Warfield on "Faith" -- A Corrective to Edwardsianism (Faith as Affectional)
The Following quotations come from B. B. Warfield’s magisterial essay “Faith” originally written for the Hastings Dictionary of the Bible (1905). This article was reprinted in volume 2 of The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield, “Biblical Doctrines” (467-508). Warfield’s essay can be found here in its entirety: The Biblical Doctrine of Faith. Well worth a read.
I’ve taken a number of citations from Warfield’s essay and included the page numbers from the Biblical Doctrines volume.
From section I. The Philological Expression of Faith (467-483)
To believe in God, in the Old Testament sense, is thus not merely to assent to His word, but with firm and unwavering confidence to rest in security and trustfulness upon Him. (471)
A glance over these passages [a number of New Testament citations] will bring clearly out the pregnancy of the meaning conveyed. It may be more of a question wherein the pregnancy resides. It is probably sufficient to find it in the sense conveyed by the verb itself, while the preposition adjoins only the person towards whom the strong feeling expressed by the verb is directed. In any event, what these passages express is ‘an absolute transference of trust from ourselves to another,’ a complete self-surrender to Christ. (477-478)
A survey of these passages will show very clearly that in the New Testament ‘to believe’ is a technical term to express reliance on Christ for salvation. (479)
. . . we may at least re-affirm with increased confidence that the idea of ‘faith’ is conceived of in the New Testament as the characteristic idea of Christianity, and that it does not import mere ‘belief’ in an intellectual sense, but all that enters into an entire self-commitment of the soul to Jesus as the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. (483)
From section II. The Historical Presentation of Faith (483-501)
The essence of piety came thus to be ever more plainly proclaimed as consisting in such a confident trust in the God of salvation as could not be confounded either by the unrighteousness which reigned in Israel or by Jehovah’s judgments on Israel’s sins,—such a confidence as even in the face of the destruction of the theocracy itself, could preserve, in enduring hope, the assurance of the ultimate realization of God’s purposes of good to Israel and the establishment of the everlasting kingdom. Thus hopeful waiting upon Jehovah became more and more the centre of Israelitish piety, and Jehovah became before all ‘the Hope of Israel’ . . . (488)
The reference of faith is accordingly in the Old Testament always distinctly soteriological; its end the Messianic salvation; and its essence a trusting, or rather an entrusting of oneself to the God of salvation, with full assurance of the fulfilment of His gracious purposes and the ultimate realization of His promise of salvation for the people and the individual. Such an attitude towards the God of salvation is identical with the faith of the New Testament, and is not essentially changed by the fuller revelation of God the Redeemer in the person of the promised Messiah. (489-490)
It was to James that it fell to rebuke the Jewish tendency to conceive of the faith which was pleasing to Jehovah as a mere intellectual acquiescence in His being and claims, when imported into the Church and made to do duty as ‘the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Glory’ (2:1). He has sometimes been misread as if he were depreciating faith, or at least the place of faith in salvation. But it is perfectly clear that with James, as truly as with any other New Testament writer, a sound faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as the manifested God (2:1) lies at the very basis of the Christian life (1:3), and is the condition of all acceptable approach to God (1:6, 5:15). It is not faith as he conceives it which he depreciates, but that professed faith (λέγῃ, 2:14) which cannot be shown to be real by appropriate works (2:18), and so differs by a whole diameter alike from the faith of Abraham that was reckoned unto him for righteousness (2:23), and from the faith of Christians as James understood it (2:1, 1:3, cf. 1:22). (495)
Thus, in vindicating the place of faith as the only instrument of salvation, Paul necessarily dwelt much upon the object of faith, not as if he were formally teaching what the object is on which faith savingly lays hold, but as a natural result of his effort to show from its object the all-sufficiency of faith. It is because faith lays hold of Jesus Christ, who was delivered up for our trespasses and was raised for our justification (Rom. 4:25), and makes us possessors of the righteousness provided by God through Him, that there is no room for any righteousness of our own in the ground of our salvation (Rom. 10:3, Eph. 2:8). This is the reason of that full development of the object of faith in Paul’s writings, and especially of the specific connexion between faith and the righteousness of God proclaimed in Christ, by which the doctrine of Paul is sometimes said to be distinguished from the more general conception of faith which is characteristic of the Epistle to the Hebrews. (497)
From section III. The Biblical Conception of Faith
Of its subjective nature we have what is almost a formal definition in the description of it as an ‘assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen’ (Heb. 11:1). It obviously contains in it, therefore, an element of knowledge (Heb. 11:6), and it as obviously issues in conduct (Heb. 11:8, cf. 5:9, 1 Pet. 1:22). But it consists neither in assent nor in obedience, but in a reliant trust in the invisible Author of all good (Heb. 11:27), in which the mind is set upon the things that are above and not on the things that are upon the earth (Col. 3:2, cf. 2 Cor. 4:16–18, Mt. 6:25. (501)
