Background links:
- “Marks of the True Church” (Original article by Merwyn S. Johnson)
- “Faith is a Result of Salvation?” (Open letter response by Casey Jones)
I wish to express my gratitude to Casey Jones for his considered response to my essay, “The Marks of the True Church” (Presbyterian Outlook, 5 March 2007). Dr. Jones’ response is to one point of the essay only, namely, my assertion that faith is the result, not the cause of our salvation. The following remarks will engage him at this point.
Let me sketch out my reply and then fill in the details at greater length.
1. With Dr. Jones I have serious reservations about the widespread theology of response. At the same time Dr. Jones misrepresents my statement “faith as the result of our salvation” when he identifies it with “faith as our response to salvation.”
2. With Dr. Jones I agree that salvation inextricably involves faith as well as grace. At the same time adding the word “necessary” to “faith” gets us into the Modernist-Pietist problem of causality which Dr. Jones says he wants to avoid, and I doubt if he can avoid the outcome of a theology of response or works righteousness.
3. With Dr. Jones I agree that the Bible and our Reformed confessions present faith as the way we receive salvation. The same confessions emphasize the radical gift character of faith itself, which likewise excludes works righteousness or a theology of response.
4. With Dr. Jones I share the deep concern to sustain and foster in our churches the Reformation doctrine of justification by grace through faith.
1
Dr. Jones and I agree on the underlying problems of “faith as our response to salvation.” In my estimation American church culture has committed itself to a basically contractual view of salvation that goes something like this: salvation is something God offers, faith (and usually repentance) is what humans have to do to claim the offer and its benefits. The contractual view invites us to calculate the costs and benefits of salvation or, if you prefer, the rewards and punishments. Often the quote from James is added, “faith without works is dead,” to secure the authenticity of our faith. At this point faith has collapsed into a work and justification into sanctification. Regardless of what God has done for us and our salvation, what saves us in the end is what we have to do to obtain salvation, or else . . . If that is what Dr. Jones means by the inaccuracies of “faith as our response to salvation,” then I whole-heartedly concur.
At the same time Dr. Jones misidentifies the two statements, “faith is the result of our salvation” and “faith is our response to God’s salvation.” Both statements make room for our active believing (faith). “Faith as the result of salvation” makes our believing itself part of the gift of salvation from God, the work of the Holy Spirit. “Faith as the response to our salvation” separates faith from salvation and makes it the human response to a divine gift.
The gift character of our believing is crucial to the integrity of our salvation, in my estimation. If faith is what it takes to obtain salvation, the question arises, “How much faith do we have to have in order to be saved?” Our believing becomes quantified. The necessary faith entails a certain amount of trust, a certain amount of agreement on essential doctrines, a certain amount of intensity, a certain amount of goodness (works) as the mark of our sincerity, and/or a certain amount of commitment and effort toward mission–all the questions that exercise us in the PCUSA at the present time. We conclude all too easily: if others don’t measure up to our minimums, they probably are not as Christian as we and may not even be saved. This is the treadmill to which Paul points in Galatians 3:12, “The one doing them [works of the law] shall live in them,” quoting, significantly, from Lev. 18:5. Worst of all, there is no real answer to the question, “How much faith is enough?” Stuck on the treadmill and keenly aware of their shortfall (“I believe. Lord, help thou my unbelief!”), devout Christians are left to wonder whether their faith is enough to pass muster in the end. A demand requirement of faith thus replaces the old law with a new one or just adds another requirement to the old one.
Believing as a gift, the primary work of the Holy Spirit (Calvin, Institutes, Bk 3, ch. 1), transforms the dilemma of the previous paragraph. For if faith is truly a gift from God, then any faith at all is sufficient for our salvation–a joy above all other joys, a great release, and an unending celebration. With God’s Word and God’s grace constantly before us, we don’t have to motivate ourselves to believe or do right. Having tasted the truth of God and the joy of salvation, we cannot get enough of it and will spend ourselves seeking and serving it, whatever the cost. Furthermore, as a gift from God our believing certifies that God is in fact its origin and not just the ups and downs of our own psyche, energy, or capacity to believe. The gift character of faith is thus a source of inestimable strength, conviction, and encouragement in the daily walk with God through a deeply troubled world. “Faith as the result of salvation” preserves the gift character of our believing, and with it the integrity and strength of our salvation.
