“Introduction to Thomas Erskine (1788-1870)” can also be read by clicking the “Read Sample” button for The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel: In Three Essays. Annotated Edition on Amazon’s website.
Thomas Erskine of Linlathen has been described as “possibly the most theologically astute layperson to write theology in the 19th century.”1 Although largely forgotten today, historians have deemed him to have been the central figure in the Scottish theological awakening that occurred between 1820 and 1830,2 and along with Englishman Samuel Taylor Coleridge to have been one of the two most “instrumental in the regeneration of British theology in the nineteenth century.”3
His first biographer, Henry Henderson, said that as a thinker as well as a personal force, he was an “extraordinary phenomenon” especially coming as he did from “the stiff Calvinistic soil of Scotland.”4 In Henderson’s view (and in the view of successive biographers), Erskine’s influence as a teacher of spiritual Christianity, meaning a Christianity that is lived, has been “great, greater than he has ever received credit for.”5
To Henderson’s mind, if anyone were to judge Erskine’s influence by the extent to which his thoughts had entered the mind of the age and had become enlisted among the ruling ideas of the world, Erskine’s influence would be unmistakable. He said,
If we single out any one of his favorite topics in the department of Ethics or Theology, the peculiar treatment of which appeared so revolutionary at the period of its first publication, it may be confidently asserted that there are few teachers of the present day exercising religious influence over their fellowmen who are not indebted to him. His influence has been great and helpful even on those matters on which, in the opinion of many, the conclusions which Erskine reached were rash and unwarranted.6
Henderson did not explain what those conclusions were that so many considered “rash and unwarranted.” We, on the other hand, will take a moment to investigate because they will serve to introduce Erskine’s story and at the same time elicit comments on one of Erskine’s key themes. Afterwards, we will return to those ideas that had, as Henderson put it, entered “the mind of the age.”
When Thomas Erskine wrote The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel, he was already a well-known and celebrated author. His first book, Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion, written in 1820, had been well received in his Scottish homeland as an exceptionally fine work of Christian apologetics.7 In the language of our day, it was a runaway best seller. Sales of the book were unprecedented. In the first ten years, it went through nine editions and was eagerly read in both England and America as well as on the European continent when it was later published in French (1822) and German (1825).8
His second book, An Essay on Faith (1822), was also well received and only served to further enhance Erskine’s reputation as an innovative thinker and theologian. While it never reached quite as wide a circulation as his first, it too went through multiple editions and was translated into French.9
But when Unconditional Freeness was published in 1828, there was a marked change in the public’s reception of Erskine’s books. Some like Thomas Chalmers,10 a leader of the Church of Scotland and a friend of Erskine’s, found it to be a “most delightful book,”11 but others like Andrew Thomson,12 founder and editor of the influential Edinburgh Christian Instructor, panned it.
While Thomson did appreciate Erskine’s “deep piety and devoted attention to the cause of pure and undefiled Christianity,” he objected to the way that Erskine gave new meanings to old terms, important and elementary terms, such as salvation, justification, heaven and hell, and eternal life. These new meanings were in his opinion “fanciful, unwarrantable, and dangerous innovations.”13 What Thomson considered dangerous innovations, however, would be seen by others as helpful and welcomed attempts to pioneer new ways forward in a system of theology that had become stale, stagnate, and largely irrelevant to the personal lives of many everyday people.
