Introduction

The Confession and the Catechisms set forth what God has revealed. But it is one thing to know the doctrine and quite another to know Christ unto salvation. One can know every answer of the Catechism by heart and still remain far from God: the devils also believe, and tremble (James 2:19). "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent" (John 17:3). The Sum of Saving Knowledge exists to bridge that distance: it takes the same doctrine as the Standards and turns it upon the conscience of the reader, to bring him to Christ.

It is not a work of the Westminster Assembly. It was written about 1650 by two Scottish ministers, David Dickson and James Durham, as a result of their conversations on how to set forth the way of salvation so that plain people could understand it. The Church of Scotland never officially approved it, but it was printed for centuries together with the Confession and the Catechisms, and so we include it here: not as a standard of doctrine, but as its most direct application to the heart.

Its first part sums up the whole doctrine of salvation in four heads: our woeful condition by nature, the remedy God has provided in Christ, the means he has appointed in the covenant of grace and the blessings he conveys to us by them. Then comes what distinguishes it: the practical use of that knowledge. By the law, and afterwards by the gospel, the Sum convinces the reader of sin, of righteousness and of judgment, and leads him to seek the righteousness that is obtained only by faith in Christ.

Its most precious part is the warrants to believe. Many stop short before Christ, asking themselves whether they have a right to come to him, whether they have repented enough, or whether they are among the elect. The Sum answers them that the right to believe lies not in anything they find in themselves, but in what God says: in his hearty invitation, in his request that we be reconciled to him, in his command, "That we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ" (1 John 3:23), and in the promises of life made to those who believe. It ends by showing the evidences of true faith, so that the believer may neither deceive himself nor live tormented by doubts that the Word does not warrant.

Few short writings have done so much good. Robert Murray M'Cheyne, one of the holiest ministers Scotland has produced, wrote in his diary that the Sum was the work that wrought a saving change in him, as the Preface relates. Today, when so often a correct doctrine is preached that is never applied, or an emotional appeal without doctrine to uphold it, the Sum shows how the two are joined: the whole truth of God, set to the service of the salvation of the sinner.

It is preceded by the Preface of a Scottish edition of 1871, which relates its origin.