It is, accordingly, solely from its object that faith derives its value. This object is uniformly the God of grace, whether conceived of broadly as the source of all life, light, and blessing, on whom man in his creaturely weakness is entirely dependent, or, whenever sin and the eternal welfare of the soul are in view, as the Author of salvation in whom alone the hope of unworthy man can be placed. This one object of saving faith never varies from the beginning to the end of the scriptural revelation; though, naturally, there is an immense difference between its earlier and later stages in fulness of knowledge as to the nature of the redemptive work by which the salvation intrusted to God shall be accomplished; and as naturally there occurs a very great variety of forms of statement in which trust in the God of salvation receives expression. Already, however, at the gate of Eden, the God in whom the trust of our first parents is reposed is the God of the gracious promise of the retrieval of the injury inflicted by the serpent; and from that beginning of knowledge the progress is steady, until, what is implied in the primal promise having become express in the accomplished work of redemption, the trust of sinners is explicitly placed in the God who was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself (2 Cor. 5:19). Such a faith, again, could not fail to embrace with humble confidence all the gracious promises of the God of salvation, from which indeed it draws its life and strength; nor could it fail to lay hold with strong conviction on all those revealed truths concerning Him which constitute, indeed, in the varied circumstances in which it has been called upon to persist throughout the ages, the very grounds in view of which it has been able to rest upon Him with steadfast trust. (502-503)
Jesus Christ, God the Redeemer, is accordingly the one object of saving faith, presented to its embrace at first implicitly and in promise, and ever more and more openly until at last it is entirely explicit and we read that ‘a man is not justified save through faith in Jesus Christ’ (Gal. 2:16). (503)
The saving power of faith resides thus not in itself, but in the Almighty Saviour on whom it rests. It is never on account of its formal nature as a psychic act that faith is conceived in Scripture to be saving,—as if this frame of mind or attitude of heart were itself a virtue with claims on God for reward, or at least especially pleasing to Him (either in its nature or as an act of obedience) and thus predisposing Him to favour, or as if it brought the soul into an attitude of receptivity or of sympathy with God, or opened a channel of communication from Him. It is not faith that saves, but faith in Jesus Christ: faith in any other saviour, or in this or that philosophy or human conceit (Col. 2:16, 18, 1 Tim. 4:1), or in any other gospel than that of Jesus Christ and Him as crucified (Gal. 1:8, 9), brings not salvation but a curse. It is not, strictly speaking, even faith in Christ that saves, but Christ that saves through faith. The saving power resides exclusively, not in the act of faith or the attitude of faith or the nature of faith, but in the object of faith; and in this the whole biblical representation centres, so that we could not more radically misconceive it than by transferring to faith even the smallest fraction of that saving energy which is attributed in the Scriptures solely to Christ Himself. (504)
So little indeed is faith conceived as containing in itself the energy or ground of salvation, that it is consistently represented as, in its origin, itself a gratuity from God in the prosecution of His saving work. It comes, not of one’s own strength or virtue, but only to those who are chosen of God for its reception (2 Thess. 2:13), and hence is His gift (Eph. 6:23, cf. 2:8, 9, Phil. 1:29), through Christ (Acts 3:16, Phil. 1:29, 1 Pet. 1:21, cf. Heb. 12:2), by the Spirit (2 Cor. 4:13, Gal. 5:5), by means of the preached word (Rom. 10:17, Gal. 3:2, 5); and as it is thus obtained from God (2 Pet. 1:1, Jude 3, 1 Pet. 1:21), thanks are to be returned to God for it (Col. 1:4, 2 Thess. 1:3). Thus, even here all boasting is excluded, and salvation is conceived in all its elements as the pure product of unalloyed grace, issuing not from, but in, good works (Eph. 2:8–12). The place of faith in the process of salvation, as biblically conceived, could scarcely, therefore, be better described than by the use of the scholastic term ‘instrumental cause.’ Not in one portion of the Scriptures alone, but throughout their whole extent, it is conceived as a boon from above which comes to men, no doubt through the channels of their own activities, but not as if it were an effect of their energies, but rather, as it has been finely phrased, as a gift which God lays in the lap of the soul. (505)
But he who humbly but confidently casts himself on the God of salvation has the assurance that he shall not be put to shame (Rom. 11:11, 9:33), but shall receive the end of his faith, even the salvation of his soul (1 Pet. 1:9). This salvation is no doubt, in its idea, received all at once (Jn. 3:36, 1 Jn. 5:12); but it is in its very nature a process, and its stages come, each in its order. First of all, the believer, renouncing by the very act of faith his own righteousness which is out of the law, receives that ‘righteousness which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God on faith’ (Phil. 3:9, cf. Rom. 3:22, 4:11, 9:30, 10:3, 10, 2 Cor. 5:21, Gal. 5:5, Heb. 11:7, 2 Pet. 1:1). On the ground of this righteousness, which in its origin is the ‘righteous act’ of Christ, constituted by His ‘obedience’ (Rom. 5:18, 19), and comes to the believer as a ‘gift’ (Rom. 5:17), being reckoned to him apart from works (Rom. 4:6), he that believes in Christ is justified in God’s sight, received into His favour, and made the recipient of the Holy Spirit (Jn. 7:39, cf. Acts 5:32), (506)