Erskine did not discount the theological work of those who had gone before, but he contended that that work was not finished with the Westminster Confession.14 In a letter to Thomas Chalmers, Erskine wrote, “Surely the Westminster divines did not exhaust the Bible; and if they had the Spirit, surely the divines of our day are not excluded from the Spirit, and if so, they ought to thank God for what light was seen before and press on the further light in the strength of the Spirit.”15 One of those “dangerous innovations” was Erskine’s thoughts on the meaning of salvation. Erskine argued that if we believe our Savior’s mission to earth was to save men from their sins, then we must also believe that salvation means not salvation from punishment but from sin itself.16 Salvation is what takes place as we grow in sympathy with God and begin to love righteousness and hate evil as He does. It is what happens when we die to self and live to God. It is the truth of God abiding richly and effectively in the soul. And above all, salvation means a growing personal acquaintance with God in the here and now as attested by Jesus when he prayed shortly before his crucifixion, “[T]his is eternal life, that they may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3).17
All of this was quite different and more than a bit troubling for those used to viewing salvation from the other end of the telescope. For most, salvation was not about the present or about sanctification. It was about the future. Salvation was the reward that the faithful would receive after they died and “went to heaven.” The faithful were, as understood in Calvinistic Scotland, an exclusive group. They were the elect—those of mankind chosen by God from before the foundation of the world and predestined to eternal life.18 Only the elect were the recipients of God’s saving grace.19 Everyone else was destined (or predestined) to damnation.
From the mid-1600s on, the Westminster Shorter Catechism had been the staple of instruction for all Scottish children which meant its teachings were almost indelibly etched into the minds of anyone growing up in Scotland. To the question, “What does every sin deserve?”, it replied, “Every sin deserveth God’s wrath and curse, both in this life, and that which is to come.” Questions and Answers 19-21 outlined the idea that because of the Fall, every human being was destined for the eternal torments of hell, that is, unless they had a Redeemer, but Jesus Christ was not everyone’s Redeemer. He was only the Redeemer of the elect.
All mankind by their fall lost communion with God, are under his wrath and curse, and so made liable to all miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell for ever. God having, out of his mere good pleasure, from all eternity, elected some to everlasting life, did enter into a covenant of grace, to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery, and to bring them into an estate of salvation by a Redeemer. The only Redeemer of God’s elect is the Lord Jesus Christ.
The official teaching of the Church of Scotland was that Jesus was not the Savior of all people because not everyone had been called to salvation.20 From the pulpit and in writing, the ministers of the Church roundly denied that there was in God a love for all men.21 God loved some and withheld his love from others based not on anything they had done or ever would do but entirely on the good pleasure of His will, a will represented by the Confession of Faith as simply an arbitrary will.
To Thomas Erskine, this was a very dark view of God’s character and of His disposition towards humanity, and it was not at all like the God Erskine found revealed in Jesus or in all the Bible for that matter. He wrote,
Throughout even the Old Testament, God is more constantly presented to us as a Father than in any other character, and in the New, our Lord speaks of it as the chief purpose of His appearance in the world, to reveal His Father as the Father of the whole human race. In both, frequent appeals are made to our sense of the love and desires and obligations of an earthly parent towards his children in order to impress on us the nature of the relation in which God stands to each one of us, and very frequently, these appeals are accompanied with the assurance that the love of the human parent is but a faint reflection of the love of the Heavenly Father. What can be more touching than the appeal in the prophet Isaiah? “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will not I forget thee.”22 The parallel passage in the New Testament is this: “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give!”23
The question Erskine leaves hanging is this. If God is more loving than any earthly father, what grounds do we have to believe He would withhold any of His gifts (grace, mercy, peace, love, and forgiveness) from any of His children? The answer is none.
In the Scriptures, God has declared his love for all people without exception. Erskine wrote in Unconditional Freeness, “God so loved the world, (the whole world—all the race of Adam,) as to give His only begotten Son for them.”24 That meant that the Father’s love was universal, and that God was not just a father to some but the Father of all.
