Abstract:
In this preface, Thomas Erskine explains his purpose and method in writing The Doctrine of Election, acknowledging its imperfections while arguing that true understanding of biblical doctrines—especially Election—must harmonize Scripture with the human conscience rather than rest on blind submission to authority. The author maintains that God’s revelation appeals to an inner moral sense capable of discerning righteousness, and that faith involves perceiving and embracing truth as righteous, not merely accepting it as commanded. Throughout, he emphasizes that doctrines such as Election, Atonement, and justification by faith must be understood both objectively in Christ and subjectively in personal moral experience, insisting that Scripture rightly instructs only when it awakens, educates, and confirms the conscience in the love of righteousness.
Preface
I did not intend to put a Preface to this Work, but, now that it is finished, I find so many things in it which stand in need of the reader’s indulgence that I think it well, at the entrance, to warn him of them and to bespeak his patience.
The first half of the book was written under the disadvantage of frequent interruptions, which I am sensible have very often broken the thread of thought and interest, and with regard to the entire work, it has happened, chiefly I confess, from my own fault that every sheet was printed as soon as it was written so that I never saw it nor could judge of it as a whole until the last sheet came from the press. From these causes have proceeded defects in the arrangement and frequent repetitions, besides other faults which are now beyond the reach of correction and which I feel must hang a drag on many parts of the book.
Nevertheless, I am not without hope that the reader who is interested in the subject will find in the book that which will repay him for the trouble of going through it. Not that he will meet with any deep thinking in it or any striking speculations, for I have throughout kept the place of a commentator or expositor confining myself entirely within the range of the written word and human consciousness and scarcely attempting to touch the meta physical questions relating to Free Will and Necessity, but I think he will find in it a satisfactory view of what is meant by Election in the Bible and satisfactory proof that the passages in the Bible on which the commonly received doctrine of that name rest do indeed teach something very different. He will also find that though I have treated the subject simply as a Scriptural one, yet in doing so, I have never forgotten that the Scriptures were given, not to supersede or stand in place of the rational conscience, but to awaken and enlighten it, and consequently that no conviction as to their meaning ought to be considered as rightly arrived at unless confirmed and sealed by the consent of the conscience, that is, unless such conviction be of the nature of a perception of truth and not a mere submission to authority and that therefore I have submission to authority and that therefore I have always felt it incumbent on me to explain the views which I bring from Scripture in the light of the rational conscience, that is, to show the relation which they bear to it.
I have entered largely into the subject of Conscience and the adaptation of the Scriptures to it and into the consideration of those general and elementary views of the condition of man as a moral and responsible being which the Scriptures either expressly set forth or manifestly assume to be true and which do in fact constitute the basis of all the doctrines which they teach, and I have endeavored to show that it is only when we take our stand upon these views as upon a ’vantage ground that we can truly discern the meaning of many parts of Christian doctrine.
I hope that my reader will see that in thus requiring that what we learn from the Bible should harmonize with the light in our consciences I am not detracting from the true authority of the inspired Book but only putting it in its true place. What that place is is distinctly marked in 2 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture which is given by inspiration of God, is also profitable, for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.” Now it is manifest that, unless in my own conscience I am perceiving the righteousness of the will of God revealed in any doctrine, I cannot be instructed in righteousness by it. For instruction in righteousness must mean here the instruction received in the conscience, that is, the awakening and nourishing within me of the perception and love of righteousness which cannot take place when I am receiving a doctrine in the way of submission to authority without really perceiving the righteousness that is in it.
And besides, I cannot feel satisfied that I have rightly understood what doctrine the inspired writer meant to teach whilst I do not myself perceive righteousness in it—for I cannot believe that anything is really of God but what is righteous—and therefore, whilst I do not see the righteousness of the doctrine, I cannot be sure that I am not putting a wrong interpretation on the inspired text, and at all events, I am not really believing the truth of it—however fully I may be persuaded that there is a truth in it, though I do not see it, which ought to be believed. I am not instructed in righteousness by believing that there is a truth in a doctrine but by acknowledging and closing with the truth which I myself perceive in it.
