Marshall: The Moralists Try To Put Us Back Under The Covenant Of Works Because They Do Not Understand The Gospel Mystery Of Sanctification

“[T]hat we must be reconciled to God, and justified by the remission of our sins, and imputation of righteousness, before any sincere obedience to the law; that we may be enabled for the practice of it. They account, that this doctrine tends to the subversion of a holy practice, and is a great pillar of Antinomianism; and that the only way to establish sincere obedience, is to make it rather a condition to be performed before our actual justification, and reconciliation before God. Therefore some late divines have thought fit to bring the doctrine of former Protestants concerning justification, to their anvil, and to hammer it into another form, that it might be more free of Antinomianism, and effectual to secure a holy practice. But their labor is vain and pernicious, tending to Antinomian profaneness, or painted hypocrisy at best; neither can the true practice of holiness be secure, except the persuasion of our justification, and reconciliation with God, be first obtained without works of the law.”

Walter Marshall, Gospel Mystery of Sanctification (Lafayette: Sovereign Grace Publishers, 2001), 14.

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  • Inwoo Lee
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    Inwoo Lee (BA, UCSD) earned his MA (Historical Theology) in 2020 from Westminster Seminary California and is author of “Righteous Before God: William Perkins’ Doctrine of Justification in Elizabethan England” (MA Thesis, Westminster Seminary California, 2020). He lives in the Great Seoul area, in South Korea with his wife Holly.

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5 comments

  1. Marshall’s first and last paras:
    “[T]hat we must be reconciled to God, and justified by the remission of our sins, and imputation of righteousness, before any sincere obedience to the law; that we may be enabled for the practice of it …. neither can the true practice of holiness be secure, except the persuasion of our justification, and reconciliation with God, be first obtained without works of the law.”

    Is there any reason why these statements together cannot be applied to pre-resurrection believers? After all, no one, not a one has ever been saved by works of the law.

  2. Isn’t Marshall alluding to this verse, 1 Timothy 3:16, here in the ESV with its formatting probably not available in this comment? “Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness:
    He was manifested in the flesh,
    vindicated by the Spirit,seen by angels,
    proclaimed among the nations,
    believed on in the world,taken up in glory.”

    That Christ Himself is the mystery of godliness? The great mystery of it? Seems so.

    And, by the way, whose godliness? His own? Doesn’t the sentence before give the first part of the parallelism, making “godliness” parallel to 3:15, “how one ought to behave in the church of God?” Christ is the great mystery of how one ought to behave in the church of God. That fits well with Marshall’s ordering of the furthering of holy practice to be after “our actual justification.” Is this right?

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