Throughout the 17th century and continuing into the 18th, the sovereignty of God dominated religious thought in Scotland. “The Lord reigneth” was the central idea that pervaded the whole of the Scottish theological system. God was the supreme King. He was our King and Lawgiver, and we are His subjects. Our relationship to God was understood as being primarily governmental, and as church historian R. H. Story speaking before the Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1903 put it, “The Fatherhood of God was ignored. The Fatherly love was never spoken of; it might not exist for all that was found in the theological system of the Confession of Faith”.25
Erskine wrote, “Jesus came preaching peace by declaring his Father to be the common Father of men, prodigals and all.”26 “He came to seek and save the lost, by declaring to them the Father’s heart, and as soon as they know that heart, they are glad. They rejoice in salvation, but whilst they continue ignorant of God’s heart, they continue to be without eternal life in them. . .. God’s heart is a heart of forgiving love to us before we believe, but we cannot enjoy God, which is full salvation, without knowing or believing what His heart is to us.”27
For Erskine, there was nothing that revealed the Father’s heart towards all humankind more than the fact that He gave His Son to be the “propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.”28 Christ did not die so that God might be induced to love us. He died because God did love us. His sacrifice on the cross was the outcome, and not the cause of God’s love for humanity, and the very fact that Christ died for and on behalf of all sinners means that all sinners are pardoned—all are forgiven. “The pardon of the gospel then is in effect a declaration on the part of God to every individual sinner in the whole world that His holy compassion embraces him, and that the blood of Jesus Christ has atoned for his sins.”29
Lest there be any misunderstanding, Erskine wanted to make it clear that pardon was not to be confused with salvation. Pardon only opens the door to God and invites sinners in. Unless a sinner knows that he or she is forgiven and returns to God and begins walking with Him, God’s love and forgiveness are to them useless. “The love of God abiding in the heart and governing the will of the creature is its salvation—there is no other salvation than this, and therefore while the pardon that is the proclamation of God’s love remains on the outside of the heart, while it does not enter in, it produces no salvation. . .. The pardon remains always the same—the access always remains open. The invitation is always urgent, but those who do not come in are not transformed.”30
The gospel to Erskine was the good news that all are included in God’s universal love. God’s grace, love, and forgiveness are free to all, and the unconditional freeness of the gospel ought to be preached to every soul under the sun. The truth of the gospel is that God is for us. He has always been for us, and there has never been a time when He was not for us even in our worst state. God does not love us or pardon us on account of anything we have done or believed. “[F]or it was while we were yet enemies and unbelievers that Christ died for us, but the belief of his love and of the gift that his love has bestowed will give a confidence that we are dearly welcome to him—that we are his accepted ones—his adopted children.”31 He says to every individual, “You are my child. I love you, and I don’t want to lose you.”
As one biographer put it, the message of the gospel according to Erskine was not “if you repent and believe God will love and forgive you”, but precisely “God already loves you and has forgiven you, therefore repent and believe.”32
Already we have heard Erskine express his views on several of his favorite topics—the universal Fatherhood of God, the universal Atonement of Christ, the freeness of the gospel, and the assurance that no matter who we are, we are loved by God—all views that when he first presented them were vociferously denounced as dangerous, unwarranted, and heretical, and yet these are the same views that Henderson, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, could say had become enlisted among the ruling ideas of the Christian world.
All these themes are commonplace in Christian thought today. Erskine’s great theme of the Fatherhood of God has become practically the viewpoint of modern theology.33 Yet as Erskine scholar Don Horrocks notes, “Erskine’s pioneering initiative in seeking constructively to redress the theological balance [between God’s sovereignty and God’s Fatherhood] was initially without contemporary precedent in Scotland.”34
There had already been hints of unrest among the rank and file of the Church of Scotland as underscored by the Marrow controversy of the early 1700s. The “Marrowmen”35 had contended that Christ had died for all and that God, moved by His universal love, had made the gift of Christ the Savior available to all.36 But in 1720, the General Assembly of the Church determined that these ideas were inconsistent with the Confession of Faith and roundly condemned them despite the fact that it could be and was argued that the propositions the Assembly had condemned were both scriptural and plainly taught by many orthodox Scottish divines.37
A hundred years later brings us to Erskine’s time when once again there was an undercurrent of unrest though of a different sort. Historian R. H. Story described it as having to do with a “deepening spiritual consciousness,” which the religion of the land was unable to satisfy, a spiritual consciousness that “could not accept as a veracious theory of Atonement one which excluded from its scope the vast majority of human beings.” He said that people were looking for a “more direct and personal application of the Gospel than the ordinary preaching commonly offered, and . . . an exposition of the Atonement which should evolve a deeper moral and spiritual meaning than that of the ordinary doctrine.” Story concluded by saying, “The earliest, and in some respects the most deeply spiritual and original representative of this unrest and wider outlook was a layman, Thomas Erskine of Linlathen” who along with his friend and fellow-laborer, John McLeod Campbell, were “the pioneers of the movement, which has ultimately broken the gloomy dominion of the theology that had been so cramped in its growth by the shackles of Westminster that its continued influence would have, sooner or later, extinguished the spiritual and intellectual liberty without which an apostolic ministry becomes impossible.”38
At this point, I need to stop and explain the connection between Thomas Erskine and John McLeod Campbell. It is nearly impossible to tell either man’s story without mentioning the other. The two will forever be linked in the annals of Scottish church history.
