D. Faith Alone
D. Faith Alone
Vermigh views faith as the means of justification.329 After asserting that justification is “not by works” in his first proposition, he endeavors to convince readers that it is properly “received by faith.” This second proposition is supported by an arsenal of biblical texts, especially from the letter to the Romans, where Martyr begins.330 For much of his argument, Martyr has the work of Albert Pighius in his crosshairs.331 It is in this section that Vermigh’s rhetoric reaches new heights (or depths) of aggression, often ad hominem (i.e., “[Pighius] deserves to be laughed at”).332 One begins to discern in such comments a connection between the intensity of Martyr’s acrimony and his adjudication of Pighius as a Pelagian.333 Less frequently, he engages the ideas of his predecessor at Oxford, Richard Smith.334
Over against meritorious works, faith is recognized by Vermigh to function as the active instrumentum by which one is declared righteous.335 Vermigh describes faith as that which actively “takes hold and receives” the promise of forgiveness.336 And he sharply distinguishes this “most sure and certain” faith from a “dead faith,” “historical faith,” “human faith,” “temporary faith,” and “naked” faith.337 It is “never alone but always draws along with it various motions of the mind,” particularly “confidence, hope, and similar affections.”338 The absence of these qualities in a person calls into question whether he truly possesses justifying faith.339
Vermigh affirms that faith is “a firm and certain assent (assensus) of the mind to the words of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit, leading to the salvation of believers.”340 This emphasis on assent is consistent with Martyr’s previous loci.341 In his Romans locus, however, Vermigh introduces for the first time the notion of fiducia (trust).342 Precisely because it is the Holy Spirit who inspires faith, creating “a new heart and mind,”343 it naturally includes, for Vermigh, a volitional impulse. “In this way,” he reasons, “we say that the faith which is effective differs very much from historical assent, and that we are justified by the [enlivened] faith we have just described.”344 In saying this, Martyr has not jettisoned assensus as a constituent element of justifying faith;345 he has simply broadened his definition to more thoroughly account for the activation of the human will.
The third and final proposition of Vermigh’s locus concerns the necessity of sola fide, a doctrine that he staunchly defends.346
This saying [sola fide] is proved by all those places of Scripture which teach that we are justified freely, as well as those that affirm that justification comes without works and also those that draw an antithesis between grace and works. I say that all these places truly prove that we are justified by faith only, even if this word “only” is not read in the Scriptures; but that is not of much weight, since its signification is derived from them by necessity.347
Martyr begins his argument for sola fide by expressing his disagreement with Richard Smith, whom he sarcastically describes as “the very light of divinity” (rarely does Vermigh miss an opportunity to take a swipe at Smith).348 Like an airplane embarking on its final descent from the grand height of ten-thousand feet, Vermigh’s treatise rushes to a conclusion in the third proposition. While the first proposition of his locus occupies seventy-two folio pages and proposition two has fifty-eight, the third troubled the typesetter for merely thirteen pages. Moving expeditiously through this final argument, Martyr cites an array of biblical texts and church fathers to support his position.
Vermigh’s commitment to sola fide is born out of his belief that one’s good works have no role whatsoever in causing justification.349 In a rather distilled statement, he articulates the essence of this conviction.