2
Faith, clearly, is important to everything I’ve said so far, including “faith is the result of our salvation.” Faith unites us with Christ and all his benefits. To talk about faith is to talk about salvation. As the primary work of the Holy Spirit (Calvin), faith is nearly synonymous with grace as well. So, Dr. Jones mis-characterizes my position when he lumps me together with those who say faith is not necessary for salvation.
On the other hand, why does Dr. Jones insist, “faith is necessary for salvation”? Is John 3:16 a statement of fact: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that when in fact we find ourselves actually believing Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior–to our great surprise and amazement! against all worldly expectation or wisdom!–we will also discover we are in the joyful presence of the living God both now and forever, instead of facing a dead end, or worse, the hell we deserve”? OR, is John 3:16 a conditional offer: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that if we believe long enough and hard enough that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, then and only then we will attain the benefit or reward of believing, namely, eternal life with God instead of the perishing we deserve”?
If “necessary” goes with the latter reading of John 3:16, I do not think we can avoid making our believing in some sense, however minimal, the cause of our salvation and fall into the pitfall of works righteousness. The Protestant Reformers understood this very well. Note that John 3:18 interprets verse 16 as a matter of fact: “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God” (see also 3:8–“The Spirit blows where it will, and you hear the sound of it but do not know whence it comes or whither it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.“).
To his credit, Dr. Jones would like to take faith out of the realm of causality altogether. Faith, he says, is neither the result nor the cause of our salvation. Nonetheless he shows how necessary faith is to our salvation in a causal sense. So, I need to address the issue of causality.
Following Aristotle’s philosophy, Calvin could speak of four causes: efficient cause (what starts everything, pushing from behind),
final cause (where things end up, drawing things forward from in front of them),
formal or instrumental cause, and
material or substantive cause (see Institutes, Bk 3, chapt14, paras 19 and 21).
In relation to salvation, Calvin identifies these causes in an overlapping, trinitarian sense:
God’s love/mercy (Father) is the efficient cause,
the obedience and sacrifice of Jesus Christ is the material cause,
faith arising from the illumination of the Spirit is the instrumental cause, and
God’s glory (including election) is the final cause.
Calvin thus could deal with multiple causes that worked together harmoniously and without conflict, all at the same time.
Ironically, Calvin had a broader canvas on which to paint than we do. With the advent of scientific thinking in the 18th Century, the notion of causality was narrowed to one cause for every effect and one effect for every cause, or one (efficient) cause and its necessary result. To avoid determinism in the period of Modernism-Pietism (1650-1950/present), salvation became an offer and human believing became the efficient cause of our salvation. That move cuts God out of all primary causality here and now, except as we humans allow God to have a non-binding role in some neutral-instrumental, internal-experiential, or non-historical arena. Further, in the period of Pietism we humans have set up a situation of controlling, manipulating, and dispensing God’s grace from ourselves to ourselves . . . through the processes of our own believing.
The language of my 3/5 Outlook article may have fallen into the same patterns of cause and result/effect, as Dr. Jones points out. Neither one of us escaped them in the end. My reversal–faith is the result and not the cause of our salvation–is a deliberate effort to step out of reducing causality to a single cause and effect. My aim is for God to be not only the gift giver but also the real source of all binding truth about this world, life in it, and our salvation. Paul’s cry resonates with me, “Let God be true, though every human be false” (Romans 3:4). From the tenor of his essay, I would guess Dr. Jones is also looking for a way out of the Modernist-Pietist problem of causality.
3
Dr. Jones and I agree that “faith is the way we receive (or appropriate) salvation.” As a statement of fact the phrase makes good sense.
My concern is for the statements he adds under the innocent sounding dictum, “so to speak.” “Faith is the means by which we open our hands . . . and receive [italics added] . . .” Or again, “That faith is a gift . . . does not change the fact that a person must reach out and receive God’s salvation in order to get it [italics added].” Or again, “We must receive or appropriate [salvation] by faith in order to be reconciled [to God]. [italics added]” With each repetition of what we must do, the “urgency in the call to faith” looks more and more like a necessary work we have to perform to accomplish our own salvation. The example of giving and receiving the dollar bill doesn’t work very well, because the accent falls increasingly on what we have to do regardless of the gift.