Campbell was the young pastor of the Parish of Row39. In later years, he would recount how “working apart and without any interchange of thought,” he had arrived at the same conclusions as Thomas Erskine.40 The difference was, unlike Erskine, Campbell was a member of the clergy and answerable to the Church of Scotland for what he believed and taught.
Campbell’s own thoughts on God’s unconditional, forgiving love for sinners and the assurance of faith had developed out of a pastoral concern for his parishioners. In Row, he found a people who did not doubt Christ’s power and willingness to save, nor did they doubt the freeness of the gospel, yet they lacked the peace and assurance that comes from knowing and believing that they themselves were the object of God’s love.
This lack of assurance of God’s love for every individual should not have been totally unexpected. The Westminster Confession taught that God’s love and forgiveness were only available to those who already had faith, and the only way of knowing whether one had faith was retrospectively by discovering the “evidences” or “fruits of the spirit” in one’s own life—something that the Confessionsaid could be a long and difficult thing to do.41
Campbell, as the new pastor of Row, soon saw as his chief task that of helping his parishioners move past this barrier of spiritual introspection that they had erected between themselves and trusting Christ and “to fix their attention on the love of God revealed in Christ, and to get themselves into the mental attitude of looking at God to learn His feelings towards them, not at themselves to consider their feelings towards Him.”42
It was a great disappointment to Campbell that the gospel message that Christ’s death revealed God’s saving love for all men was not as readily accepted by his flock as he had hoped. Instead of producing a joyful confidence in Christ, many found it difficult to accept the idea that God’s grace and love were free to all and were not conditioned on any goodness on their own part.
Campbell’s troubles with the Church began in 1827 when some summer visitors to Row returned south to Glasgow and reported what they had heard him preach. As the result of the attention and excitement generated by these reports, a paper was read in support of the traditional doctrine of assurance by “evidences” at Glasgow’s theological society. Campbell was present and was invited to respond, which he did hoping that those hearing him speak would meditate on what he was able to say.43[1]
What happened next shows that Campbell was still a bit naïve about how difficult it is to change men’s minds, especially in matters of doctrinal belief. Soon after the theological society’s paper was read, Campbell had the occasion to give a public sermon before one of the charitable institutions of Glasgow with most of Glasgow’s ministers in attendance. Campbell took it as an opportunity to explicate the practical importance of the assurance of faith.
