In the previous articles, we observed the structural parallels between John Piper’s affectional model, what I have termed justification sola feels, and the errors of John MacArthur’s Lordship Salvation, as well as the historic Roman Catholic doctrine of faith formed by love. In both modern evangelical schemas, the empty hand of faith is implicitly renovated into a qualified, active instrument.

But theology is never merely an exercise in structural engineering; it is the bread by which the sheep live or the poison by which they wither. Piper is a man with a deep pastoral heart. He wants his readers to be happy in God. He wants a faith that is vibrant and vital. Every Reformed believer should share that desire. We are not interested in a dead, cold orthodoxy that treats the gospel as a dry mathematical equation.

Yet, as we turn to the final casualty of this affectional shift, we find that Piper’s solution for “dead faith” kills the very thing that makes faith alive: its objective certainty.

The ultimate casualty of an affectional definition of faith is the Christian’s assurance. By shifting the gaze from the objective promise of Christ to the subjective intensity of one’s “treasuring,” we replace the peace of the gospel with a new, internal law that we can never fully satisfy.

In the historic Protestant framework, faith is an instrument of peace because it looks away from itself to its object, the finished work of Jesus Christ. When the Westminster Confession of Faith 14.2 describes the principal acts of saving faith, it uses the language of cessation: “accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life.”

But when Piper defines faith as “relishing” or “treasuring” Christ as a prerequisite for justification, he introduces a subjective variable into the essence of the instrument. The question for the struggling saint is no longer, Is Christ a sufficient Savior? but rather, Is my treasuring of Him sufficiently intense? Because our affections are notoriously fickle, a faith that is constituted by affections is a faith that can never be sure of itself.

Keeping the Horse Before the Cart

To reject Piper’s essentialist view of affections is not to say that affections and good works have no place in the Christian’s life and assurance. The Reformed tradition has a robust category for these realities, but it is one of secondary evidence, not constitutive essence.

It is vital to remind the reader here that this classic distinction, viewing affections strictly as fruit and evidence, is precisely what Piper is arguing against. He does not want affections to be relegated to the safe category of downstream fruit. As we documented from his own primary text, he is explicitly not asking if affections are the result or evidence of saving faith; rather, he is claiming they are of the very nature and essence of faith itself. By refusing to let affections remain in the category of secondary evidence, Piper forces them into the upstream instrument of justification.

The Westminster Confession of Faith 18.2 outlines a beautiful, threefold foundation for assurance that keeps the horse firmly before the cart:

This certainty is not a bare conjectural and probable persuasion grounded upon a fallible hope; but an infallible assurance of faith founded upon the divine truth of the promises of salvation, the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made, the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God.

Observe the hierarchy established by the Westminster Assembly. The infallible assurance of faith is founded first, foremost, and fundamentally “upon the divine truth of the promises of salvation.” This is our primary, objective anchor. As the author of Hebrews declares, we have strong consolation because of the immutability of God’s counsel and the oath He swore (see Heb 6:17–19). Our hope is an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, precisely because it is fastened to Christ within the heavenly veil, completely outside of ourselves.

Only after establishing this objective foundation does the Confession speak of “the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made.” There is a biblical and proper place for looking at our own hearts to find secondary confirmation of our standing. We can look to the “inward evidence” of 1 John 2:3, “And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments,” or the fruit of the Spirit to find a probable persuasion that has been deepened into an infallible assurance. We are commanded to “be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election” (2 Pet 1:10) by growing in these graces.

These inward graces and the testimony of the Spirit of adoption are subordinate witnesses, however. They confirm the primary promise; they do not supplant it.

By infusing these graces into the very definition of faith, Piper effectively strips them of their capacity to serve as comforting evidences. The moment a fruit is made part of the essence of the instrument, it ceases to be secondary evidence that reassures us and becomes a primary entry requirement that terrifies us. If the hand itself must be “affectionally qualified” to justify, then we can never look at our fruits with peace because their lack of perfection invalidates any comfort or assurance they might provide.

Moreover, this collapse of faith into love represents a fundamental category error in biblical theology: It confuses the law and the gospel. To command a sinner to love and treasure Christ as a prerequisite for justification is to mistake the law for the gospel. Loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength is, after all, the first and greatest commandment, the ultimate summary of all our moral obligations toward God (Matt 22:37–38; see also Westminster Larger Catechism 98, 102).

When we make this affectional disposition a condition or constituent part of the justifying instrument, we are smuggling our highest duty of obedience into the very hand that is meant to be empty. This is not the covenant of grace; it is a covert covenant of works, demanding an emotional and psychological legalism that can only crush the believer under the weight of an impossible standard.

Yet the danger runs even deeper. Even if we properly understand fiducia as trust, if we do not first look to Christ’s objective promise, even looking to our own trust and confidence in Christ will leave us wondering. Unless the objective promise of Christ is the only thing our empty hand clings to, we will always be robbed of the infallible assurance that is our rightful possession and covenant inheritance.

Of Frozen Lakes and Weak Steps

To illustrate this difference, we can look to a familiar sight for anyone who grew up in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes. In Minnesota life does not stop when winter arrives. The water merely changes state. As a child, I spent my winters under gray skies on those frozen sheets. Swimming was traded for sledding and ice fishing. I even took shortcuts across the wide, frozen bays on my long walks to school once the deep freeze set in.

There is a pastoral analogy often used in these snow-laden pulpits to describe the relationship between the objectivity of justification and the subjectivity of our faith.

