections. Added to these hindrances, mere assent to a truth or a doctrine to a creed or a form, cannot bring the salutary blessings of the cross. It is not enough to say, “This man doeth many miracles.” We must also be in full sympathy with the Spirit of Jesus who so acts. To hold simply as a creed the doctrines of the Trinity can never bring to the heart all the implications of the Trinity.
Is faith the result of character instead of being the cause and former of character? Erskine says both. The objects of faith do not create faculties in the mind which did not previously exist there, but these objects rouse, awaken, call into action, direct and make virile the faculties which they find there. Hence to turn a wrong feeling or a feeling from a wrong direction to what is a right course there must be the exciting object. This exciting object is the love of God, but various terms were applied to faith which might be technical, speculative, historical, saving and realizing. Hence the heart was not occupied with or centered on God who hates sin and loves the sinner. In other words, there was much fruitless examination of the mental operation of believing: The question of faith being the right kind occupied the mind more than the question, Do I believe the right thing? To Erskine, the Bible was a practical book. So practical is the Bible that it never supposes it possible for a man to be ignorant or in doubt whether he really believes or not. Abstract belief in God leads nowhere. Belief in the moral character of God alone influences character. The question therefore is not, do we believe in the Trinity? but how do we stand in regard to this one Being? How does He regard us? What does He love and what does He hate? The reality of God for Erskine does not rest on the ontological proof but on Fatherhood, expressed supremely in the revelation of the Eternal Son and completed in the work of the Holy Spirit.
To Erskine the objects of religion were not revealed to us to sharpen our faculties by observing how they are fitted to impress the mind, but rather that our minds might be impressed by them with the character of happiness and holiness. It is not an easy thing to examine the various aspects of conduct or to look into self. There is a difference between studying the emotions of the mind and looking on a landscape and allowing the vision to enter with its contents into the mind or soul. Contemplation of the delightful object and not knowing how we enjoy it is the test. This does not mean that Erskine was averse to self-examination—no one was more faithful—but his mind felt it is not how we believe but what we believe that is the important thing. Men will wrangle about religion, dispute about it, suffer for it—anything but live it. This attitude of Erskine was also the expressed opinion of Coleridge, who in his “Aids to Reflection,” says “Christianity is not a theory or a speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life but life, and a living process.”
To have faith in a thing—to believe a thing—and to understand a thing as a truth are expressions of equal value. Four merchants receive advice from a foreign correspondent, but each one of these merchants treats the information in different ways. One, indeed, does not read the letter. So [are] those, who do not believe the Bible—the word given by God to successive generations as man was able to understand the mind and heart of God—and finally, the Word set forth in the “Word made flesh,” [and] therefore finds no place in the reasoning of Scripture for them. It is so also with nominal Christians.
Understanding demanded by Philip of the Ethiopian, Acts 8:30, and by our Lord in the parable of the Sower, Matthew 13:19, is not knowledge in the abstract but when separated from the object believed or from the object of knowledge. This is not a case of setting reason above revelation but that divine revelation, in a practical and intelligent way, is addressed to human reason and feeling, and it is the duty of man to bring his reason and feelings into contact with divine revelation.
This divine purpose in revelation is reached when man sees the connection between it and the Divine Being who gave it even although man may not be able to understand all that is in revelation. The atonement, for instance, exhibits the infinite compassion and holiness of God and has a most powerful tendency to humble and purify and elevate the human heart. Erskine makes no restrictions in his doctrine of Election. All are included. The orthodox method was to summon sinners to believe but at the same time were taught that God’s purpose of mercy was only for certain elect and chosen people. What am I to believe? men asked, and how can I believe God loves me after I have believed? These difficulties Erskine solved by teaching that all men were pardoned whether they believed or not; that those who did believe it were sanctified and saved by believing it, and that those who did not believe were, in the long run, condemned, not as sinners but as unconverted persons. Faith is said to justify because it sanctifies. The basis of the atonement in the Divine nature is the necessity to satisfy justice. In all this, Erskine is sound so far as orthodoxy is concerned in regard to substitution. It is the influence of free forgiveness on human character that gives to the atonement its practical value and its internal evidence. The depraved are less susceptible to this love, and yet the Gospel is related in a unique way to the hearts of the most sinful, for the image of God in the human heart is never wholly lost. With God also is the power to send awakening messengers of sorrow or fear. The Eternal devises means to bring back His own to Himself. Appeals are fitted for different varieties of character. If the unbeliever is not awakened by conscience, which to Erskine was the great illuminator, then the reasonableness of the system of Christianity may appeal to the understanding, as in modern days the unchangeable words of Christ in contrast with the ofttimes changed terminology of science appealed to George Romanes. Such, however, cannot be taken for substitutes to the impression of the love and holiness of God and of the Gospel but only as fore runners to the full acceptance of the atonement in all its holiness.
