I just wanted to thank you for the article. I have just about finished it and have found it most helpful/revealing.
As you might expect from me, it is the attack on the assurance of faith that I find especially interesting. I say that because it, assurance, deals with the witness of the Spirit which only the Spirit can give.
As I see it, if undue emphasis is put on resulting works, an objective measure, to the exclusion of the work of the Spirit's witness, then the result is inevitably the kind of distortion that we find in The Auburn Heresy or it's kin, Roman Catholicism. This, in my opinion, is why right in the middle of John's first epistle, where he is emphasizing works resulting from love, he emphasizes, the Spirit's "anointing", and "having given an understanding" so that we are to consider BOTH, TOGETHER, as our evidence of assurance.
If works are the primary or only significant measure, then the Papists do quite well at this, and, I would suspect, some of the Auburn crowd are working quite hard too.
Please don't missunderstand me, I believe that the measure of a changed life is absolutely crucial, as Edwards, in His Religious Affections, and all the Reformers, made clear, but to emphasize this to the exclusion, or minimization, of the witness of the Spirit is a slippery slope on which the Auburn people and all who neglect the "whole counsel" of God's Word find themselves.
