In the previous article, I established that in his 2022 volume What Is Saving Faith?, John Piper is not merely interested in the fruits of faith. He is interested in the nature of faith. By insisting that affections like “treasuring” and “relishing” Christ are not merely fruits (or evidence) of faith but are integral to the very essence of justifying faith, Piper has fundamentally altered the Protestant’s “empty hand” that receives justification from Christ.

Piper does not see this as an innovation as much as a logical progression in a long-standing war against nominalism/antinomianism. He explicitly views this project as an extension of the questions posed by John MacArthur during the Lordship Salvation controversy of the 1980s. Piper recounts reading MacArthur’s The Gospel According to Jesus (1988) like a “miser finding gold,” celebrating MacArthur’s “blast across the bow” of a movement that suggested one could receive Christ as Savior while rejecting Him as Lord.¹

Furthermore, he understands this work as a continuation and expansion of the arguments he first posited in Future Grace (1995), where he sought to link the power of the gospel to the presence of a Spirit-sustained satisfaction in God.²

While we ought to count Piper and MacArthur as allies and cobelligerents in the gospel, at least broadly speaking, the systematic architecture of justification sola feels introduces a dangerous rift. R. Scott Clark has already done yeoman’s work in explaining the issues inherent in the Lordship model, particularly how it risks turning the gospel into a new law by making the believer’s response a part of the ground of his standing.

In both models, the instrument of justification is no longer a passive reception of an alien righteousness. Instead, the instrument is “qualified” by a renovation of the fallen human nature. Just as Lordship Salvation unintentionally blurs justification and sanctification by arguing that fiducia is a renovated will that desires to obey the Lord,³ so also Piper blurs these categories by arguing that fiducia is a renovated affection toward Christ. For MacArthur, it is the will; for Piper, it is the affections. In both instances, sanctification is pulled forward and made a prerequisite for the forensic declaration of justification. If the hand that receives Christ must first be “treasure filled” or “surrendered,” then the ground of our standing has quietly shifted from the Object of faith to the quality of the subject.

Validating the Anathemas

The most stunning unforced error Piper makes in his 2022 volume is his explicit acknowledgment—and validation—of the fundamental critique Rome leveled against the Reformation. In his attempt to distance himself from papal theology, Piper ironically grants the very premise that necessitated the Council of Trent’s anathemas.

Piper quotes several canons from the Sixth Session of Trent, which warn against thinking oneself “exempt from the observance of the commandments” or believing that “nothing besides faith is commanded in the Gospel.”⁴

To the shock of many Reformed readers, Piper defends these Tridentine warnings, stating, “These statements are legitimate warnings against an unbiblical view of justification by faith alone. It is true that obedience must and will mark the person who is genuinely justified by saving faith. . . . Faith without works is dead. Such faith does not justify.”⁵

By calling Rome’s warnings “legitimate,” Piper suggests that the historic Protestant articulation of sola fide—upheld by figures like Martin Luther and John Calvin—is somehow prone to an “unbiblical view” that only his affectional model can rectify. He recognizes the knife’s edge he is trying to walk, admitting he wants to include affections without “smuggling into faith a kind of meritorious virtue that would turn justification by faith alone into justification by human goodness or holiness.”⁶

Piper correctly notes that Roman Catholics have no problem treating faith as affectional because they treat faith, understood as a virtue, as “part of justification-sanctification.”⁷

Yet he fails to see the danger of his own path. It is unwise and unsafe to lock arms theologically with Rome on their critique of sola fide. You can grant someone’s argument only so much before you are making the same argument they are. Piper essentially grants Rome their critique and then attempts to resist their conclusions merely by force of will.

The Unnecessary Struggle

This theological gymnastics is entirely unnecessary if we maintain a proper understanding of the nature of saving faith as notitia (knowledge), assensus (assent), and fiducia (trust). The Reformers did not leave the empty hand of faith vulnerable to antinomianism; they simply understood that the hand is empty because it is busy clinging to Christ.

Piper has to wrestle with the similarities between his view and Rome’s only because they are substantively the same in the most important points: the renovation of the instrument. If you have to go on at length about how your view may seem like the Roman Catholic view but it really is not . . . me thinks the lady doth protest too much. If faith only justifies when it is animated by the affection of treasuring, the distinction between justification sola feels and Trent’s “faith formed by love” becomes one of linguistic nuance rather than theological substance.

Putting the Cart Before the Horse

In his effort to ground his views in the Reformed tradition, Piper appeals to the Westminster Confession of Faith 11.2, which states that faith is “ever accompanied with all other saving graces, and is no dead faith, but works by love.”⁸

Here, however, we see the danger of his “filling up” of words.

In the historic Protestant view, the Confession is making a vital distinction: Faith is the sole instrument, though it is never alone in the person justified. The “other saving graces”—such as love, delight, and treasuring—accompany faith as inseparable companions, but they do not constitute the nature or essence of the instrument itself. Piper, however, collapses this distinction by design. He is not arguing that these affections merely follow or accompany faith; he is arguing that they are of the very nature and essence of faith. Recall that he writes,

I am not asking whether affections . . . accompany saving faith. 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? . . . Saving faith has affectional elements without which the faith is not saving.⁹

The force of the argument here is profound: For Piper, a faith stripped of these affectional elements is not merely a broken or ineffective version of the real thing; it ceases to be faith at all. By moving what the Confession defines as an “accompaniment” into the “essence” of the instrument, he has fundamentally distorted the Protestant definition of faith. This forces a renovation of the fallen human nature into the position of an instrumental means. We are no longer justified by a faith that leads to love; we are justified by a faith that is love. The logical entailment is not that we are justified by faith in Christ but in love for Christ. By Piper’s own logic, when we hyphenate “justification-sanctification” by making the latter a component of the former’s instrument, we have essentially told the “anxious conscience” that he must look within to find a sufficiently “treasuring” heart before he can look up to find a merciful Savior. Adding any quality to faith as a condition of its justifying power eventually leads back to a works-based righteousness, even if those works are internal and affectional.

The Connoisseur’s Hand

As we noted in the first article, we must take Piper at his word. He is a clear writer, and he has told us what he thinks. He believes that “faith,” “belief,” and “trust” are inadequate words if they do not include these affectional realities.¹⁰

But if we believe him, we must also believe the implications of his words. By filling up the meaning of faith with affections, he has emptied the empty hand. He has replaced the simple fiducia—the trust of a beggar in a promise—with the sophisticated relishing of a connoisseur. In doing so, he has created a system where the renovated nature of the believer becomes a co-instrument alongside the merits of Christ.

In our final installment, we will examine the pastoral fallout of this shift. We will see how this “affectional neonomianism” burdens the conscience and why the only hope for a sinner is to return to a faith that justifies not because it is treasure filled but because it is an empty hand clinging to an objective Savior.

Notes

1. John Piper, What Is Saving Faith? (Crossway, 2022), 30.
2. Piper, What Is Saving Faith?, 33–34.
3. See John MacArthur, The Gospel According to Jesus (Zondervan, 1988), 173.
4. Piper, What Is Saving Faith?, 40–41.
5. Piper, What Is Saving Faith?, 41.
6. Piper, What Is Saving Faith?, 39.
7. Piper, What Is Saving Faith?, 39.
8. WCF 11.2, as quoted in Piper, What Is Saving Faith?, 32.
9. Piper, What Is Saving Faith?, 15.
10. Piper, What Is Saving Faith?,  17.

©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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