Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 85:1 (Spring 2023)
Article: Saving Faith In Gisbertus Voetius, Johannes Hoornbeeck, And Petrus Van Mastricht
Author: Todd M. Rester

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Saving Faith In Gisbertus Voetius, Johannes Hoornbeeck, And Petrus Van Mastricht

Todd M. Rester

Todd M. Rester is Associate Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary.

I. Introduction

At least two stimuli, one negative and the other positive, might prompt a profitable survey of the definition of saving faith among three early modern Dutch Reformed theologians whose combined professorial careers spanned from 1636 to 1706. The first stimulus arises from a recently published popular-level work that is proving controversial in some quarters of anglophone evangelicalism for its attempt to elucidate, but in fact redefine, saving faith. The second reason is more academic due to contributions over the past thirty years and recently in scholarship in historical theology, drawing attention to theologians of the Nadere Reformatie and the centrality of the nature and experience of faith in that working definition.

As to the first reason, in the spring of 2022, pastor and theologian John Piper published What Is Saving Faith? Reflections on Receiving Christ as a Treasure, precipitating some debate among Christians, pastors, and theologians regarding the nature of saving faith due to his understanding of love as a primary constitutive element.1 Notably he formulated true saving faith as functionally

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the experienced affection of love as desire. Piper argues that an act of faith—receiving as the affectional desiring—is the cause of faith’s transformative power.2 Does it matter pastorally if we think of affectional elements in saving faith as constitutive causes or requisite effects? Are there historical distinctions worth maintaining between the nature of faith and its acts? Piper argues in existentialist and actualized terms that “[faith] is act, it does not do acts.”3 But given that it is human moral agents that act by faith, the older distinctions regarding the nature of faith and its origin, regarding the sort of faculties, capabilities, and potencies that give rise to its operation, and regarding the operation of faith moving toward its realization in actuality in various degrees, all point to lines of historic distinction within biblical orthodoxy that require a great amount of care and clarity. And therefore, since Piper appeals to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources that do maintain these distinctions with much greater care, consistency, and clarity, a consideration of not only Petrus van Mastricht’s views of saving faith, but also the views of two of M...