The Nature of Saving Faith

Can Faith Be Equated With Faithfulness?

"To believe is to obey." This was the thesis of Pastor Dave's sermon this Sunday. He and his wife had lunch with us afterwards, and it gave an opportunity for talking with him about this very point, which has in God's providence been one of my ruminations over the last couple of weeks.

Dave's sermon, incidentally, developed the point by examining why it is in Luke 9 that Jesus did not meet with Herod despite the fact that Herod seemed eager. Why not? Because disobedience -- cutting off the head of John the Baptist, say -- amounts to a denial of God's truth, amounts to unbelief. Clearly, Herod's eagerness to see Jesus was something other than faith.

Dave didn't mention 1 Cor 10 or Heb 10.26-39 in this context, but such were obviously in the background. To disobey is to deny; hence, to believe is to obey.

This was interesting for me because of recent conversations concerning the nature of saving faith (here , here, and here). Is it legitimate to speak of saving faith as "faithfulness"? Is it legitimate to require that saving faith include obedience as a part of its definition? Is it legitimate to require that saving faith be purely receptive of the grace of God? At the back of these questions are concerns on the one hand about legalism, and concerns on the other about antinomianism.

All of these questions are raised by a pair of recent books, the latest in the ongoing Protestant quest to nail down "saving faith" to the systematic subflooring with nary a bubble. These two are Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry and A Faith That Is Never Alone. The former is a product primarily of Westminster Seminary West and argues (I am told) for a hard separation between faith and obedience in a definitional sense. The latter is a product primarily of Norm Shepherd and those influenced by him, including many Federal Vision lights. It argues, apparently, that faith must include obedience by definition; that is, that faith is faithfulness.

Both are on my reading list, so the summaries above are second hand. Certainly, this post will not be an attempt to interact with either work!

Rather, I thought merely to blog some preliminary thoughts about faith viewed from two perspectives. From the "black-box", empirical perspective, faith looks like faithfulness. When we open up the box and peer inside, it turns out that faith proper is an instrument that receives God's grace, which leads necessarily to obedience. In other words, the inner workings of faith do not properly include obedience; and yet, living faith is always necessarily obedient.

Think about faith as it is presented in James. Not merely in chapter 2, but in the whole of the epistle, the burden of James is this: if your faith is genuine, then it will be seen in the works of your hands (Jas 1.26, 3.13, 4.4 but also 1.3-4, 1.5-8, passim). Or as I often say to my students, "You don't really know something until you know it in your hands." James says in effect, "You don't really believe something until you believe it with your hands."

The author to the Hebrews presents the contrapositive: that those who disobey are unbelievers. So for instance, he warns

So, as the Holy Spirit says:

"Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion,
during the time of testing in the desert,
where your fathers tested and tried me
and for forty years saw what I did.
That is why I was angry with that generation,
and I said, 'Their hearts are always going astray,
and they have not known my ways.'
So I declared on oath in my anger,
'They shall never enter my rest.' "

See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first. As has just been said:

"Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion."

Who were they who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt? And with whom was he angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the desert? And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest if not to those who disobeyed? So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief. -- Heb. 3.7-19

Time does not permit examining Jesus' take on saving faith (think for example of the fruitful soil of Matt. 13 or the Rich Young Ruler of Luke 18), nor even Paul's confirmation that the disobedient are unbelievers (1 Cor 5.11-13, Eph. 5.6 || Col. 3.6, Tit. 1.16).

All of this is strong confirming evidence that to believe is to obey. We might call this the 'empirical perspective' on faith. From the outside without any access to the inner workings of faith, what does it look like to believe? It looks like obedience to God's commands. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.

In many pastoral settings, this is exactly what is needed. Indeed, as I work with students in my Ethics class, we talk often about integrity as a person; that is, having actions that are consistent with our stated beliefs.

The 'empirical perspective', then, can include obedience within faith as a matter of operational definition. If we think of faith as a kind of black box whose inputs are the promises and commands of God and whose output is obedience, it makes sense to view 'faith' as faithfulness.

But it turns out that not all pastoral problems can be solved by this approach. Indeed, one of the problems that Paul frequently felt the need to counter in his ministry was the problem of legalism.

By "legalism", I don't mean what Wright is so anxious to clear the Pharisees of -- a kind of merit-gaining by means of racking up righteousness points. Nor do I mean the addition of human laws to God's law; nor strict scrupulousness in keeping God's law. All of these are, of course, kinds of legalism.

But the more general definition of "legalism" that fits best what Paul argued against is this: legalism is obedience to the Law in the power of the flesh.¹

It's immediately obvious that legalism in this sense can look exactly like our black-box definition of faith. Inputs: commands and promises of God. Outputs: obedience (at least by the metric of the legalistic community).

And yet, Christians all agree (following Paul) that legalism amounts to a different gospel -- unbelief! Or better, pseudo-belief.

How?

To get at this, we must follow Paul and open up the black box, examine what goes on inside the inner workings of faith.

And when we do, we find that the faith that saves is not actually itself obedience to the Law. Instead, for Paul as he addresses the Romans, Galatians, and Philippians, faith is an instrument that lays hold of the promises of God and receives as a result the work of God: justification, sanctification, adoption, the indwelling of the Spirit. Faith in this sense is separate from obedience to the Law.

We can see this most starkly in Luther's favorite epistle, Galatians. Crucial for Paul in his argument there is that we receive the Spirit by trusting in the promises of God over against obeying the Law (Gal. 3). He insists that we are justified by faith apart from performing works of the Law (Rom. 3, 4)².

This is mind-bending. Our black-box definition of faith was comfortable in including obedience as a part of its definition. Yet the inner workings of faith are set, apparently, apart from obedience. How?

The key (I think) is to view the black box as consisting of two components under the hood. Faith itself is that which lays hold of God's promises. As a result, God acts. He unites us to Himself, working in us through the power of the Spirit. As a result of that action, we are changed, both in initial salvation and also in its ongoing expression of sanctification. The result of that change is ... obedience.

Now, the relationship between our faith and God's work in us is inseparable from a causation perspective. Genuine, living faith will always result in God's work, resulting in obedience. Hence, the black-box perspective is operationally valid.

However, it is also incomplete. To those who labor under the illusion that their flesh-generated obedience is the same as the work of the Spirit, it must be told: faith is a receptive, not generative, instrument. 'Faithfulness' is not faith; it is the outcome of God's work in us that comes through faith.

Put another way, an emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit is an irreducible part of teaching on faith and obedience. Without that teaching, legalists are led from bad to worse. With it, we can say to both antinomians and legalists: "The cure is to believe."

JRC

1. I am indebted to Jack Miller for this definition. It makes sense of Paul's frequent coupling of the flesh/Spirit dichotomy with his faith/works of the Law dichotomy. It also makes sense of the Pharisees' simultaneous reliance on the Law *and* antinomian tendencies -- both of which are sourced from the flesh nature.
2. Utterly unconvincing are solutions that try to make Paul's disparagement of fleshly obedience to the Law mean something limited: Jewish separatism from Gentiles, or adherence to OT ceremonial law. To argue thus makes light of Paul's robust view of the Law, which was in line with Jesus' (cf. Gal. 5.14). The "curse of the Law" was not visited on Jesus because Gentiles ate pork!