Life

Conversion

Marsh spoke little about his early years, saying only that he had been redeemed from a life of sin and had traded his vices for a knowledge of Christ.^[2] He had been an alcoholic before his conversion; afterwards, the intensity he had given to drink was redirected wholly into the study of Christ, a preoccupation that lasted the rest of his life.^[6]

New Zealand

Marsh was a baptised Adventist of some years' standing in North New Zealand.^[4] It was a period of severe internal conflict in Australasian Adventism, in which the publication of Seventh-day Adventists Answer Questions on Doctrine (1957) and the rise of Brinsmead's Sanctuary Awakening movement divided congregations, and in which convening or attending an unauthorised meeting, or publishing a pamphlet outside the denominational press, could be treated as grounds for questioning a member's loyalty.^[3][5] By the early 1960s Marsh had been disfellowshipped as a schismatic by the conference administration of Robert Greive — an expulsion already treated as an incident of the past when the events described below took place.^[4]

He came to stay with non-Adventist relatives in Timaru, in South New Zealand, where the local congregation and its pastor, Arthur Patrick — later a historian of Adventism, and the source for most of what is known of this period — received him back into the life of the church. Marsh took part in community evangelism and home visitation, including the Appeal for Missions,^[4] and after some months the congregation judged him ready to be admitted to membership on profession of faith.^[3][4]

Others in the conference took a different view, being certain that Marsh remained in communication with Brinsmead. The dispute escalated: by 1961 Patrick was told by the executive committee in Christchurch that his place in ministry depended on his saying six words — “Robert Brinsmead is of the devil” — and, declining, took ten months' leave of absence before being restored.^[3][4] Marsh was not in the end received into membership there: by the time the question was settled he had left for Africa.^[4] Patrick, recalling the episode half a century later, wrote that he was “deeply saddened by the conflicts that impacted individuals and congregations,” and that the church had needed to ask all the questions that figures such as Greive and Brinsmead were raising.^[4]

Africa, California and later years

Marsh left New Zealand for Africa, in Patrick's words, “to share the Good News.”^[4] He settled later in California. Patrick, who had lost contact with him for thirty-eight years, encountered him again around the turn of the century at the Palm Springs Seventh-day Adventist Church, where Marsh was listed in the bulletin as a Sabbath School teacher; Patrick attended the class, found it well presented, and described him as “a loyal and appreciated teacher” whom a stroke had somewhat impaired.^[4]

He served his congregation as an elder, though he was seldom invited to preach, and his following remained small — principally a handful of people meeting for Bible study in a private home.^[6] Marsh died after a debilitating battle with cancer, through which he suffered greatly; the date is not recorded in the published material.^[2][6]

Association with Robert Brinsmead

Robert Brinsmead (b. 9 August 1933) is among the most contested figures in modern Adventism, in large part because his published positions were revised repeatedly across successive decades.^[5] His first phase, running from the late 1950s to about 1970, taught a “Sanctuary Awakening” message in which the close of Christ's mediatorial work would be followed by the moral perfection of the believer — a punctiliar blotting out of the scars of sin in the judgment of the living.^[3][5] Brinsmead was disfellowshipped in 1961, and the Sanctuary Awakening Fellowship he formed with his brother John drew followers in the United States, Africa and Asia.^[5]

Marsh's association with Brinsmead dates from this early period. When Marsh sought readmission to membership in Timaru, objectors in the conference were certain that the two remained in communication, and it was that suspicion which drove the dispute over his standing.^[3][4] It was Marsh who was instrumental in Brinsmead's abandonment of the perfectionist position, drawing him during the 1970s toward the Christ-centred doctrine of justification by faith that characterised his work thereafter and led him into sustained study of the sixteenth-century Reformers. Marsh himself held to that position for the remainder of his life; Brinsmead continued to revise his views, moving by the late 1970s to a systematic rejection of distinctive Adventist doctrines and eventually away from the denomination altogether.^[5]