Faith and Sanctification depend on each other for growth even as the strength on use, for one moral truth acting on the moral nature makes it easier for the mind to accept another. It was the possession of faith by Simeon, the sentinel, and Anna the prophetess that enabled them to see in the infant of days the revealed glory of Israel, just as it was that faith in material things blinded the majority of the chosen nation. Even pagans with only a rudimentary faith believed. It is knowledge of guilt and the helplessness on man’s part in face of that guilt which must be believed.
This was the protest which Erskine made in behalf of the Evangel in opposition to the paganism of moderatism and the mockery of a free love which yet “out of mere good pleasure” elects some and casts others aside. Moderatism was like a laid but unlit fire, and the new Evangelism was like a heart lacking love.
The aphorisms of Erskine in dealing with this part of the topic are striking and memorable. “Precept,” he says, “is cold and joyless.” “The word may be believed yet the Gospel not believed.” “The purest heart has the most correct faith.” “Not logic but vivid impressions.” “A holy mind delights and feeds on holy things.” “Perfect faith supposes perfect sanctification and perfect sanctification supposes perfect faith.” It is in such quotations that we see how Erskine, though he claims no traffic with metaphysic or mysticism, is yet the best exponent of the mysticism of Calvinism, whilst preserving also all that is best in Quietism. It is not as God revolving thought on thought, heedless of the needs of men, that the Divine Creator reveals Himself. Quietism is at fault in the neglect of the Word revealed, even as Rome is when it seals up the Bible and makes ultimate appeal to the teaching of the Church.
The simplicity and freeness of the Gospel Erskine sums up in these words, “to change our former views for those which the Gospel presents to us.” “The Gospel is not a philosophical theory.” “It is not moral mechanism without power.” “For sinful man the Gospel is a necessity.” “The doctrine of the atonement is a mold in which Christian character is shaped.” “The Gospel to some may only be a matter of contention.” “This attitude,” says Erskine, “deserves the hardest of all condemnation.” “Defects in character originate in corresponding defects in faith.” It would be very difficult to find in any other religious manual so many striking aphoristic phrases that so aptly deal with the human soul. We owe much to Erskine for riding the marches of faith and doing all this in such a way as to anticipate the many curious assertions of modern Psychology.
The efficacy of the atonement is achieved through contact with God in Prayer, and prayer is not isolated acts, but a manner of existence. We know we can speak to God and that certainly we are heard of Him, but when Erskine says prayer means, “the eyes of our soul fixed on the face of our Redeemer,” we realize that Erskine was not only a saint but also a mystic of the same school as Jeanne Guyon. In prayer no limit must be put to our desires. Human efforts alone after holiness are absolutely inefficient. God will not fail us. If faith is for us an essential element, then the Bible will be to us always as a book just fresh from the inspirations of the Holy Spirit.
Such is the richness of expression and the virility of thought in The Essay on Faith that the only inference is we are dealing with the work of a master mind who moved among the contents of the human heart with the assurance of one able to pursue a thought to its utmost limit and to express the result in language that recalls the seraphic language of the prophets of Israel. There is perhaps too much of the subjective in the description of faith given by Erskine for the ordinary man. The modern mind, at least, craves the objective, if there is a desire at all. Again, Erskine in his anxiety to simplify the Gospel brings himself into some doubtful positions. He speaks of man’s predispositions and aversions to God as painful, but is this form of stating the guilt of man as emphatic as we find it set forth in the revealed word?
Erskine, though a powerful logician, makes more of intuition than of logic; indeed, he seems to feel at times that he trusted too much to intuition. “This view,” he says, “may be bad logic; that may pass with a friend I know it to be true.”
The development of Erskine’s mind and thought can be seen from this fact. In The Essay on Faith, stress is laid on happiness and self-preservation as the means of bringing the heart of man to realize the truth of the divine character as a purifying influence. The Gospel was a message of joy. Sin was failure to reach either true happiness or joy. Sin, therefore, was a painful fact standing between man and God. What of man’s guilt and what of the measure of man, repentance? [Later] through the stress and strain of experience he saw another element deeper than happiness. This was sacrifice.
Erskine is emphatic in regard to conscience and in this is he on as sure ground as the reformers on personal faith or a personal Saviour—Jesus Christ?
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