# Question from the Marrow Controversy



## sotzo (Dec 2, 2008)

With regard to assurance, did the disagreement between the Marrow Men and the church of Scotland really boil down to the WCF addressing assurance from a subjective POV whereas the Men were addressing it from an objective POV? If that was the case, would both sides acknowledging those different POV's on assurnance have reduced the turmoil between the parties?


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## Marrow Man (Dec 2, 2008)

Joel, I believe you are basically correct in what you have posed. I do believe the issue runs much deeper than this (the nasty beasts of hyper-Calvinism and neonominism playing their part), but the subjective/objective distinction might be a key.

If found this article helpful. Here is pertinent material from it:



> In a section entitled “On Faith,” Ebenezer Erskine wrote, “Its appropriation or assurance. (1.) The ground of this. A particular application is grounded on the word, for faith relates to testimony, believing on a word to be believed.” For Erskine, the testimony of God was the only assurance that one could have of his justification. Erskine wrote in his memoirs: "Because it is charged on us [The Marrow Men] as an error, that we preach assurance to be of the essence of faith, I design to publish the substance of some sermons on that subject from Heb. 10:22; from which I hope it will appear, that our principles on that head are agreeable unto the scriptures of truth and the ancient and modern standards of truth in this church."
> 
> The Marrow Men did not stop fighting for the truth of the gospel. Concerning justification, Thomas Boston wrote, "That there can be no mixing of our own righteousness, in greater or lesser measure, with the righteousness of Christ, in
> our justification…And evident it is, that we cannot pretend to a perfect righteousness of our own, and therefore must go wholly to Christ for one."
> ...


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## sotzo (Dec 2, 2008)

Marrow Man said:


> Joel, I believe you are basically correct in what you have posed. I do believe the issue runs much deeper than this (the nasty beasts of hyper-Calvinism and neonominism playing their part), but the subjective/objective distinction might be a key.
> 
> If found this article helpful. Here is pertinent material from it:
> 
> ...



Sounds like Boston went too far. Where do the Scriptures describe assurance in the sense that no one can go to heaven "in a mist..."? Also, it is not clear what "a fiducial appropriating persuasion" is or how it is different than a subjective faith whose object is objective.


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## Marrow Man (Dec 2, 2008)

The fuller Boston quote is perhaps more helpful:



> [The author] doth not here teach that assurance of faith whereby believers are certainly assured that they are in the state of grace, the which if founded upon the evidence of grace, of which kind of assurance the Westminster Confession expressly treats, chap. 18, art. 1-3; but an assurance which is in faith, in the direct acts thereof, founded upon the word allenary, Mark 16:15-16; John 3:16; and this is nothing else but a fiducial appropriating persuasion.



Elsewhere, in his notes on the MoMD, Boston writes:



> This confidence, persuasion, or whatever other name it may be called by, we take to be the very same with what our Confessions and Catechisms call accepting, receiving, and resting on Christ offered in the Gospel for salvation; and with what polemic and practical divines call ... "fiducial application," "fiducial apprehension," "fiducial adherence," "recumbence," "affiance," "fiducial acquiescence," "appropriating persuation," etc. All which, if duly explained, would issue in a measure of this confidence or persuation we have been speaking of. However, we are fully satisfied this is what our fathers and the body of Protestant divines, speaking with the Scriptures, called "the assurance of the faith."



It would be more helpful to read his notes from the MoMD (if you haven't done so already) by going here and jumping to around p. 99. He treats the issue of assurance in a particular and technical way that I cannot reproduce adequately here.

This page contains a summary of Boston concerning the Marrow Controversy, including this statement:



> That in justifying faith, there is a real persuasion in the heart of the sinner, that Christ is his; and that he shall have life and salvation by him, and that whatever Christ did for the redemption of mankind, he did it for him in particular; which persuasion is founded (not upon the uptaking of one's real regeneration, as the reflex assurance is, but) upon the promise of Christ in the gospel, made to sinners of Adam's family as such; and so there is resting upon him alone, for the whole of salvation.



I'm not sure any of that helps, but I hope so.


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