Wendelin's "Christian Theology": Doctrine of Justifying Faith, Part 5

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THESIS XVI:  Hitherto the form of faith:  Its proper end is the eternal salvation of the elect.

EXPLANATION:  Thus Scripture teaches:  John 3:16, Whosoever believeth in Him hath eternal life.  John 20:31, That ye, believing, might have life through His name.  Hebrews 10:39, We believe to the saving of the soul.

THESIS XVII:  Thus the causes of faith.  The effects attributed to it in Scripture are various, justification, regeneration, reception of the Holy Spirit, adoption as the Children of God, victory over the world, the obtaining of bodily and spiritual goods, eternal life.  But the formal and specific effect, which all the others follow, is the apprehension of Christ and His merit.

EXPLANATION:  I.  Those effects are attributed to faith, not as the principal or meritorious cause, but as the instrumental cause, insofar as faith apprehends Christ, because of whom all spiritual goods are communicated to us:  whence we are not said to obtain these things because of faith, but by faith:  let what things we said on Thesis XI above concerning the proper and principal object of faith be considered.

Now, even if all good works proceed from various habits of virtues, as their proximate causes; yet the same are also attributed to faith, not because faith alone of itself is able to exercise acts of all other virtues (for thus the remaining virtues would be useless), but in another threefold manner:

(1.)  Because it apprehends Christ, who is the sole fountain of all the power of doing good in us, according to that saying:  without me ye can do nothing, John 15:5.

(2.)  Because it, persuaded by arguments, whereby Scripture urges us to the exercise of all virtues, stimulates and excites all the virtues to their proper acts.

(3.)  Because it has the power to obtain all grace and all virtue.

Scripture calls sin, whatever is done without faith,[1] that is, whatever is done with faith not going before, not accompanying, not directing:  whence it appears that faith is the leader and guide of all other virtues, and the procurer of all grace to them.

II.  Among the effects of faith the Orthodox also reckon this:  that it sets before itself things future and absent as present:  not indeed bodily, but spiritually, aided by the word and Sacraments:  to which they refer that eminent saying of the Epistle to the Hebrews 11:1, where faith is called the ὑπόστασις τῶν ἐλπιζομένων, the substance of the things hoped for:  or, what makes the things hoped for exist:  as the Greek scholiast admirably interprets the Apostolic sentence:  whose words are worthy of observation:  Πίστις ἔστι αὐτὴ ἡ ὑπόστασις καὶ οὐσία ἐλπιζομένων πραγμάτων.  Ἐπειδὴ γὰρ τὰ ἐν ἐλπίσιν ἀνυπόστατά ἐστιν ὡς τέως μὴ παρόντα, ἡ πίστις οὐσία τις αὐτῶν καὶ ὑπόστασις γίνεται, εἶναι αὐτὰ καὶ παρεῖναι τρόπον τινὰ παρασκευάζουσα διὰ τοῦ πιστεύειν εἶναι, Faith is itself the substance and essence of things hoped for:  For, since the things in hope are without substance, as not yet present, faith becomes a sort of essence and substance of them, causing them in a certain way to exist and to be present through believing that they are.

Christ elsewhere describes the power of faith in this way, when He says that His own day was seen by Abraham, John 8:56.  By this power of faith also, believers under the Old Testament ate the flesh of Christ, not yet existing outside of its causes.

But against this opinion and declaration insolently and sophistically inveigh some of the Lutherans, and among them Graver:  who is hardly able to discover an end of the absurd consequences in his Absurdis, page 158; and concerning which see Exercitation 107, § 24.

III.  Our Theologians, imitating the Fathers, teach that no distance of places hinders faith, and say that faith also summons unto heaven, which some of the Lutherans quite impotently assail:  see Exercitation 107, § 8, 21; Exercitation 108, § 6.  The same contend that the act of faith is nothing other than an imagination:  against whom we dispute in Exercitation 104, § 3-5.  I ask, consider, friendly reader, whether what marvelous effects are attributed to faith, Hebrews 11, could be attributed to imagination?  Those that are of sound mind reject the exalted wonder-working imagination of the Paracelsists.[2]

[1] Romans 14:23.

[2] The Paracelsists extolled the power of the imagination in producing real-world effects, magical, curative, and otherwise.