The Marrow Controversy—If you know nothing about this, I encourage you to study this portion of church history. Here is just a bit to wet your appetite:
The neonomians were orthodox Calvinists, but theirs was a reformed orthodoxy that was thoroughly lifeless and cold and dead. Boston saw while he agreed with the neonomians in preaching a doctrine of unconditional election, they were also preaching a doctrine of conditional and conditioned grace, and there work was therefore tearing the feet from under the fullness and freeness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Neonomians called the marrow men antinomian.
Marrow men said the neonomians were legalistic.
Neonomians had mastered the pattern by which grace works. Knew the ordo salutis and Westminster Confession inside out. Yet knowing the pattern by which grace works, they had never been mastered by the grace of God in the gospel in their hearts. They were Calvinists with the minds and hearts of natural men as far as these truths were concerned. They were masters of Calvinism who had never been mastered by God’s grace.
In 1718 James Hog reprinted The Marrow of Modern Divinity by Edward Fisher (1645). The short book articulated the same view of free grace that Boston and the Erskines were preaching. In 1720 the General Assembly prohibited recommending the book or advocating it, and said ministers must warn against its use. In 1721 Thomas Boston wrote published an annotated version of Marrow .
The Marrow men were formally rebuked by the church's General Assembly in 1722 but not removed from their ministries.I would have been formally rebuked by the church. Would you have been? Or would you have bowed down to the postion of the Church? Any local body or denominational body or group of godly theologians, can and have been terribly wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment