For those of us who came of age in the “Young, Restless, and Reformed” era, the theological landscape was dominated by a specific triumvirate of voices. I cut my Reformed teeth, like so many others, on the ministries of R. C. Sproul, John MacArthur, and John Piper. These men were more than just authors; they were the architects of our worldviews. As I grew up in the context of a Lutheran megachurch and later attended a Baptist college in a suburb of Minneapolis, Piper was not merely a distant voice—he was a local and global household name. His Christian Hedonism provided the vocabulary for our passion, and his Desiring God vision was the sun around which our theological planets orbited. When I attended an evangelical seminary in the heart of Puritan New England, this reality only intensified.

In 2007, when the controversy surrounding the New Perspective on Paul erupted, I watched as Piper stepped into the breach. His defense of the imputation of Christ’s active obedience in The Future of Justification felt like a victory for the gospel. At the time, I defended him out of instinct and loyalty. He was “our guy,” and he was fighting for the forensic heart of the Reformation against the revisionism of N. T. Wright. In those days, it seemed impossible that the man who fought so valiantly for the ground of justification could ever be accused of drifting from the historic Protestant understanding of its instrument.

But a shift began to occur in my own thinking in April 2020. I had previously read R. Scott Clark’s critiques and dismissed them outright as somewhat pedantic, the technical hairsplitting of a distant academic. But the Holy Spirit has a way of softening pride when we least expect it. I listened to episode 149 of the Heidelcast and found my defenses lowered. The critique offered was sharp, and for the first time, I began to explore the concerns with a more open mind. It forced me back into the primary sources, both those of the Reformed tradition and Piper’s own bibliography. What I discovered was unsettling. While the vocabulary of imputation remained, the definition of the faith that receives that imputation was undergoing a radical renovation. This realization came to a head with the 2022 publication of Piper’s What Is Saving Faith? Reflections on Receiving Christ as a Treasure.

An Instrument . . . or an Attitude?

While What Is Saving Faith? is motivated by a laudable desire to preserve the vital, experimental nature of the Christian life and to guard against “dead orthodoxy,” his move to include “treasuring Christ” within the essence of faith itself fundamentally alters the nature of the justifying instrument. By moving affections from the fruit of faith into the essence of faith, Piper shifts the nature of the instrument from a passive reception to an affectional disposition. This creates a theological framework that, unintentionally or not, risks undermining the very forensic peace he spent decades defending by making a renovated human nature a component of our legal standing before God.

The Nature of Faith and the Lecherous Surgeon

In What Is Saving Faith?, Piper sets out to answer a question that most of us thought had been settled in the Reformation: What, precisely, is the “faith” that justifies? Historically, the Reformation tradition has defined saving faith through the triad of notitia (knowledge of what the gospel is), assensus (assent that the gospel is true), and fiducia (trust that what Christ did in the gospel is true for me).

The Westminster Confession of Faith 14.2 provides the classic summary of this historic Protestant position, stating that the principal acts of saving faith are “accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life, by virtue of the covenant of grace.” In this confessional framework, faith is an instrumental cause precisely because it is an “empty hand.” It does not justify because of any intrinsic quality in the believer but because it terminates on the object—Christ and His righteousness.

Many defend Piper by suggesting that he is simply affirming that good works and spiritual affections are the inevitable fruit of a regenerate heart—a position entirely consistent with Reformed orthodoxy. But Piper is remarkably clear that this is not his project. He is not merely asking if affections accompany faith but whether they are “in the very exercise of faith itself.” He writes,

I am not asking if such affections are the result of saving faith. I am asking whether such affectional realities are in the very exercise of faith itself. That is, are they part of the nature of faith? Are any of these affections so integral to saving faith that, if they were not there, we would not have saving faith? And I will try to show from the Bible that the answer to this question is yes. Saving faith has affectional elements without which the faith is not saving.¹

This represents a significant systematic departure from the confessional definition of Westminster. Piper argues that isolated words like “faith,” “belief,” and “trust” are “bricks embedded in the beautiful building of God-inspired truth,” and we cannot know their meaning unless we “press into the way they are used in the most illuminating biblical contexts.”² To illustrate the inadequacy of a purely forensic or “competency-based” trust, Piper offers a striking analogy: He asks whether one would trust a kind but inexperienced surgeon or a “foulmouthed, dishonest, lustful, highly skilled” surgeon for a life-saving brain surgery.

