Rev. Donald Beaton
This article completes the section on particular redemption in Mr Beaton’s book, The Reformed Faith, and is continued from the last issue.
(D) The Double Reference Theory. In the early part of the eighteenth century the Church of Scotland was agitated by what was known as the Marrow Controversy. It arose through the publication of a Scottish edition of Edward Fisher’s Marrow of Modern Divinity in 1718. It contains such expressions as God the Father “hath made a deed of gift and grant to them all [ie sinners], that whosoever of them shall believe on His Son shall not perish, but have eternal life.” Another expression was: “Christ is dead for him [ie the sinner], and if he will take and accept His righteousness, he shall have Him.” That these expressions are liable to be misunderstood is evident from the charges brought against the Marrowmen – Thomas Boston, Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine, etc. – by their opponents, and by the explanations offered by the Marrowmen as to what they understood them to mean. They were charged with holding a universal doctrine of Christ’s satisfaction, and for this and other alleged errors they were condemned wrongly, we believe, by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
We cannot enter more fully into the position taken up by the Marrowmen here on the extent of redemption, except to say that they were thoroughly Calvinistic on this doctrine, and strongly opposed to the Arminian and Amyraldian heresies. In fact, what has been described by Dr Smeaton as “perhaps the best refutation which is to be found in English of Amyraldism, or of the double satisfaction, the one effectual and the other ineffectual, is in the
12 The Herald 24/2/96.
4 See the [author’s] paper in Scottish Church History Records, vol 1, pp 127-131.
Rev Adam Gib’s Display of the Secession Testimony, vol. 2, pp 131-190 and pp 273-298″.5 Adam Gib was a devoted follower of the Marrowmen and was one of the ablest defenders of their theology, and the Church to which he belonged was a strong supporter of the Marrow theology.
While this was the position of the Secession Church at its beginning, as time went on the Marrow theology on the extent of the atonement drifted into what was known in the Scottish Secession Churches as the Double Reference Theory of the Atonement. This gave rise to the Atonement Controversy which was waged with considerable heat during a number of years.
We have already seen that Amyraldian views had been vented in the Secession and Reformed Presbyterian Churches.6 The General Associate Synod (Anti-Burgher Secession Church) passed an “Act concerning Arminian Errors”, in which these views were condemned. The Rev Thomas Mair, one of their ministers, objected to the Act, and after being repeatedly dealt with by the Synod, was deposed in 1757, as has already been stated. The whole subject will be found treated in the Rev Adam Gib’s Display of the Secession Testimony and in the Rev Andrew Robertson’s History of the Atonement Controversy in the Secession Church. This leads on now to what was known as the Double Reference Controversy.
In 1845, at the United Secession Synod some reference was made to the views held by Professors Brown and Balmer. Both were theological professors in the United Secession Church. Brown stood by his colleague and stated his position thus when before the Synod: “In the sense of the great body of Calvinists that Christ died to remove obstacles in the way of human salvation by making perfect satisfaction for sin, I hold that He died for all men”. Balmer, in a preface to a reprint of Polhill’s On the Extent of the Death of Christ7 says: “Twelve years ago the supreme court of the United Secession Church passed an Act condemning the doctrine of a universal atonement and forbidding the use of the phrase. But how great the change effected within the last two years! The doctrine of a general reference to the death of Christ has been officially recognised; such a reference as necessarily implies a universal atonement.”
This Double Reference view was one of the objections advanced by those
5 Smeaton, Our Lord’s Doctrine of the Atonement, second edition, p472.
6 In addition to reference study already made to the controversy in the Reformed Presbyterian Churches. see Rev W J Couper’s paper, “A Breach in the Reformed Presbytery, 1753”, in Scottish Church History Records, vol 1, pp 1-28.
7 An Amyraldian work.
in the Free Church who opposed union with the United Presbyterian Church.1 The whole subject may be studied at greater length in Robertson’s work, to which reference has already been made. It is necessary to point out, however, that the account there given in so far as it is an attempt to father on the Marrowmen the views of Brown and Balmer is misleading. It is probably owing to this that Dr A A Hodge in his Outlines of Theology (new edition, p 417) and also in a certain reference in his Atonement (p 352) makes the views of the Marrowmen and the United Secession professors similar. This is a mistake not confined to Dr Hodge.
(E) Cosmic or Eschatological Universalism. Professor Warfield states this view as follows: “When the Scriptures say that Christ came to save the world, that He does save the world, and that the world shall be saved by Him, they do not mean that there is no human being whom He did not come to save, whom He does not save, who is not saved by Him. They mean that He came to save and does save the human race; and that the human race is being led by God into a racial salvation; that in the age-long development of the race of men it will attain at last to a complete salvation, and our eyes will be greeted with the glorious spectacle of a saved world. Thus the human race attains the goal for which it was created, and sin does not snatch it out of God’s hands, the primal purpose of God with it is fulfilled; and through Christ the race of man, though fallen into sin, is recovered to God and fulfils its original destiny” (Plan of Salvation, pp 131-132).
Dr Warfield sees in this a parallel of what takes place in the sanctification of the individual which is not completed in the day of effectual calling. This eschatological universalism, maintained today by Professor L Boettner, is very different from the universalism of Arminius, the hypothetical universalism of Amyrald, or the restorationism set forth by Professors Hastie and W P Paterson in recent times. Dr Warfield does not suggest that no souls are lost in the course of the long process through which the world advances to its salvation, or that all men are saved without exception. There are, however, difficulties created by this view which we cannot discuss here, and we prefer the older and, in our estimation, the more satisfactory explanations that have been usually given by Calvinistic theologians of the universalistic texts of Scripture.2
1 The Church formed by the union of the United Secession and Relief Churches in 1847.
2 Some of these texts, especially those which occur in the Pauline writings, can be explained on the ground that the catholicity of God’s salvation is set over against the national particularistic ideas of