"Considered to be the best account in a small compass of the Marrow controversy," stated Alan Cairns (cf. Johnston, Treasury of the Scottish Covenant, p. 486).

Gives a history, from original documents, of the Marrow controversy (which centered around the book The Marrow of Modern Divinity), along with biographical notices of the main disputants. John Brown of Whitburn (the son of John Brown of Haddington) has compiled pertinent extracts "from the works of the Representers (i.e. the defenders of the Marrow--RB), in illustration and defence of those views of evangelical truth which they had espoused.

This forms perhaps the most valuable portion of the book, and will probably be equally new with the other divisions, to most of its readers, as many of the extracts are taken from books which are now in the hands of very few" (p. iv).

One interesting appendix gives a very helpful side-by-side table illustrating the "Contrast between the Doctrines of the Marrowmen and Anti-Marrowmen." Topics which were disputed during this controversy include God's sovereignty and human responsibility in salvation and sanctification, the nature of the Gospel, the free offer of the Gospel, covenant theology, assurance, the atonement, the place of the law in the life of the believer and much more.

"The theological divisions in the Marrow controversy reflected similar divisions in Reformed thought, with the Marrow and its defenders being more in harmony with the Reformed orthodoxy of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and, on balance, with the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms. Their opponents, though representative of the great majority of ministers in the early eighteenth-century Church of Scotland, reflected the legalizing tendencies of late seventeenth-century developments in Reformed theology, rather than Reformed thought as a whole," writes David Lachman (Cameron, ed., Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology, p. 547) -- in summary of the historical and theological context surrounding the issues dealt with in this book.

276 pages.