The result was almost predictable. Campbell had hoped that his explanation would remove prejudices and commend men to the truth, but he said that they, on the other hand, “had calculated on my being changed by what had come from them, and in consequence were much offended to hear me so shortly after state so fully what they had condemned.”44
The growing opposition to Campbell’s teaching on assurance only drove him deeper into the Scriptures. He wrote,
The controversy in which I was constantly engaged in almost all my intercourse with my brethren urged me to examine narrowly the foundation furnished by the communications made in the Gospel for Assurance of Faith. This led directly to the closer consideration of the extent of the Atonement, and the circumstances in which mankind had been placed by the shedding of the blood of Christ; and it soon appeared to me manifest that unless Christ had died for all and unless the Gospel announced Him as the gift of God to every human being, so that there remained nothing to be done to give the individual a title to rejoice in Christ as his own Saviour, there was no foundation in the record of God for the Assurance which I demanded, and which I saw to be essential to true holiness. The next step therefore was my teaching as the subject matter of the Gospel, Universal Atonement and Pardon through the blood of Christ.45
In the winter of 1828, Campbell was invited to deliver a sermon in Edinburgh at which time Thomas Erskine was in attendance. After the sermon, Erskine is reported to have said to the person next to him, “I have heard today from that pulpit what I believe to be the true gospel.”46 This fortuitous meeting between the two was to become the start of a life-long friendship, and in retrospect, it may well be seen as God’s encouraging hand on the lives of two men who were about to face together some of the most trying times of their lives and that for what they both firmly believed to be the true gospel.
In January of 1830, Campbell wrote to his sister in India that the seasonal visitors to Row had gone away “rejoicing in the Lord” and had returned home “spreading the good news” that they had heard him preach. The reaction was by this time something that Campbell had come to expect: the pulpits of Edinburgh and Glasgow were alive with sermons against what was now being called the “Row heresy.”47
In March, eight parishioners of Row were persuaded to make a formal charge of heresy against their pastor to the Presbytery. This resulted in an official delegation arriving in July to hear Campbell preach. By September, his case had been heard by the Presbytery and the libel (indictment) proven “relevant.”48 At which point, Campbell’s only option apart from immediately leaving the ministry was to appeal his case to the Synod of Glasgow and Ayr.
On April 13th of 1831, Campbell’s case came before the Synod. The charge against him was that he held and repeatedly promulgated “contrary to the Holy Scriptures and the Confession of Faith approven by the General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland” the “doctrine of universal atonement and pardon through the grace of Christ” and also “the doctrine that assurance is one of the essence of faith and necessary to salvation.” The indictment continued, “[Y]ou have declared that God has forgiven the sins of all mankind whether they believe it or not: That in consequence of the death of Christ, the sins of every individual of the human race are forgiven; That it is sinful and absurd to pray for an interest in Christ, because all mankind have an interest in Christ already: And that no man is a Christian unless he is positively assured of his salvation.”49 For those closely following the proceedings, the similarity between Campbell’s ideas and Erskine’s was unmistakable, so much so, that in the minds of many, Thomas Erskine was the true source of the “Row heresy.” Campbell was the clergyman on trial, but from the pulpit and in the press, through pamphlets, articles, and books, it was Thomas Erskine who was the target of much of the Scottish religious world’s wrath. So, when on Wednesday, the 25th of May 1831, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland deposed John McLeod Campbell, Minister of the Gospel at Row, it was as much a judgment against Erskine as it was Campbell.
Both men had been accused of teaching contrary to the Scriptures, but it is worth noting that at his trial, Campbell had requested that he be judged by the light of Scripture and Scripture alone. In response he was told that the “Standards of the Church” meaning the Westminster Confession would be the only basis on which his case would be argued. “Any detailed reference to the Scriptures” was “altogether unnecessary.”50
Campbell’s carefully worded reaction to this decision is worth repeating:
If you show me that anything I have taught is inconsistent with the Word of God, I shall give it up, and allow you to regard it as a heresy. . . . If a Confession of Faith were something to stint or stop the Church’s growth in light and knowledge and to say, “Thus far shalt thou go and no further,” then a Confession of Faith would be the greatest curse that ever befell a church. Therefore, I distinctly hold that no minister treats the Confession of Faith right if he does not come with it, as a party, to the Word of God, and to acknowledge no other tribunal in matters of heresy than the Word of God. In matters of doctrine no lower authority can be recognized than that of God.51
The Church of Scotland could silence its own clergy by depriving them of a license to preach, but Thomas Erskine was not a member of the clergy, and neither was he dependent on any one for his livelihood. He had inherited the family estate of Linlathen in 1816, making him financially independent. So as one writer for the Spectator noted, it “rendered it a matter of no consequence to his outward comfort whether society accepted or condemned his utterances, and so far as the moral courage is concerned of deliberately encountering the prejudices of a whole nation, Erskine showed that he possessed it.”52
Three more books from Erskine followed The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel. The Brazen Serpent: Or, Life Coming Through Death was published in 1831, the same year as Campbell’s deposition. It was followed by The Doctrine of Election in 1837.