Experience, Piper notes, teaches us that we would trust the lecher with our lives because of his skill, even though we “neither love, nor admire, nor even want to be around” him.³ He argues that saving faith cannot be this kind of trust. It is not enough to believe that Christ can save you and to trust him to do so, but you must also have the proper affectional disposition toward him. For Piper, the traditional category of fiducia (cordial trust) has always assumed an affectional dimension—that no one intended a trust that “views Jesus as disliked, unadmirable, undesired, distasteful, repugnant.”⁴ He seeks to make this “assumed” affectional dimension explicit by weaving it into the nature of faith itself.

The Charity of Clarity

Before proceeding to a critical assessment of this shift, a word must be said regarding the nature of theological discourse. Often in these discussions, critics of this affectional model are accused of not understanding what is being said. I have always found this response to be both strange and, ironically, uncharitable toward Piper himself.

Piper is a competent communicator. Throughout his decades of ministry, he has demonstrated a gift for clear, evocative, and precise language. This is particularly true in his published books. There is no reason to assume that he is being inept or confusing in his most recent formal engagement with this doctrine. Unlike other contemporary figures whose meaning is often obscured by layers of equivocation or shifting analogies, Piper writes with remarkable clarity. What he means is not hidden or poorly articulated.

There is a popular adage suggesting that when someone tells you who they are, you should believe them. I would like to adapt that principle for our purposes: When a teacher tells you what he thinks, you ought to believe him. We must grant the author the charity of assuming he is fully capable of conveying his own positions. To suggest that those who raise concerns are simply misunderstanding him is to suggest that he has failed in his primary task as a teacher. Therefore, in the analysis that follows, I intend to take him at face value, believing that he means exactly what he has written.

When the Empty Hand Becomes the Ordered Heart

As someone who has wrestled with these truths, I must pause here. We must be careful to represent the view accurately: The author is not merely saying that believers should love Christ, but that justifying faith is itself an act of love and treasuring. This shifts the focus from the act of receiving to a specific dispositional posture.

Yet theological precision requires us to ask, What happens to the instrument of justification when it is no longer defined by its object (the promised Christ) but by its quality (our internal treasuring)? By redefining the “empty hand” of faith as a “treasure-filled” heart, the definition has been fundamentally altered. A new requirement has been introduced into the instrument itself. The prerequisite of a renovated nature—that is, a heart that can and does properly “treasure”—has been moved into the very moment of our legal standing before God.

In the next article, we will examine how this “affectional” renovation of the instrument parallels the errors of lordship salvation and the Roman Catholic doctrine of “faith formed by love.” We will see that when the instrument is qualified by the state of our hearts, the peace of the forensic gospel is inevitably traded for the uncertainty of the inner life.

Notes

1. John Piper, What Is Saving Faith?: Reflections on Receiving Christ as a Treasure (Crossway, 2022), 15.
2. Piper, What Is Saving Faith?, 17.
3. Piper, What Is Saving Faith?, 17.
4. Piper, What Is Saving Faith?, 18.

©Tony Arsenal. All Rights Reserved.

You can find this whole series here.

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Post authored by:

• Tony Arsenal

  

  Tony Arsenal holds Master of Arts degrees in Church History and Theology from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He co-hosts the Reformed Brotherhood Podcast and is a member of an Orthodox Presbyterian Church congregation. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife, Ashley, and their children.

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