To venture out onto the ice at all, a traveler must possess a certain baseline of understanding. The man who walks on the ice must know that lakes freeze in the winter (notitia); believe that this physical fact is true (assensus); and trust, however timidly, that this particular lake is actually frozen and capable of bearing his weight (fiducia).

Imagine, then, two men standing at the edge of this frozen lake. The first man is bold, confident, and steps out onto the ice without a single moment of hesitation. The second man is timid, trembling, and terrified. He gingerly tests the edge with his boot, shivering with anxiety as he takes one small, agonizingly slow step forward.

Yet both men are held up. The bold man is not kept from falling because his confidence is great, and the timid man does not plunge into the freezing depths below because his trust is weak. What holds them both up is not the quality, intensity, or boldness of their subjective trust; it is the objective stability, thickness, and solidity of the ice itself.

This is the great, comforting truth of the Reformed understanding of justification. The empty hand of faith does not need to be warm, steady, or bold to receive Christ’s righteousness; it merely needs to touch the hem of his robe. The utility of the instrument lies entirely in its object, not in its internal quality.

But if we apply the logic of justification sola feels, this classic frozen lake illustration is no longer enough to keep the traveler dry. For Piper’s thesis to be true, the man must not only know that lakes freeze, believe that fact to be true, and trust that this lake is in fact frozen, but he must also have a deep, affectional appreciation for the lake itself. In Piper’s system, even if the ice is ten feet thick, the traveler’s lack of “relish,” “admiration,” or “affection” means his faith is not saving. He must, by theological necessity, plunge through the solid, objective ice to his frigid and terrible death.

This exposes the central, pastoral danger of the affectional shift. By redefining fiducia (trust) to mean a renovated affection, specifically, “treasuring” or “relishing” Christ, Piper has shifted the ground of assurance from the thickness of the ice to the aesthetic appreciation of the traveler. He argues that we cannot trust Christ the way we would trust a highly skilled but lustful, dishonest surgeon whom we neither love nor admire nor even want to be around.

But this analogy falls apart in the light of the gospel. The sinner does not look to Christ as a detached specialist hired for a clinical procedure. We look to him as the Great Physician of souls. And contrary to what Piper writes, it is not the fact that we find the Physician admirable, adorable, or relishable that determines whether he is objectively our Savior. It is simply the fact that he is the physician who came for the spiritually sick, the good physician who seeks and saves the lost. On our worst days, when we feel the symptoms of our indwelling sin most acutely, our faith is often a trembling, unfeeling sigh. Yet, if we have reached out to touch the hem of his garment, we are saved. He does not demand that we admire his hands before he heals us; he simply heals us because he is good.

The Only Comfort in Life and Death

Consider how these two different systems operate in the crucible of real pastoral care, particularly when sitting with a believer on his deathbed—someone physically exhausted, emotionally flatlined, and deeply conscious of a lifetime of failures.

A pastoral approach shaped by Piper’s justification sola feels is forced to ask, “Do you truly treasure Christ? Is he your supreme treasure? Do you relish him?” If “faith, belief, and trust” are inadequate words without these affectional realities, then the counselor must push the dying, weary saint to perform an exhausting emotional self-examination. To a saint whose emotional capacity is currently depleted by illness, trauma, or clinical depression, this is not good news. It is a demand for a work at the very moment he has no psychological strength left to perform it.

Contrast this with the biblical and confessional pastoral approach, which does not send the dying saint inward to audit his own appreciation but points him immediately to the glorious, objective comfort of Christ’s righteousness:

Pastor: What is your only comfort in life and in death?
Dying Saint: That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.

This is forensic, covenantal peace. Our comfort lies not in our ownership of Christ nor in our subjective capacity to relish him perfectly but in his ownership of us. A beggar’s hand receives a gift just as effectively whether that hand is steady and joyful or cold, numb, and trembling. Piper’s model replaces the beggar’s hand with the connoisseur’s palate. In his model, the gift is only savingly received if it is properly appreciated.

The Double Grace of a Forensic Hope

To find peace in life and comfort in death, we must return to the classic Reformed distinction popularized by John Calvin: the duplex gratia, or “double grace.” Justification and sanctification are distinct blessings of our union with Christ. They are inseparable, like light and heat from a single fire, but they must never be collapsed into one another. Justification is a once-for-all forensic declaration based on an alien, imputed righteousness; sanctification is a progressive, inward work of the Spirit that produces the very affections Piper so rightly desires (see Westminster Larger Catechism 70, 75, and 77).

The systematic mistake of justification sola feels is the attempt to collapse these two graces at the level of the instrument. By pulling the love of sanctification into the trust of justification, Piper has inadvertently poisoned the well of assurance. By granting the Roman Catholic critique that sola fide is structurally prone to antinomianism unless faith is defined as an affectional virtue, Piper has functionally abandoned the empty hand of the Reformation.

If we are to have peace in our final breath, our hope cannot be that we have “treasured Christ as our supreme treasure.” Our hope must be that Christ has treasured us with a perfect, forensic love that was satisfied on a Roman cross. We do not need a faith that is animated by our love; we need a faith that clings to the love that animated Christ to lay down His life for the ungodly, those of us who, quite often, do not relish Him as we ought.

We must be content with a faith that is a simple “receiving and resting.” We must look away from our fickle hearts and look up to the objective Savior. Our confidence is not based on how we feel about him but on what he has done for us. That is our only comfort in life and in death—and it is more than enough.

©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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