What is Saving Faith? Reflections on Receiving Christ as Treasure. John Piper. 2022. [April] 304 pages. [Source: Review copy]
First sentence: Why do so many thoughtful Christians from centuries ago describe saving faith as though it were an experience involving the affections and not just a decision of the will?
What is Saving Faith? That is the question John Piper is asking and answering in his newly published book. The question in and of itself is a good one. Every Christian needs to be able to know--somewhere on the spectrum of vague and fuzzy to academically precise--what saving faith is...or...what saving faith is not. Those two--what it is and what it is not--do seem to be two sides of the coin.
In this book, Piper argues that saving faith is a RECEIVING faith and that that receiving faith is intricately and intimately connected to receiving Christ as TREASURE. In other words, it's not merely an intellectual receiving but a whole receiving--mind, heart/body, soul/spirit. ALL of you receives ALL of Christ. And in that receiving there is great joy and delight. Christ is seen as the ultimate one-and-only treasure.
Piper is many things, but concise is not exactly one of them. This question has been asked and answered beautifully in Piper's previous book GOD IS THE GOSPEL. God is the Gospel is all kinds of fantastic (aka some kind of wonderful.) It is more concise, more straight forward, definitely more reader friendly.
What Is Saving Faith? is a bit unwieldy (not in a literal sense), dry, academic, repetitive. It has moments of beauty. How could it not? It talks of the mighty, glorious, wondrous person of Jesus Christ. But the journey there is more of a hike than it perhaps has to be. (Not that I'm opposed to academic/scholarly, "proper theology" books. I'm not.)
I will give credit to Piper's almost exclusive reliance on Scripture for answering the question(s) at hand. He uses Scripture and almost always Scripture foremost to lay out his argument before readers. He does make use of church fathers/church history. But only as secondary resources.
He tackles the subject thoroughly taking absolutely no short cuts; he makes no assumptions. He is willing to admit when and where his arguments present as controversial or against the status quo. He does try to logically and reasonably counter argue with his opponents or would-be opponents.
Perhaps this is the kind of book you want. Perhaps you don't want a quick "big picture" view of the subject. Perhaps it is not enough to say, hey there's grass. You want someone to look at every single blade of grass in a pasture.
But when a question is so fundamentally BASIC and ESSENTIAL and foundational, in my humble opinion, a more straight-forward, more concise book is to be desired. God is the Gospel, for me, is one of those books. I realized this early on--relatively--when Piper started saying things like, "Where Christ is not received as treasure, he is being used. This is not saving faith. It is tragic that many think it is."
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