The Dutch Reformed thinker and poet Willem Bilderdijk recalls in a letter to a friend in 1822 what his former teacher once said: “When examining the truth of Christianity, you must be as much a heathen as a Christian in order to judge freely.”^[1] This troubled Bilderdijk for the simple reasons that it failed to honor Christ, first and foremost, and to account for the antithesis between believers and unbelievers. He writes,

This beautiful sounding precept, which then dismayed me, is indeed of the evil one and seduces whoever accepts it: because it contains [1] unfaithfulness to God and the Savior to whom we are sanctified in baptism and [2] a fundamental apostacy. — No, we must cling with all of our soul to the Savior, value and hold fast with our heart the Grace that has called us, and fight Unbelief in God’s might and not under the Banner of Reason.

By the “Banner of Reason,” Bilderdijk has in mind not reason in itself but reason understood specifically as an autonomous source of knowledge that can function independent of God and his revelation. And so, he recognized that if believer and unbeliever alike fight under the Banner of Reason, then (autonomous) reason must triumph in the end. For the believer to raise the Banner of Reason is for him to desert his Commander; it is “a fundamental apostacy.” Bilderdijk continues,

Then it will not be difficult to see the falsity of the feigned refutations [of God]. They gleam in the eye, but one must not let himself be moved into the standpoint of those who cannot see the light of truth from their standpoint. I must not close my eyes with the blind man in order to debate with him whether or not the sun shines. If someone denies that I have a good library or a well-stocked cellar, I must not shut up the room or cellar, but bring him in there with me. Or, if he is too crippled to go up and down the stairs with me, then let him talk, and I will enjoy my privilege in gratitude toward God who gives me these refreshments for soul and body. — If I can refute the unfortunate by the communication from there, so much the better; but to set aside my possession and consciousness of it in order to refute his arguments from those arguments themselves would be folly.

Believers and unbelievers view all things from different “standpoints” or “worldviews,” as Bilderdijk speaks of elsewhere. For the believer to adopt the unbeliever’s mode and position of seeing in order to debate with him would be as foolish as someone debating a blind person as to whether or not the sun is shining by closing his own eyes. He deprives himself of that which alone can recognize the thing in question. The Christian must not set aside his “possession,” graciously given to him by God, in order to refute the arguments of unbelievers by the unbeliever’s own arguments. Is it not telling that it is typically those fighting for the faith who are lured under the “Banner of Reason” and not the other way around? Neutrality is a myth.

Bilderdijk realized that someone could object to this as simply begging the question (petitio principii). He responds,

All feeling is petitio principii and cannot be disproved or proved by reason. And so it is with the Feeling of Grace [Genadegevoel], that is, with Religion. It is of God, it is the working of God’s Spirit in our heart, and the mind must receive it from our heart. Without this, intellectual Religion is a mere Historical or Philosophical view, nothing more, and does not prove Christianity but Paganism.

This Romantic version of “faith seeking understanding” is basic to the Reformed theology that Bilderdijk sought to defend and promote. A test case is the believer’s reception of the Bible’s sixty-six books as holy and canonical and his undoubted belief in all things contained in them. The Belgic Confession, which Bilderdijk affirmed, states that the believer receives these books and believes all things in them “above all because the Holy Spirit testifies in our hearts that they are from God” (article 5). As Bilderdijk said, “[I]t is the working of God’s Spirit in our heart, and the mind must receive it from our heart.” The mind is not independent, but dependent upon the heart and the Spirit.

In apologetics, the believer must not set aside “his possession and his consciousness of it” in order to argue from the unbeliever’s resources. Rather, “we must cling with all of our soul to the Savior, value and hold fast with our heart the Grace that has called us, and fight Unbelief in God’s might and not under the Banner of Reason.”

And so Bilderdijk did. As Herman Bavinck writes of him, “Against the Revolution, he raised the banner of the Gospel.”^[2]

^[1] Willem Bilderdijk, “Aan Mr. Samuel Iperuszoon Wiselius,” in Brieven 3 (Amsterdam, 1837). All quotations in this article are taken from here. All translations are my own.

^[2] Herman Bavinck, Bilderdijk als denker en dichter (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1906), 216, my translation.