Erskine’s last book, The Spiritual Order and Other Papers, was unfinished when he died, but he had left instructions for this contingency. All the papers that he had ready were to be set in order and sent to the publisher as is. This final book was published in 1871.
Erskine also left specific instructions that an excerpt from The Spiritual Order be published separately as a pamphlet immediately on his death. This was done as he requested, and the pamphlet titled “The Purpose of God in the Creation of Man” was printed and distributed in 1870.
I believe the significance of this final piece has too often been overlooked. First, as Erskine’s final request, it tells us what he considered to be most important, and secondly, it means that Erskine had come full circle and was ending where his theological journey had begun.
Erskine was around 17 years old when he read the essays of evangelical Baptist minister, John Foster (1770–1843). It was from Foster that Erskine first heard that God is a loving Father and that the purpose of His love is to educate us as His children—to train us in His own righteous character, and thus to make us sharers in His own blessedness.53 Erskine’s reaction to this new understanding was that if life was given for the education of character, then it was a serious matter indeed. It meant that life was the seed-time for eternity and that the purpose of God towards men is not probation as Erskine once believed, but an educative process which manifests the unchangeable character of God rather than a particular act.54[2] Foster also taught him the need for a deep personal dependence on this loving Father because it was only by continually looking to God for help that we can ever succeed in becoming what He wants us to be.55
From this beginning with Foster, it is not hard to see how it soon came to Erskine that there are two views of human life—two views that he said are in principle opposed to each other and lead to opposing conceptions of the character of God and of the relation in which we stand to Him.56 The one view supposes that God made men so that He afterwards may judge them. The other holds that He judges them so that He may teach them, and that His judgments are instructions.57
The first view, Erskine said, holds that we are here in a state of probation—under trial as it were. But that is simply wrong. We are not in a state of trial. We are in a process of education directed by that eternal purpose of love which brought us into being. He went on,
It is impossible to have a true confidence in God whilst we feel ourselves in a state of trial: we must necessarily regard him not as a Father but as a Judge, and we must be occupied with the thought how we are to pass our trial. We know our own unworthiness, and though we know that we have a Savior, there must still be a degree of alarm in the thought of that judgment seat. But when we have once realized the idea that we are in a process of education, which God will carry on to its fulfilment however long it may take, we feel that the loving purpose of our Father is ever resting on us, and that the events of life are not appointed as testing us whether we will choose God’s will or our own, but real lessons to train us into making the right choice. If probation is our thought, then forgiveness or receiving a favorable sentence is our object; if education is our thought, then progress in holiness is our object. If I believe myself in a state of education, every event, even death itself, becomes a manifestation of God’s eternal purpose. On the probation system, Christ appears as the deliverer from a condemnation; on the education system, He appears as the deliverer from sin itself.”58