Marsh's own trajectory ran differently, and one of the differences is the sanctuary. He arrived at a thoroughgoing doctrine of imputed righteousness while continuing to affirm the sanctuary doctrine — the pre-advent judgment and Christ's high-priestly mediation in the heavenly sanctuary^[2][7] — a combination that separates him both from Brinsmead, who came to reject the heavenly sanctuary outright,^[5] and from Desmond Ford, whose reappraisal of Daniel 8:14, the Day of Atonement and the investigative judgment cost him his ministerial credentials after the Glacier View conference of 1980.^[12]

The Michael Marsh Papers

Marsh wrote in the form of articles, papers and letters rather than books, and none of his work appeared in print during his lifetime.^[2] The body of material is generally referred to as the Michael Marsh Papers, the title under which it is studied and taught today.^[6][7] Among the best known items is a long letter to the editors of the magazine Our Firm Foundation, written in response to an article on righteousness by faith and substantial enough that it is customarily treated in three parts.^[7]

The papers circulated by hand among Adventist readers long before they were published, passing through several sets of hands and reaching people Marsh never met.^[2] One such collection came to David Leone from Duane Nathan Kinman (1926–2013) — an Adventist army medic known in the wartime press as the “foxhole surgeon,” and a student in Marsh's classes — whom Leone met while serving as a missionary in Sweden.^[2][8] After three of the articles were lost by a friend to whom they had been lent, Leone concluded that what remained needed preserving in print.^[2]

Magnum Opus was issued in April 2017, running to 338 pages,^[9] and reissued by RTC Ministries in 2019.^[11] The collection is incomplete: pages and parts of pages are missing from several chapters, and some sheets carry handwritten marginalia.^[2] Selected papers have since been presented in a video series under the Michael Marsh Papers title, with the underlying documents distributed alongside.^[6][7]

Theology

Marsh's governing concern was to distinguish, and then to order rightly, the two things commonly gathered under the single phrase righteousness by faith. In his account, justification by faith refers to the righteousness of Christ's own life, lived outside the believer and in the believer's place, which makes up humanity's unavoidable deficiency and is received by faith alone. The righteousness of the law — the sanctified life produced by the Holy Spirit within the believer — is its necessary fruit and accompaniment, but not its equivalent and never its ground.^[7] Against a linear model in which imputed righteousness belongs to conversion and sanctification to everything after it, he argued that imputed righteousness stands at the beginning, the middle and the end of the Christian life.^[2]

Underpinning this is his claim that humanity's inheritance from Adam is a legal problem as well as a moral one. Where much of the discussion he was answering treated the human predicament purely as moral depravity to be repaired by an infused holiness, Marsh argued from the biblical law of representation — the priest bearing the sins of the people, guilt entailed upon a household — that humanity stands condemned by imputation and therefore requires a second Adam under whose headship righteousness can be imputed in the same legal manner. He built the case from Scripture and from the Spirit of Prophecy together, resting in particular on the language of Adam's sin being entailed upon his posterity and of guilt inherited as a birthright.^[10] Such an atonement demands an infinite sin-bearer; and Christ's freedom from inbred sin, on Marsh's reading, was what preserved the infinite purity through which he could feel the full weight of temptation and of the world's sin, rather than a quality that distanced him from human experience.^[10]

He carried the argument into eschatology. The pre-advent judgment and the period Adventist writers call Jacob's time of trouble he understood as the testing of a faith deliberately not resting on the believer's own experience or attainment: sanctification is real, sin no longer reigns, and yet the sanctified life is precisely the life that renounces itself and cries, in his recurring phrase, look not upon me, but upon my Mediator.^[7] He held that assurance grounded in one's own inward state — an ontological disposition, in the vocabulary used of his argument — misplaces the object of faith,^[10] and that the closer a believer comes to Christ the more evident the need for a righteousness outside himself becomes.^[7]

It is often said that the most important thing in the Christian religion is the believer's relationship with the Lord. But as important as that is, it is not the most important thing. The most important thing is Christ's relationship with God. … The believer is not accepted because of his faith — even though he will not be accepted without it. He is accepted because Another is accepted. He is declared righteous because Another is righteous on his behalf.