Saving faith is the instrument by which the whole person is united to the whole Christ in the unbreakable bond of the Holy Spirit. I am not my own, confesses the believer, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. Faith is not merely an activity of the mind assenting to the truth, nor merely an activity of the heart being assured of God and salvation, but an activity of the whole person. This faith, which the Holy Spirit kindles in our hearts, “embraces Jesus Christ with all His merits, appropriates Him, and seeks nothing more besides Him” (Belgic Confession art. 22). In the same way faith does not embrace half a Savior, as the Belgic Confession goes on to say, so also it is not an activity of half a person. Saving faith is nothing less than the whole self embracing a whole Savior. It is a matter of the heart, in the biblical sense, as that from which proceed all expressions of life in mind, feeling, and will. This is consistent with the way Paul speaks of our union with Christ, which is by faith. He writes to the Colossians, “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). Similarly to the Romans, he writes, “We were buried … with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:4). And to the Corinthians, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17). Paul does not qualify as if only part of you died with Christ; he has in mind a total death. And the same is true of the new life in Christ. By faith our whole self is brought into union with the whole Christ in his death and resurrection. This holistic view of faith is at the basis of true religion, as the means of fellowship with the living God. In creation we learn that man, as the image of God, was to serve and enjoy him with his whole self in true knowledge, righteousness and holiness, that is, as his prophet, priest and king. Likewise, in God’s work of redemption, regeneration is in principle a renewal of the whole person to this once forfeited, but now regained service in Christ. True religion, then, is not something that can be relocated to certain areas of a person’s life, but is the animating principle of all of life. Our view of faith must coincide with this.

The Roman Catholic Captivity of Faith and True Religion

This view of faith was something that was thankfully recovered by the Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church had reduced the full-orbed nature of faith to a mere activity of the mind assenting to revealed divine truth, and in doing so corrupted the true religion. Herman Bavinck, in his excellent essay, “Philosophy of Religion (Faith),” accurately summarizes the Roman Catholic view of faith:

It generally is the acceptance of a witness on the basis of the trustworthiness of the spokesman, and it retains this meaning also in the religious arena. It is true that an operation of the Spirit is necessary to illumine the mind and to bend the will. Still, faith is and remains an activity of the mind. It exists in the acceptance of and agreement with God’s truth as contained in Scripture and tradition, on the basis of the inerrant authority of the church (25-26).

While Roman Catholic theology is far from unified, this summary of Bavinck is consistent, for example, with the Catechism of the Catholic Church. First, for Rome faith is merely the assent of the mind. While they may speak of personal adherence and insert such language as “his whole being,” they never go beyond mere assent. For example, “By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God. With his whole being man gives his assent to God the revealer.'” (143). While the language, “whole being” is used, the action attributed to the “whole being” is only that of assenting. So either the whole being of man is reduced entirely to his mind or his whole being is brought in subordination to his mind. Even when speaking of Mary—in whom Rome venerates “the purest realization of faith”—the catechism only states that she “welcomes the tidings and promise brought by the angel Gabriel, believing that ‘with God nothing will be impossible’ and so giving her assent.” Aquinas is also cited as saying, “Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace.” Second, Rome supplants the Holy Spirit with the Church as the source of faith. It is the Church, according to Rome, who teaches the believer to say both “I believe” and “We believe” (167). Furthermore, “It is the Church that believes first, and so bears, nourishes and sustains my faith…” (168). And the Church is considered the believer’s mother because through her “we receive the life of faith” and so “she is also our teacher in the faith” (169). This view of faith severs the unity of the person, embraces rationalism, and injects a heavy dosage of impersonalism, imposing an institutional mediator between the believer and Christ, thus corrupting the true religion of fulsome fellowship with the living triune God.