If there was one thing that Thomas Erskine would want to leave with his readers, I believe it would be what you have just read. Life is not a probation but an education. For Erskine, this principle of education is what lies at the very heart of the gospel because it is what expresses God’s loving purpose for creating humanity. As Erskine put it, “I believe that God created man that He might instruct him into a conformity with His own character, and so make him a partner of His own life, the eternal life, which is His will or character.”59
- Young, “Thomas Erskine,” lines 107–8. ↩︎
- Drummond and Bulloch, The Scottish Church 194, 199; Storr, Development of English Theology 353; Story Apostolic Ministry, 306-8. ↩︎
- Franks, History, vol. II, 379. ↩︎
- Henderson, Erskine, ix. ↩︎
- Henderson, Erskine, 132. ↩︎
- Henderson, Erskine, 125-6. ↩︎
- Needham, Thomas Erskine, 55. ↩︎
- Reid, Influence, 11, 193, 282; Hanna, Letters, 576-77. ↩︎
- Winslow, Thomas Erskine, 9. ↩︎
- Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) was a Scottish minister, professor of theology, and a leader of both the Church of Scotland and of the Free Church of Scotland. He has been called “Scotland’s greatest nineteenth-century churchman.” ↩︎
- Needham, Thomas Erskine, 195. ↩︎
- Andrew Mitchell Thomson (1779–1831) was the pastor of St. George’s Church, Edinburgh, and leader of the evangelical party in the Church of Scotland. ↩︎
- Winslow, Thomas Erskine, 18–19. ↩︎
- The Westminster Confession, also known as the Confession of Faith, was a document draw up in 1647 and held to be the standard of orthodoxy by almost all Scottish churches in Erskine’s day. ↩︎
- Winslow, Thomas Erskine, 46–47. ↩︎
- Erskine, Spiritual Order, 243. ↩︎
- Winslow, Thomas Erskine, 1–2. ↩︎
- Westminster Confession, Ch. 3, para. 5. ↩︎
- “Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the elect only” (Westminster Confession of Faith, Ch. 3, para. 6). ↩︎
- Westminster Confession, Chapter 10, paragraph 1. ↩︎
- Needham, Thomas Erskine, 5–6. ↩︎
- Isaiah 49:15. ↩︎
- Hanna, Letters, 425. ↩︎
- Erskine, Unconditional Freeness, (1828 edition), 44. ↩︎
- Reid, Influence, 190. ↩︎
- Erskine, Doctrine of Election, 569. ↩︎
- Letter to Monsieur Gaussen, 7 December 1832, Letters, 191. ↩︎
- 1 John 2:2. ↩︎
- Erskine, Unconditional Freeness, (1828 text),44. ↩︎
- Erskine, Unconditional Freeness,44. ↩︎
- Erskine, Unconditional Freeness, 1828 edition, 120. ↩︎
- Hart, Teaching Father, 27. ↩︎
- Horrocks, Laws of the Sp. Order, 43-44. ↩︎
- Horrocks, Laws of the Sp. Order, 27–28. ↩︎
- The Marrowmen were Scottish divines [theologians] who had read and agreed with Englishman Edward Fisher’s 1645 book titled The Marrow of Modern Divinity. ↩︎
- Needham, Thomas Erskine, 472. ↩︎
- See Wikipedia article the “Marrow Controversy.” ↩︎
- Story, Apostolic Ministry, 307–8. ↩︎
- Row, now spelled Rhu, was a village in the county of Dunbartonshire, Scotland, 24 miles north-west of Glasgow and 62 miles almost due west of Edinburgh. ↩︎
- Horrocks, Laws of the Sp. Order, 14. ↩︎
- Horrocks, Laws of the Sp. Order, 99–100. ↩︎
- Needham, Thomas Erskine, 469. ↩︎
- Campbell, Reminiscences, 20. ↩︎
- Campbell, Reminiscences, 20–21. ↩︎
- Campbell, Reminiscences, 24. ↩︎
- Hart, Teaching Father, 29. ↩︎
- Campbell, Reminiscences, 31–32. ↩︎
- Winslow, Thomas Erskine, 34. ↩︎
- Winslow, Thomas Erskine, 34. ↩︎
- Hart, Teaching Father, 34. ↩︎
- Reardon, Religious Thought, 299–300. ↩︎
- Horrocks, Laws of the Sp. Order, 4. ↩︎
- Keyser, “A Critical Analysis”, 14. ↩︎
- Erskine, Letters, 278–79; Reid, Influence, 245. ↩︎
- Keyser, “A Critical Analysis”, 14. ↩︎
- Erskine, “Purpose of God”, 6. ↩︎
- Erskine, Letters, 393. ↩︎
- Erskine, Letters, 128–29. ↩︎
- Erskine, Letters, 393. ↩︎