When a man has once become persuaded that the Bible is divinely inspired, he often seems to think that this persuasion lays him under an obligation no longer to try or judge of the contents of the Book by his conscience but to submit himself to all that he reads there and to receive it implicitly—and thus he learns to put away his conscience and to turn it from the use for which it was given and also to turn the Scriptures from the use for which they were given—and yet, notwithstanding all this, to have the semblance of obeying his conscience which commands him to honor God’s word. But whilst he is in this state, he is lying under a strange delusion for he is mistaking the conviction that he ought to be believing a thing for the actual believing of it. He is mistaking submission to the authority of God for the belief of the truth of God.
The error here arises from an ignorance of God and of his purposes towards us. It arises from regarding God, not as a loving and righteous Father who desires for us that we should become partakers of His love and righteousness by appreciating the excellence of these qualities and loving them and receiving them into our hearts, but as a Sovereign who insists on our absolute submission to His behests, indifferent whether we see and sympathize with His love and righteousness in them or not.
This is to merge the moral attributes of God in His natural attributes of power and sovereignty. It is to say of God that what He does is the rule of righteousness instead of saying that what He does is according to righteousness. And it has also a tendency to lead us on to say that He is more glorified by the manifestation of His power and sovereignty in making the creature what He will, whether good or bad, than by the manifestation of the influence of an apprehension of His love and righteousness on the heart of the creature, which He has made capable of discerning good from evil—in prevailing on it of its own free choice to abandon all other expectations of good and to take Him and His love and His righteousness for its whole desire, and its whole portion.
But this is not the religion which Jesus Christ taught. He did not come preaching the sovereignty of God but preaching His righteousness and declaring Him to be the Father. And moreover, He did not come in His own name, that is, He did not come claiming submission from men on the ground of His own personal and official authority, but He came requiring them to receive His doctrine, on the ground of its intrinsic truth as discerned by their own consciences. He said, “If I speak the truth, why do ye not believe me?” (John 8:46), thus appealing to something of God within their own hearts which could distinguish truth from falsehood and which they were bound to consult in judging of the things which He said to them. And thus, it appears that the authority on which the gospel is to rest is the authority of truth recognized and felt in the conscience and not any outward authority however purporting to be of God and that those who do rest it on an outward authority are really subverting its principles by so doing.
I do not mean that a man is to sit down to the Bible in the spirit of a judge rather than of a disciple, but I mean that the true discipleship consists, not in a blind submission to authority, but in the discernment and love of the truth, not in subjecting the conscience to a revelation which it does not understand, but in educating and feeding the conscience by the truth apprehended in the revelation.
But if men were called on by Jesus to try what He himself personally taught them by a light within them—we are surely bound to try by the same light the things which have come down to us through the written word. And those who would teach the things which are contained in the written word ought to remember that their teaching is really of no use unless they make them clear to the consciences of the learners, that is, unless they show in the things taught a righteousness of God which the consciences of the learners can apprehend and approve.
It must be evident to everyone that the sole ground on which men can be considered culpable in preferring wrong to right is the assumption that they have something within them by which they can distinguish right from wrong and discern the excellence of what is right and the evil of what is wrong. But we all naturally and necessarily make this assumption and consider those to be culpable who in any circumstances prefer wrong to right. Now truth in morals and in religion is only another name for what is right, and falsehood another name for what is wrong—and thus that inward witness which judges of right and wrong within us is the only real test by which we can judge of truth and falsehood in religion.
That this inward witness is hardly perceptible in the case of some persons and that its judgment is limited to outward actions in the case of others is no objection to the statement here made. For the witness is as a seed sown in the heart of man, and if it is unused, it lies dormant. But still it remains true that it is only by the awakening and the strengthening of this witness that there is any real growth within us, either in morals or religion, and therefore the only real instruction in the Scriptures or the doctrines of religion is that which is addressed to this witness and which thus has a tendency to awaken and exercise it, for thus only is it possible that the Scriptures can be made “profitable for instruction in righteousness.”