The Reformation Rescue of Faith and True Religion

In response, “the Reformation,” writes Bavinck, “presented a completely different view of faith. Even though faith could properly be called knowledge, it was, as Calvin said, still more a matter of the heart than of the mind” (26). This is embodied in the great document of the Reformation, the Heidelberg Catechism. After stating in Q/A 20 that salvation is only for those who by true faith are grafted into Christ and accept all his blessings, it expectantly asks, “What is true faith?” The answer encompasses the whole person, mind and heart, intellect and soul, knowledge and assurance. It reads, “True faith is not only a knowledge and conviction that everything God reveals in his Word is true; it is also a deep-rooted assurance, created in me by the Holy Spirit through the gospel, that, out of sheer grace earned for us by Christ, not only others, but I too, have had my sins forgiven, have been made forever right with God, and have been granted salvation” (Q/A 21). In contrast to Roman Catholic theology, “faith thus received from the Reformers a unique, independent, religious meaning. It was distinguished essentially from the faith of which we speak in daily life, and also from historical and temporal faith, or faith in miracles. It was not just an acceptance of divine truth, but it also became the bond of the soul with Christ, the means of fellowship with the living God” (26). In this we have the restoration of true religion.

Following the Reformation we find unfortunate attempts to again sever the unity of the person with either rationalism and cold orthodoxy (reducing faith to the intellect) or pietism, mysticism and ethicism (reducing faith to feelings and morality), along with Immanuel Kant’s failed attempt to unite them once again. We will explore this, along with some of the manifold implications of the Reformation’s proper and wholesome view of faith for Christian living, preaching, evangelism, etc. in future articles. We will also look at some of the insights from Geerhardus Vos on the various words used throughout the Old and New Testaments for “faith,” so as to find biblical confirmation of the Reformed view.

On October 31st, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg. These were dark, dark days; the gospel had been shackled by the superstitions and idolatries of the Roman Catholic Church and consigned to her dungeon where its light was hidden from the world. But Luther’s action that day would initiate its emancipation by sparking the Protestant Reformation. The Reformers rescued the gospel from Rome’s dungeon and brought it to the hilltops from where its light could again emanate as a beacon of salvation for all to see. To remember this day in the history of Christ’s church, brothers from various Reformed denominations have contributed articles on each of the five solas of the Reformation: sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus, and soli Deo gloria. Together they form the five-fold light of the gospel that overcomes the darkness.

A Matter of Eternal Weight

Sola fide (“by faith alone”) is the Reformation’s most notorious doctrine and resides at the core of all Protestant identity. Of course it would be a reductionism to say the Reformers were only concerned with justification by faith alone; nonetheless, it was, in the words of Luther, articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae (“the article by which the church stands and falls”). It was here the true church fought the good fight of faith, many even unto martyrdom. The consequence of compromise was not negligible, but carried in its wake the very forfeiture of the power of God for salvation (Rom. 1:16). It was not merely a matter of life and death, but of eternal life and eternal death as it had a direct impact on the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Justification by Faith Alone

The Westminster Larger Catechism defines justification as “an act of God’s free grace unto sinners, in which he pardoneth all their sins, accepteth and accounteth their persons righteous in his sight; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but only for the perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Christ, by God imputed to them, and received by faith alone” (70). In a more succinct fashion, Bavinck defines it as “that gracious judicial act of God by which he acquits humans of all the guilt and punishment of sin and confers on them the right to eternal life.” Paul states the matter clearly in Galatians 2:9ff that “a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.” Any doctrine of salvation that undermines sola fide by requiring any kind or amount of merit that is not supplied by Christ, must be considered (in the full sense Paul meant it in Philippians 3:8) σκύβαλον—”rubbish” is an understatement. Why must we do this? In order that we may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of our own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith (Phil. 3:8-9). Calvin compared faith to an “empty vase” that is filled with and only with the righteousness of Christ. Luther said faith “clasps Christ as a ring clasps its jewel.” And by faith we sing, “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling.” With these pictures before us, a twin truth emerges. First, by faith we believe that we are truly sinners incapable of saving ourselves, devoid of any work that could contribute to our righteous standing before God. Second, by faith we believe that out of grace God justifies us for Christ’s sake, which brings us to glory in the fullness and wholeness of our Savior whose perfect righteousness has been freely and graciously imputed to us apart from works. Luther would speak of this righteousness of Christ by which sinners are justified as an “alien” righteousness—it is a righteousness not our own. Bavinck summarizes,

Luther’s great discovery about the “righteousness of God” was that it did not apply to God’s righteousness in himself but rather to the righteousness applied to believers through faith in Christ. God’s righteousness does not condemn us but justifies us. We are clothed in Christ’s righteousness. We are not justified by good works, but for good works, by grace. Faith thus believes that we are sinners and that for Christ’s sake we are justified. God’s declaration of righteousness is not a mere sentence God pronounces to himself but brings with it the act of making us righteous in Christ.