In Galatians (which I studied under Balmer Kelly) Paul doesn’t take away the activity of faith or its gift character, but his accent is on the source of the Spirit. “Did you receive the Spirit out of (ek) the works of the law or out of (ek) the hearing of faith?” (3:2). Whose faith, and where did it come from? Paul actually refers to the “faith of Christ” (pistis jesou christou, 2:16, 20) as well as to our own (2:16). Our believing is a participation in the faith of Jesus Christ, as our believing is a participation in the faith of Abraham and God’s blessing upon him (3:7-9). Similarly, “the promise of the Spirit through faith” (3:14) coincides with the faith which is the work of the Spirit within us (I Cor. 12:3). The contrast throughout this passage (2:15-3:14) is between a work and a gift (so 3:10-14). The work is something we do out of ourselves. The gift is something God does–drawing us to participate actively in what God is doing (Eph. 2:8-10). The gift includes the avenue of salvation (Jesus Christ, life, cross, and resurrection), the believing itself, and the daily walk with God (Eph. 2:10).
As to the confessions in the PCUSA Book of Confessions, I believe I have shown that, emphasizing the gift-character of faith, “faith as the result of our salvation” does not conflict with “faith as the way we receive salvation.” I also agree with Dr. Jones that the confessions say “faith is the way we receive salvation”–as long as faith is not separated from grace, which ties faith together with salvation. The grace in the phrase “justification by grace through faith“ extends to the faith as well as the justification, i.e., there is no faith without grace.
To confirm this point let me simply refer to the Westminster Confession of Faith, which Dr. Jones does not cite. Para 1 of Chapter 11, “Of Justification” (BC 6.068), systematically strips away any ground for our justification, or salvation, apart from the work of Christ:
“Those whom God effectually calls, he also freely justifies:
not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous;
not for anything wrought in them or done by them but for Christ’s sake alone;
not by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness;
but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on him and his righteousness by faith;
which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God.”
The paragraph explicitly speaks of “receiving and resting on him [Christ] and his righteousness by faith,” but adds just as plainly, “which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God.” The rest of the PCUSA Book of Confessions, I believe, says the same things, including the passages Dr. Jones cites.
4
Dr. Jones and I both have a strong commitment to the Reformation doctrine of justification by grace through faith. The grace, I believe, pertains to both the justification/salvation and the faith. Indeed, I can say more. I believe a recovery of the distinctive and powerful, Reformed vision of grace would lead to a revival in the Presbyterian Church USA and American Christianity. A forthcoming article in the Presbyterian Outlook will try to make that point at length.
This exchange really is about the Reformed doctrine of justification. Dr. Jones has helped me think through afresh the issues he raises in a vigorous but congenial manner, and for that I am grateful. It would be very easy to misinterpret our exchange as a typical clash between a contemporary liberal and conservative. If that were the case, my stated position would be to the right of Dr. Jones. But a liberal-conservative clash is not what has occurred here. This discussion really revolves around the Reformed tradition in the period of Pietism (1650-1950/present; concern for salvation and the necessary role of faith therein) and the period of the Reformation (1518-1650; concern for the gift-character of believing vs. works-righteousness). Even here, earlier Pietism, e.g., Jonathan Edwards (18th Century), Friedrich Schleiermacher (19th Century), and Charles Hodge (19th Century), understood very well that grace includes the means of grace, the form (faith) as well as the content (salvation).
The exchange between Dr. Jones and me makes two things increasingly clear to me and I hope to you, dear reader. First, the issues that divide us most keenly in the PCUSA are those posed by the era of Pietism-Modernism (1650-1950/present). The time has come to name the common era from which we are emerging (Pietism). The time has also come to identify the larger issues of Pietism that all of us face today, without exception. And the time has come to acknowledge that the Gospel itself is at risk in the way we come to terms with those issues going forward. Hopefully the acknowledgment will mean using our disagreements as a springboard into the future God has for us instead of using them as a brickbat with which to beat each other over the head.
Second, our own PCUSA Book of Confessions represents a great source of fresh insights for us at this critical time of transition in the life of the Christian Church. The documents of our Book derive mainly from the Protestant Reformation (ca. 1518-1650)–six plus one (Barmen) out of 11. God does not call us to repeat the past, but we can certainly share their remarkable vision of grace and avoid the pitfalls they clearly marked. In our exchange of views Dr. Jones and I have engaged our Reformed heritage and identity, I hope to our mutual benefit, certainly to mine. I believe the PCUSA can do the same and move forward with exciting creativity, vigor, and faithfulness.
Yours together in Christ,
Merwyn S. Johnson
