Theopedia

Faith

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

— Hebrews 11:1

Definition

Saving faith is belief of the truth of Christ on the testimony of God, resting on him alone for salvation, not bare intellectual assent but an act of the whole soul. Classical Reformed theology names three elements within it: notitia, knowledge of what the gospel promises; assensus, agreement that the promise is true; and fiducia, personal trust in Christ himself rather than mere conviction about him.12 These three make up faith’s own definition. Love, obedience, and the other marks of a changed life are never absent from genuine faith, but they are its fruit, not its substance.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states that faith is “the work of the Spirit of Christ” in the elect, ordinarily given through the preaching of the Word and strengthened by it, by baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and prayer.3 By this faith a Christian believes what Scripture reveals on God’s own authority, yielding obedience to its commands, trembling at its threats, and embracing its promises for this life and the next. The confession then narrows the definition: “the principal acts of saving faith have immediate relation to Christ, accepting, receiving, and resting upon him alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life, by virtue of the covenant of grace.”4 Obedience, trembling, and embracing promises are things faith does; accepting, receiving, and resting on Christ are what faith is. The confession also holds that saving faith differs from a merely temporary faith not in degree but in kind, however weak, and grows in many to full assurance.5

Biblical Basis

Hodge argues the Protestant doctrine, that saving faith includes trust and not mere assent, against Rome’s reduction of faith to assent to the church’s authority, from how Scripture itself speaks of faith: the same promises made to “faith” are elsewhere made to “trust,” and believing is repeatedly explained through pictures of trust rather than mere intellectual agreement, looking to Christ as the dying Israelites looked to the bronze serpent (John 3:14-15), fleeing to him as a refuge, resting upon him, receiving him (John 1:12). To believe that Christ is God manifest in the flesh, Hodge writes, “is not the mere intellectual conviction that no one, not truly divine, could be and do what Christ was and did; for this conviction demoniacs avowed; but it is to receive Him as our God.”2 Paul states the doctrine of justification by this faith directly: “to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness” (Rom. 4:5), a faith distinct from its own fruit: “the one who is righteous shall live by faith” (Hab. 2:4; Rom. 1:17). John names the object and the promise together: “whoever believes in the Son has eternal life” (John 3:36).

James warns against a counterfeit that stops at assent alone: “you believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe, and shudder!” (James 2:19), the very point Hodge draws on to distinguish saving faith from bare intellectual conviction.2 But James warns against the opposite error too, treating faith and its fruit as though they could come apart: “faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:17), and Paul, in the very letter that most insists faith alone justifies, still expects it to be “faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6). Genuine faith and its fruit are inseparable in experience without being the same thing by definition; the next two sections trace how the Reformed tradition has kept that distinction without collapsing it in either direction.

Historical Development

Within Reformed orthodoxy itself, the settled three elements of faith came under pressure from a different direction: theologians folding too much into faith’s own definition, rather than too little. Bavinck traces how, after the Reformers fixed knowledge, assent, and trust as faith’s constituent acts, later theologians facing hard pastoral questions about assurance, whether a doubting believer’s faith was even real, tried solving them by multiplying the categories, which “led to the danger that faith would no longer be seen as the appropriating organ in justification.”6 Alexander Comrie, an eighteenth-century Dutch pastor working in this tradition, tried to locate assurance further back, in a disposition (habitus) prior to faith’s acts from which those acts spring. Gisbertus Voetius, a generation earlier, had already warned against exactly this move: such a disposition “cannot be called faith except by analogy and improperly by metonymy of the cause or of principle; formally this is no more faith than a seed is a tree, or an egg a chicken, or a bulb a flower.”6 The same instinct that wants to fold obedience or love into faith’s essence, out of concern that a bare three-part definition leaves too little to hold onto, was already recognized within Reformed orthodoxy as a threat to keeping faith the “appropriating organ” it needs to be for justification by faith alone to mean anything.

Mastricht’s own list of the “essential parts of faith” (knowledge, assent, reception, trust, submission to Christ as Lord) is followed immediately by a caution: each of these “have their own rivals that imitate their character, from which they deserve to be distinguished carefully.”7 He keeps faith’s effects in a separate category rather than inside its definition: faith “ennobles the believer’s person… nature… prayers… works… state,” and its sense and fruits, “consolation, joy, and so forth,” belong to “the things that accompany it” rather than to faith’s own substance.7

Opposing Views

Rome locates the same line differently. Against the Reformed and Lutheran view that saving faith is notitia, assensus, and fiducia, and that love and obedience are its necessary fruit rather than its substance, Rome holds that love is what makes mere assent into saving faith at all: faith’s “form,” in the scholastic sense of what gives a thing its defining character. Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and Robert Bellarmine each state the position: Aquinas writes that “charity is called the form of faith, insofar as through charity the act of faith is perfected and formed.”8 On this view (fides caritate formata, “faith formed by love”), an assent to Christian truth without love is only fides informis, unformed, dead faith; love supplies the missing form that makes it a true, saving grace. Hodge answers that this is not the same thing as the Reformed distinction between a living and a dead faith: “if our work, our virtue, our sanctification is primary, then we remain in doubt and uncertainty to our last breath.”8 For the Reformed, love is “the invariable and necessary attendant and consequent of saving faith,” produced by it and inseparable from it in a genuine believer, but not the act by which a sinner lays hold of Christ; folding it into faith’s own definition relocates the ground of assurance from Christ’s sufficiency to the believer’s own love, which is exactly what justification by faith alone was meant to rule out.8

Objections and Responses

If saving faith is defined narrowly as knowledge, assent, and trust, doesn’t James flatly contradict Paul by saying “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24)? A. A. Hodge answers that James is not addressing the same question Paul is: “James is not speaking of the meritorious ground of justification, but of the relation which good works sustain to a genuine faith.”9 Paul is answering how a sinner is declared righteous before God; James is answering how a claimed faith can be told apart from a counterfeit, against a professed believer who claims faith while doing nothing that faith produces (James 2:14-17). Works are the evidence by which a real faith is known, including to the person who has it, not a second ingredient added to knowledge, assent, and trust to complete justification.

Doesn’t keeping faith’s own definition this narrow risk making Christianity purely intellectual, or letting an assent-only “faith” count as saving? No, because narrowing what counts as faith’s element is not the same as narrowing what a genuine faith actually produces. Every source above that insists on the narrow definition, Mastricht, Hodge, Bavinck, the confession itself, insists just as firmly that real trust in Christ inseparably produces obedience, love, and the other fruits Scripture attaches to it; none of them treats a bare, inert assent as saving. The dispute concerns where the boundary of faith’s own definition falls; all sides agree fruit must follow it. Keeping that boundary narrow is what lets Paul’s contrast between faith and works keep its force (Rom. 4:5) rather than being redrawn every time assurance feels uncertain.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 465-467. ↩

  2. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XVI. Faith,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 90-92. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 14, “Of Saving Faith,” para. 1. ↩

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 14, para. 2. ↩

  5. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 14, para. 3. ↩

  6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 19, “Faith and Conversion.” ↩ ↩2

  7. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 1, “Saving Faith,” 67, 70-71. ↩ ↩2

  8. Hodge, “Chapter XVI. Faith,” 92-94. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  9. A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 33, “Justification,” Q. 11. ↩