Christ as the Preparation for Our Salvation (Preston)

We have a record of John Preston’s systematic theology, preserved in the form of lecture notes in a student’s hand in one single, unpublished manuscript (Emmanuel College MS III:1: “A Table Containinge the Sume of Theology B. Dr. Preston, Mr. of Em Col.” Emmanuel College Library, Cambridge.)

Here’s the outline of Preston’s teaching:

I. Of God
II. Of Man (including “innocencie” and “reparation”)
III. The Preparation for Our Salvation
IV. The Application of Redemption

That third point, “preparation,” is interesting. Commenting on the manuscript, Paul Schaeffer Jr. notes that in this section “Preston discussed not what modern scholars call ‘preparationism’; rather he concerned himself with Christ, who through His incarnation, humiliation, and exaltation ‘prepared’ our salvation..” (Spiritual Brotherhood, p. 234)

“Preparation” hardly strikes the right note to modern ears. It sounds like what God did in Christ was get salvation ready in advance, and then later actually carried it out. But a peek at the immediate context, and Schaeffer’s summary of the contents, reassures us that’s not the connotation Preston intended.

Instead, the third section is a Christology, a treatment of the work of the second person. It lays out the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, which Preston considers to be the place where salvation was worked out, enacted, put together, made. In fact, Preston’s soteriology has a lot to say about the fullness and perfection of salvation in Christ, precisely in the events of Christ’s own life for us. His life is where our salvation was worked out.

“Christocentrism” just almost has a bad name after some major overinterpretations of the slogan in the twentieth century. But Preston’s soteriology is a good example of the right kind of Christ-centeredness: it’s a conceptual expansion of “in Christ.”