How Much Must We Believe?

When is faith saving? Time was when the intellectual requirements were too high. Today they are too low. Both extremes have hindered people from entering the Kingdom. The true preaching of the Gospel adds no requirements beyond the necessary truths. But it is also insistent that the standard shall not be less than Scripture requires. We must not make the gate narrower or wider than the Lord has made it. Ours is the day of the wide open door and the broad way to heaven.

As evangelists vie with each other to offer an easier Gospel, the time has come to set some very definite limits. Perhaps we should echo once more the stern warning of the Athanasian Creed. “This is the Catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.” Extreme as this may sound, when we consider the faith in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit which it defines, it is nothing less than essential.

The Heidelberg Catechism mentions three things which we must know. Note, it does not say “to be saved” but that in this “comfort you may live and die happily.” The definition of saving faith is rather broad. The content of true faith is all that God has revealed in His word. Then follows the summary in the Apostles’ Creed evangelically explained. After outlining the essential elements of Christian doctrine, the question is asked: “What does it profit that you believe all this?” (Question 59). However, we soon find ourselves dealing with a more condensed Gospel. The believing heart accepts Christ and all His benefits (Question 60).

Faith in a Doctrine and a Person

Is there a contradiction here? Sometimes we are speaking about all kinds of “truths.” Then suddenly we shift to the Person. But this is only following the Biblical method. By preaching the truths the Truth Himself comes to us. For Calvin and the Catechism there is a correlation between sound doctrine about Christ and the benefits of Christ. This does not mean that to know the truths is enough. We must accept Christ and His benefits with a “believing heart.” The Catechism suggests the same idea when it defines faith not only as a certain knowledge, but also a “hearty confidence that not only to others, but to me also, remission of sins, everlasting righteousness and salvation are freely given by God, merely of grace, only for the sake of Christ’s merits” (L.D. VII).

How Much Certainty Must We Have?

There has been fully as much reduction of the ideas of the confidence as of the knowledge. Both requirements have often been reduced beyond recognition. When asked how much certainty a believer must have, Witius went so far as to require that he should at least “hope so” or “wish to wish to be saved.” Some questions might also be raised about Berkhof’s sharp distinction between faith and assurance.

Don’t Seek a Minimum

The Catechism does not fall into the trap of trying to present a “least possible” faith. That would be more dangerous than trying to fly a plane on the least possible amount of gas. It treats the use of Scripture as the natural man deals with food. He does not usually want to gauge a starvation diet. In fact, the whole minimum faith attitude is itself a sign of spiritual sickness. When we use the concentrated forms of the gospel, it is not to reject their elaboration. Rather, without the further explanations, the concentration is meaningless and faith is not faith but illusion.

Faith Also Sanctifies

The catechism is concerned not only with a faith which justifies, but also with sanctification. The Belgic confession contains a remarkable statement about sanctifying fait h. In Art. XXIV we read: “We believe that this true faith, being wrought in man by the hearing of the Word of God and the operation of the Holy Spirit, regenerates him and makes him a new man, causing him to live a new life, and freeing him from the bondage of sin. Therefore it is so far from being true that this justifying faith makes men remiss in a pious and holy life, that on the contrary without it they would never do anything out of love to God, but only out of self-love or fear of damnation. Therefore, it is impossible that this holy faith can be unfruitful in man; for we do not speak of a vain faith, but of such a faith which is called in Scripture a faith working by love, which excites man to the practice of those works which God has commanded in His Word.”

It should be noted that “regeneration” here is used in a wider sense of sanctification. Later in the Canons of Dordt and in Reformed circles it received a narrower meaning. Confusion in the usage has accounted for a good deal of controversy about mediate and immediate regeneration. If we mean by regeneration an observable, radical transformation of character and life, then we have given it a broad meaning. Note also, we are not here dealing only with the problem of faith and works. Rather faith and works are here not only always together, but fait h produces works.

Berkouwer, the leading Dutch Reformed theologian, was deeply concerned about t his relationship. He wrote two books on faith: Faith and Justification and Faith and Sanctification. He was on the right approach to the doctrine of sanctification. However, he seems to me to have failed to do justice both to faith and sanctification. In fact, his very way of linking the two seem to force him to modify each too much. *In his evaluation of Berkouwer, Lewis Smedes points out the defective view of the Dutch theologian regarding an actual change in the Christian. I am not sure if this reflects a Barthian influence, but it is obvious in his writings.

While trying to maintain the principles of “only by grace” and “only by faith,” Berkouwer limits the character of fait h. On the one hand, saving faith is anti-works. It knows only the sinner who is justified as sinner. We must add, however, that there are other sides to the action of saving faith. The faith of Hebrews 11 is not a different faith than that of Romans 1:17. It is faith seeking a different result. Faith in Christ may seek forgiveness or justification without works. But faith in Christ may seek from Him renewal and sanctification. The “working by love” or the transforming grace is never part of our justification. But it is part of our salvation in a wider sense. Wit h Calvin we may affirm that God justifies no man whom he does not also sanctify.

Saving faith must thus be considered as it seeks the basic foundation of our salvation in justification. However, it is not really saving faith if it does not also seek a new life in Christ. In this sense, faith is the victory that over comes the world. Nor is it less a matter of grace when God solely of His gracious work makes us new creatures in Christ.

Faith Does More than Justify

In Barth one finds many statements which make of sanctification a form of justification. The effort to apply the identical faith to the reality of sanctification as to justification either destroys the concept of sanctification of deals in the illusion of sanctification. I cannot be sanctified by believing I am changed without any empirical change. But I can be sanctified by a faith which finds the power of real transformation of character and life in dying and being raised with Christ.

In short, saving faith is a wider, broader and deeper function than only the seeking and finding of justification. This is true both personally and collectively. Faith creates not only the new person but also the new community. Outside such movement toward the Church there is no salvation.

Faith and the Kingdom

But saving grace and saving faith also are used by God to create other aspects of His kingdom. Abraham Kuyper correctly saw that salvation involves the building of the Kingdom of God in this world here and now. He had inherited the illusion or confusion that the believer might take over the world. This had been the heritage of Constantine and “Christian” Europe. Today we have, however, a wave of cultural pessimism. We are told that Western civilization has no Christian roots or fruits. Kuyper could say this, too, of the “revolutionary age.” But always there remained the duty and opportunity to have a Christian beach–head in the world. Saving faith creates an antithesis with the world. But saving faith which does not try to change its environment by creating the Christian family, Christian school, and christianized influence in the community is certainly not fully developed saving faith. Saving faith not only inevitably reaches out for a better world to come, but also moves toward a better world here and now.

*Hughes, P. ed., Creative Minds in Conemporary Theology, Eerdmans 1962.