Michael D. Marsh, Magnum Opus, p. 15

Asked by Leone in their last conversation what his final work would be, Marsh summarised the whole of it in a single proposition: Christ is our reality.^[6] The phrase gathers his claim that the believer's life, righteousness, wisdom, sanctification and redemption are located in Christ rather than possessed inwardly — a reading he drew from 1 Corinthians 1:30 and Colossians 3:3–4.^[11]

Reticence and self-effacement

Marsh's privacy was not incidental to his work but of a piece with it. He disclosed little about himself, sought no public profile, and consistently redirected attention from his own person to the subject of his writing.^[2][6] Those who knew him describe a manner marked by humility, patience and warmth, and a habit of turning any conversation back toward Christ;^[2] Patrick, encountering him again after decades, found him a “loyal and appreciated teacher” whose class he was glad to have sat in.^[4]

The papers are best approached on those terms. Their point is not the man who wrote them but the Christ they uplift, and the biographical detail assembled here is offered as context for the writings rather than as a subject in its own right — a reading that follows the theme Marsh returned to most often, that the believer should look away from himself to his Mediator.^[7]

Reception

Marsh remained largely unknown outside a small readership during his lifetime, and his congregation did not take his work particularly seriously.^[6] The papers were published into a resurgence of interest in the questions he wrote about — above all how justification by faith relates to end-time events.^[2]

Marsh has begun to be cited in theological writing: Ville Suutarinen quotes him at length in a 2019 course paper at Asia-Pacific International University, drawing on Magnum Opus in support of the argument that faith is not itself the ultimate reality but “only a hand that reaches to the ultimate reality: God.”^[11] Leone, who has studied the material for more than twenty-five years, presents the collection as a preservation project rather than a critical edition.^[2] No book-length study of Marsh has yet appeared.

References

1. Marsh, Michael D. Magnum Opus: Lost Writings on Justification by Faith by Little Known Theological Giant Michael Marsh. Ed. David Leone. CreateSpace, 2017. ISBN 9781545187098. The 2019 RTC Ministries printing carries the subtitle … Michael D. Marsh, Original Writings.
2. Leone, David. “Introduction.” In Marsh, Magnum Opus, pp. i–iii.
3. Patrick, Arthur. “The Questions on Doctrine Event: Contrasting Perceptions, Their Impact and Potential.” Paper presented at the Questions on Doctrine 50th Anniversary Conference, Andrews University, 24–27 October 2007, p. 13 and n. 36.
4. Patrick, Arthur. “Post 70, Robert Daniel Brinsmead: A Reflection After Fifty-seven Years.” Adventist Studies, 17 August 2012.
5. “Robert Brinsmead,” Wikipedia, on the Sanctuary Awakening, the 1961 disfellowshipping, and the turn to Reformation theology c. 1970.
6. Michael Marsh Papers video series, Return to Christ Ministries: untitled instalment on part 3 of the Our Firm Foundation letter, closing section on Marsh's life and on the phrase “Christ is our reality” (transcript; the transcript carries no title).
7. “What Is Righteousness by Faith | Michael Marsh Papers,” Return to Christ Ministries, YouTube (video 4IM6KgOccNo), on part 1 of Marsh's letter to the editors of Our Firm Foundation (transcript).
8. “Duane Kinman, Foxhole Surgeon,” Adventist History Library, 30 October 2008; “Kinman, Duane Nathan (1926–2013),” Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists.
9. Publication record, ISBN 9781545187098, Blackwell's.
10. Same instalment as ref. 6, opening section, on whether humanity's inheritance from Adam constitutes a legal as well as a moral problem.
11. Suutarinen, Ville. “The Postmodern ‘Sacramental and Experiential Presence’ vs. Justification by Faith.” RELP 494, Asia-Pacific International University, May 2019, pp. 11–12, citing Marsh, Magnum Opus, pp. 15, 327.
12. “Desmond Ford,” Wikipedia, on the manuscript Daniel 8:14, the Day of Atonement, and the Investigative Judgment, the Glacier View conference of August 1980, and the withdrawal of his ministerial credentials.

See also

• Imputed righteousness
• Pre-advent judgment
• Seventh-day Adventist Church