Chambers:

Is saying that faith is a gift of grace equivalent to a belief in the purchase of faith?

In Owen is view this is clearly the case. It is his contention at the beginning of the work that

the death and blood-shedding of Jesus Christ hath wrought, and doth effectually procure, for all those that are concerned in it, eternal redemption, consisting in grace here and glory hereafter,⁶⁴

and, as we saw, his first premise in relation to the purchase of faith states that

whatever is freely bestowed upon us, in and through Christ, that is all wholly the procurement and merit of the death of Christ.⁶⁵

Not only does he expand the category of faith in his discussion of means to include grace, as we have seen, but he insists that access to and experience of the covenant of grace is only by purchase.⁶⁶ Grace itself is merited for us by Christ.⁶⁷

Is this then just a quarreling over words, when we suggest that the acknowledgment that faith is a gift of grace is no support for the notion of the purchase of faith?⁶⁸ To this we must respond with three observations.

Firstly, the acceptance of the distinction within grace is itself moot, and it is not a feature of modern studies of grace, which tend to emphasise the underlying unity of its varied uses in the New Testament, especially in the Pauline use, which is the major and determinative New Testament use.⁶⁹ Even were it accepted it could be well argued that where grace is related to faith it is referring to God’s electing, sovereign grace [especially Eph. 2:8-9, Phil. 1:29, 2 Pet. 1:1, Acts 11:48, 14:23, 18:27], grace which cannot be thought of as ‘purchased‘, unless it is to be the cause of itself. Secondly, the words are different in that they set the participants in salvation in different relationships in respect to one another. In Owen’s understanding, purchase is from God, for the elect, by Christ. By contrast, the gift of faith is given by God, to the elect, through Christ. While Christ is the mediating agent in both, the initiating agent has changed from Christ to God, and thus the nature of the role of Christ in relation to people’s coming to faith also changes. Thus faith seen as the gift of God’s grace, a phraseology more consistent with the New Testament terminology, does not allow Owen to draw the causal links he desires and needs between the death of Christ and subjective faith, especially where the context suggests Paul is referring primarily to the Father, as in Eph. 2: 8-9 and Phil. 1: 28-9.⁷⁰ Thirdly, Owen’s making these terms equivalent in effect further highlights his dependence on the construct of the covenant of redemption. They can only be equivalent if one accepts his initial premise.

In fact, Owen’s talk of ‘purchase’ could well be seen as having a distorting effect on the biblical idea of faith, by reifying it, making it a thing or object or commodity, instead of a relational response. The phrase ‘purchase of faith’ is a category confusion, for trust, like love, can only be given by the subject, not bought, and arises in the subject. While, of course, it is bought for us, and not from us, even that suggests a passivity that is not a feature of the New Testament is portrayal. While the trusting attitude itself can be conceptualised as passive and receptive in relation to the reception of righteousness, we are not passive but active in that trusting, we are those who believe.⁷¹ It is this active responsibility that talk of the purchase of faith has the potential to undermine, and which the New Testament’s portrayal of faith in relation to the temporal realities of the preaching of the gospel and renewal by the Spirit do not. Nor does seeing faith as a gift of grace suggest passivity to the same extent, for the realisation of that gift again focuses on God is gracious work in history, on the preaching of Christ, whereas purchase emphasises determined causality. Gift continues to be the language of grace, but purchase moves into the language of rights.⁷²

We have spent some time examining the concept of the purchase or procurement of faith and associated ideas. Why the labour? To stress that the ‘purchase of faith,’ is not a self evident biblical idea that can be read off the text of scripture. Rather it is a theoretical causal construct dependent on the covenant of redemption. Owen could argue that he would in no way seek to undermine anything that the scripture has said about faith and its relation to the cross. It is just that he, with his talk of the purchase of faith by the cross, is revealing the relation of the cross to believing as seen from the perspective of eternity. But Owen would have to say more. It is revealing it as seen from eternity where the viewpoint of eternity is the relation of the Father and the Son in the one work of redemption as conceptualised in the covenant of redemption. The whole legitimacy of Owen’s insistence on the purchase of faith is dependent on the legitimacy of that covenant, and it is that covenant which we shall explore after we have examined its temporal foundation, Owen’s understanding of ‘redemption’ in scripture.

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