The Belgic Confession on Sola Fide: A Whole Savior

The Belgic Confession was forged in the fires of the Reformation primarily by Guido de Brès in early 1561. The Synod of Dort (1618-19) would later adopt the confession as one of the doctrinal standards of the Reformed Churches.[1] Article 22 (“Our Justification through Faith in Jesus Christ”) opens with a clear explanation of the source and content of faith, both of which serve the glory of God (soli Deo gloria). Its source is the Holy Spirit who “kindles in our hearts an upright faith.” While it is the believer who believes (neither the Spirit nor Christ believes for us), faith is nevertheless the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast (Eph. 2:9). Faith is not a personal achievement, but the end of all boasting before God. This faith then “embraces Jesus Christ with all His merits, appropriates Him, and seeks nothing more besides him.” With Calvin the confession is clear that “as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and is of no value to us.” Because faith embraces Jesus Christ, the question regarding salvation is never, “Is my faith sufficient?” (looking inward to the instrument), but “Is my Savior sufficient? (looking outward to the object). To an overwhelming degree, Christ answers Yes with the fullness of his merits, which he obtained in his life, death and resurrection. Faith does not embrace an abstract, bear or irrelevant Christ, but a Christ who is, in the words of Calvin, “clothed with his gospel” (Institutes, 3.2.6). To look to supplement the merits of Christ in any way is to say that “all things which are requisite to our salvation are not in Jesus Christ.” But by sola fide we say that “those who possess Jesus Christ through faith have complete salvation in Him.” He is not “half a Savior,” but a whole Savior.

Therefore we justly say with Paul, that we are justified by faith alone, or by faith apart from works. However, to speak more clearly, we do not mean that faith itself justifies us, for it is only an instrument with which we embrace Christ our righteousness. But Jesus Christ, imputing to us all His merits, and so many holy works which He has done for us and in our stead, is our righteousness. And faith is an instrument that keeps us in communion with Him in all His benefits, which, when they become ours, are more than sufficient to acquit us of our sins. (Belgic Confession 22)

Sola Fide and the Chief End of Man

Sola fide not only accents the glory of God in salvation, but also affords us assurance of right standing before God in order that we may enjoy him.

Certainly there can be no peace of mind and conscience, no joy in one’s heart, no buoyant moral activity, or a blessed life and death, before the guilt of sin is removed, all fear of punishment has been completely eradicated, and the certainty of eternal life in communion with God fills one’s consciousness with its consolation and power. (Bavinck)

The Belgic Confession puts it this way in article 23:

We always hold fast this foundation, ascribing all the glory to God, humbling ourselves before Him, and acknowledging ourselves to be such as we really are, without presuming to trust in any thing in ourselves, or in any merit of ours, relying and resting upon the obedience of Christ crucified alone, which becomes ours when we believe in Him. This is sufficient to cover all our iniquities, and to give us confidence in approaching God; freeing the conscience of fear, terror, and dread…

We can say then that sola fide complements the chief end of man: to glorify God and enjoy him forever. If justification is by faith alone, then God is to be maximally glorified in our salvation and we are to enjoy the wholeness of our Savior in whom we find eternal life.

For Further Study

• Cornelis Venema, The Gospel of Free Acceptance in Christ.
• Lane Tipton, “Biblical Theology and the Westminster Standards Revisited: Union with Christ and Justification Sola Fide.” Also listen to our interview with him on it.
• There are many helpful articles in Justified in Christ: God’s Plan for Us in Justification.
• P. Y. De Jong’s exposition of articles 22 and 23 of the Belgic Confession in The Church’s Witness to the World.
• Anthony Hoekema’s chapter on justification in Saved by Grace.

[1] For more on the fascinating history of the Belgic Confession see Nicolaas H. Gootjes’ The Belgic Confession: Its History and Sources. See also the introduction of Daniel Hyde’s helpful exposition of the confession, With Heart and Mouth.