If therefore a teacher thinks that he is claiming honor for God’s authority when he refuses to listen to the objections which a learner makes to any view of a doctrine on the ground of conscience, and when he silences all such objections by a mere reference to the written word, he is deceiving himself—for that which is the true authority of God in relation to every man is the man’s own perception of righteousness—and the teacher is only then truly claiming honour for God when he brings the doctrine to meet that perception.
I am not arguing for the right of private judgment—I am arguing for the right of conscience, that is, for the right which my conscience has over me. I am not arguing for my right to say to another man my judgment is as good as yours, but I am arguing that neither he nor I can have a right to think that we are honoring God by our faith whilst our conscience is not going along with the thing believed.
When I meet with anything in the Bible to which my conscience does not consent, I feel persuaded that I don’t understand the meaning of it—for my confidence that it comes from God assures me that if I understood it aright, I should perceive its righteousness. Whilst I remain in this condition, however, I am conscious that I am not believing the thing, “for with the heart man believeth unto righteousness,” and I am certain that I cannot believe anything truly unto righteousness unless I perceive righteousness in it—I am therefore conscious that I am not believing in it and that I am only bowing to it. But I do not willingly rest in this condition. I examine the passages on which the doctrine in question rests—I consider whether the meaning which I have been attributing to them is the true meaning—I consult translations and commentaries, not with the view of taking any of them as a guide, but that I may see whether I can find in any of them an interpretation which will at the same time satisfy my conscience and agree with the language and harmonize with the tenor of the discourse. We ought to require the meeting of all these conditions in an interpretation before we allow ourselves to rest in it, and accordingly, when I have in this work preferred any interpretation of a passage which differs from that which is found in the common version, I have done so on the ground that these conditions meet in it and not in the other.
It may seem to some that such a work as this which consists chiefly of interpretations of passages ought not to have been attempted by anyone who was not well versed in verbal criticism in general and more especially in that of the Scriptures. But besides that the labourers in that department have now brought the whole subject within the reach of very ordinary scholars, I believe that those who are best acquainted with the results of that kind of scholarship will agree with me in thinking that it has already done all or nearly all that it is likely to do and that another kind of instrument is needed in order to draw a true and useful advantage from that which it has established, which instrument seems to me to be no other than a zealous and yet patient demand for consistency and coherence in our interpretations—in respect both of conscience and of logic. Whether I have used this instrument or not, each reader must judge for himself. All that I ask of him on this point is that he will not judge hastily nor give a final judgment until he has finished the book and that he will allow his conscience as well as his reasoning to sit along with him in the judgment.
There is another thing of which I ought here to say something to the reader. Everyone who has studied Christianity as a system not only of righteousness but of wisdom must have perceived that it has a double form throughout inasmuch as God has, in the first place, set forth to us the whole truth, objectively, in Christ and then He calls on us to experience it all, subjectively, in ourselves through the operation of the Spirit of Christ received into our hearts by faith. I am persuaded, also, that many must have felt that the Atonement and the Righteousness of faith are connected in this way—the Atonement being the objective view of the doctrine and the righteousness of faith the subjective—so that the Atonement when experienced by ourselves is the righteousness of faith, and the righteousness of faith when viewed out from ourselves in Christ is the Atonement. Thus to die with Christ or to be partakers of His death, or to have His blood cleansing us from all sin means the same thing as to be justified by faith, or to have the righteousness of faith—and thus also the blood of Christ when taken subjectively or experimentally means the shedding out of the life-blood of man’s will in the Spirit of Christ inasmuch as no one can know the blood of Christ purging his conscience in any other way than by personally shedding out the life-blood of his own will.
From the habit of viewing these two doctrines as thus connected and also from a conviction of the exceeding importance of understanding that the objective view of the doctrine is quite useless when separated from the subjective, I have occasionally in speaking of them used language which I am aware may at first strike the reader as unusual but which I trust he will see the justness and reasonableness of as he advances. I do not mean to confound the two doctrines together but to connect them together as I do not mean to confound the root of a tree with a branch but only to mark their connection when I speak of them as having the same sap circulating through them both, for though I thus speak of them, I do not forget that the sap is originally concocted not by the branch but by the root and that the branch could have no sap at all unless it had a root by which the sap might be prepared and communicated to it.
