Justification… The Big Question

5 Responses to “Justification… The Big Question”

1. Peter

   September 21st, 2007 at 11:52 pm

   Questions back to you:

   What kind of distinction are you suggesting?

   A temporal one? As in, for one moment, faith is alone in the person justified but later isn’t? A logical one? What would that mean?

   What is the nature of justifying faith? Is it active, living faith? Is it trust, assent, knowledge?

2. W.H. Chellis

   September 22nd, 2007 at 7:41 am

   Me thinks faith is resting (yes, I agree knowledge, assent, trust). I take trust to be the central thing. Yet, I take this faith to be passive and receptive in justification. WCF 11:2, “Faith, thus recieving and resting on Christ, and His righteousness, is the alone instrument of justification.”

   In other words, the “faith” that justifies rests but the faithfulness that follows “does”.

   Of course, this saving, justifying, passive faith is never alone but is “accompanied with all other saving graces, and is no dead faith, but worketh by love.”

   Notice that the Confession distinguishes between faith in its passive office (recieving and resting) and its active office (working by love).

   It is the failure to distinguish in this way that has lead others to seriously question whether you are confounding faith (trusting/resting/receiving) with faithfulness (loving, obeying, doing).

3. DWilson

   September 22nd, 2007 at 9:55 am

   Bill, not wanting to speak for Peter, I have no problem in affirming that saving faith has a passive office (receiving and resting) and an active office (working by love, on the basis of the rest). Further, it is faith in its receiving office that does all the receiving of Christ and His benefits. But the faith that does one is not a different faith from the other. This is comparable to saying that a husband has a “listening” office and a “working” office. But he is the same man.

   Further, I would not want the passive office and the active office to be separated chronologically, with the passive first, and the active following later. I would structure them hierarchically, with passive, receiving faith as foundational to any actions that God ever receives with pleasure. Because I trust, I therefore call out for salvation. I believed, and therefore I have spoken. Because I trust (in exactly the same way) I work out my salvation in love three years later.

   Too often we have tried to preserve the gospel of grace by simply giving out different names for things, and we have to recognize that there are some legitimate questions that these labels eventually necessitate. Peter affirms WCF 11:1-3, and so I want to see his work in answering some of those questions.

4. Peter

   September 22nd, 2007 at 11:28 am

   Instead of resting/obeying, how about distinguishing faith and faith-filled obedience as body and spirit? Like James does: “just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead,” which appears to make the equation faith = body and works = spirit. Are you happy with faith/obedience distinguished as body and spirit?

   My question to you, then: Is “resting faith” a body without a spirit? Is there any moment when faith is just a body?

   And let me try this: Jesus commands, “Believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). Does one respond to that command with “passive, resting” faith or with “active obedient” faith?

5. P. Andrew Sandlin

   September 22nd, 2007 at 1:23 pm

   Hebrews 11 convinced me. Obviously the “resting/passive” element is there in the first few verses, but this faith is everywhere vigorous, obedient, active — not merely as an effect of that faith but constitutive of that faith itself.

   M. Horton (in the book to which Peter and I and others are responding) states that faith is active everywhere EXCEPT when it instrumentally justifies.

   I find this distinction entirely arbitrary and artificial.

   (Peter, I’ll need to think over your body-spirit analogy ….)

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