Now, God in our nature—that is, Christ—is the root of the new sap or eternal life in man without which no man could have been righteous and by the presence of which in our nature, every man may be righteous. This is the root which connects the whole tree of man with God, and heaven as the carnal Adam is the root which connects it with Satan and corruption—for the tree has two roots and two saps and the atonement is just that acting of Christ, the new root, that voluntary dying or shedding out by him of the old sap or corrupt will of man—through which he separated himself and all the branches that would adhere to him altogether and forever from the corruption and condemnation which belonged to and lay upon that old sap—that so they might be filled exclusively with the holy sap, the eternal life, and bear the eternal blessing which rests upon it. But the adherence which the branch gives to him, which is the righteousness of faith, is just a repetition of the same acting by which he, the root, separated himself acceptably to God—namely, a voluntary dying or shedding out of the old sap performed by the branch in the power of the new sap communicated to it from the root and without which it would be incapable of performing it.
This view of these doctrines connects them distinctly with the conscience. We must acknowledge that that corrupt sap or life within us which seeks self-gratification instead of righteousness is indeed the source of all the evils of our condition and deserves the punishment of sorrow and death which God has laid upon it—and we must also acknowledge that the only way of escaping from the bondage of that corrupt life is by getting quit of it or by shedding it out, but this we could not do without another principle of life within us in the strength of which we might do it and yet survive. To bring this principle of life, the eternal life, into the whole race so as to be within the reach of every man was the work of the root, and He effected it by shedding out the life which belongs to the flesh and blood in which he along with the other children of the family partook and to receive this principle of life, thus brought within their reach so that it should become their own life is that cooperation which is required of all men and in which their trial consists and which they can only effect by consenting in like manner to the shedding out of the corrupt life of the flesh in the strength of the new principle.
The root does important things for the tree, but in doing them, it is not a substitute for the tree—nor is its action intended to dispense with the cooperating action of the branches. It commences a process which they are to carry on in the power communicated to them through it. They could not have commenced the process, but the root by commencing it has put it in their power to carry it on. Our Great Root received the sap for us in saying, “Not my will, but thine be done,” that is, by dying to the will of the flesh and consenting to the punishment laid on the flesh—and we can receive it from him to be our life only by following out the same process. And thus, the history of Christ is not only the history of God’s love in calling us to be partakers of His nature and blessedness but is also a model of the way in which alone we can truly receive the unspeakable gift. Hence, I see the oneness of meaning in the three following passages: “If they accept of the punishment of their iniquity, then will I remember my covenant with their fathers” (Lev 26:41, 42). — “The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil; so do stripes the inward parts of the belly” (Prov. 20:30). —And, “The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). The meaning of them all is the same, but the two first passages refer simply and directly to the action of the branch whilst the third refers to the action of the root by which the branch has been made capable of performing its action. The love which gave the root and the spirit communicated through the root are profitable only when they are thus received and used by the branch.
Christ did not suffer to save men from punishment but to save them from sin by enabling them and encouraging them to accept their medicinal punishment that blueness of a wound which cleanseth away evil. See to this effect 2 Corinthians 4:10–18.
In looking over the book since it has been finished, I see that I have not always kept to the same meaning of the word conscience and that I have used it sometimes to signify the Spirit of God in man and sometimes to signify the man’s own apprehension of the mind of the Spirit in him, which is often a very different thing. But though this is a fault in point of accuracy, I do not think that it produces any confusion in the meaning as the context always shows which of these senses is intended. Lastly, I should here account for the Epistle to the Ephesians not having a more distinct place given to it amongst the passages commented on in this Work as connected with the doctrine of Election. The fact is that I had proposed to take it up after going through the Epistle to the Romans but finding that part of the work grow so much beyond what I had intended and anticipating the same result in treating the Epistle to the Ephesians, if I should undertake it, I determined to give it up altogether, rather than to do it in a slight way.
T. E.