And when we say that one is justified by faith alone we obviously say nothing else than that one is justified only by the mercy of God and by the merit of Christ, which we cannot grasp by any other instrument than faith alone.350
Emphatic as he is, Martyr is quick to counterbalance such statements concerning the gratuitous nature of justification with his conviction that sola fide must never be at the expense of sanctification. Thus, faith functions as the instrument, but it must never be seen as the totality of what is expected of a person. Vermigh offers an analogy to underscore this point. “The eye cannot be without a head, brains, heart, liver, and other parts of the body, and yet the eye alone apprehends color and light.”351 All of the above members are essential for life, just as virtue is required for the completion of justification, for “Christ requires more of us than faith, for who doubts that he wants those who are justified to live uprightly and to practice virtue of all kinds.”352 Indeed, Vermigh questions whether one can actually realize eternal salvation without such (a living) virtue.353
In this closing segment, Vermigh offers a final word on two important concepts which have appeared throughout his locus and which have bearing on his understanding of sola fide: opposition to the claim that general grace is accessible to all and support of the perseverance of the saints. In regard to the first of these, when Martyr accuses his opponents of maintaining a doctrine of congruent merit, he determines their position to be a form of Pelagianism that is foreign to the teaching of Scripture.354 He outhnes the Catholic teaching on merit in terms of the traditional categories of de congruo (that which precedes conversion on the basis of natural ability) and de condigno (merit that fully deserves a reward subsequent to conversion).355 Martyr holds congruent merit in contempt, asserting that “They are worse than foolish who would say that we were converted prior to the aid of God. He first loved us before we began to love him.”356 He regards condign merit equally unsustainable from Scripture and, therefore, he discards the entire system as “directly repugnant to the word of God.” 357 In his view, if redemptive grace is obtainable prior to regeneration and appropriated by the sinner through good works, even if such works are enabled by God, the justification that follows would ultimately be based upon human effort.358 In his words: “They hold that there is a kind of general grace accessible to all and common even to the unregenerate, who are in a sense helped to merit justification and do works which please God. But in saying this, they fall into the heresy of Pelagius.”359
It should be noted that Martyr does in fact recognize a distinction between “prevenient” grace and “subsequent” grace (gratia subsequentem). Simply put, the former is identified with the initial work of the Spirit that enlivens sinners, and the latter consists in sanctification. He asserts that prevenient grace “is nothing other than the same favor of God through Christ, which moves us beforehand to rightly exercise our will, and after we are regenerated, helps and stirs us up to live rightly.”360 As an example, Vermigh responds to his opponents’ argument from the book of Jonah where it says, “God regarded the works of the Ninevites.” Martyr explains why these works were not prevenient. “Since they believed before they did any works, they were justified by faith and not by works, which followed afterwards, and God is said to have regarded their works because they pleased him.”361 Because Martyr regarded faithful Ninevites as regenerate, their works were therefore pleasing and acceptable to God.362 This ability to please God, according to Vermigh, is on account of the regenerate’s close association with Christ, in which his “incomplete obedience” as a justified person effectively “pleases God.”363 In this way, Vermigh limits gratia praevenientem to the Spirit’s initial enlivening work and opens the door widely to gratia subsequentem.
In keeping with his conviction that man’s best efforts to secure divine favor through good works are in vain (i.e., justification cannot be merited), Vermigh also maintains a doctrine of perseverance, which, in a sense, affirms the inverse (i.e., the justification of one who is in Christ is secure, even when he commits a serious sin).
In general, it may be stated that faith cannot be completely extinguished because serious sins are committed by the justified and those destined to salvation. In such cases, faith is lulled to sleep and lies hidden and does not burst forth into action unless awakened again by the Holy Spirit. In such fallen ones, the seed of God remains, although for a time it produces no fruit.364
Martyr seems to be saying that when the regenerate lapses into sin, even serious sin, his justification remains secure (“the seed of God remains”). He acknowledges that “true faith,” fidem veram, sometimes “slips” or is “lulled to sleep,” but is not lost.365 “Therefore those who seek God, to be justified by him through faith, as the apostle teaches, attain what they desire; but those who would be justified by works fall away from justification.”366
Not everyone agrees that Vermigh’s doctrine of justification contains the idea of perseverance, including Donnelly.
Martyr does not hold the doctrine of perseverance of the saints as interpreted by many later Calvinists, that once man has received justifying faith, he never falls from grace and justification. On the contrary, Vermigh teaches that man can fall into sin and thereby lose justification, but as often as he truly assents to God’s promises he recovers justification.367
In making this case, Donnelly points to a statement from Martyr’s Romans locus which seems to suggest that justification can be lost and subsequently reclaimed: “Indeed justification is not only taken hold of once, but as often as we truly and effectually assent to God’s promises, for since we continually slip and fall into sins, it is necessary that our justification should be repeatedly renewed.”368 James, in his doctoral dissertation De Iustificatione, takes issue with this, regarding Donnelly’s proof to be less than convincing in Vermigh’s context and also inconsistent with what Vermigh writes elsewhere on the topic.369
With regard to the context of Vermigh’s statement, Martyr is answering Pighius, who had argued from the narrative of Abraham that the Patriarch was not justified by faith for the remission of sins in the Christian sense (since he lived centuries before Christ).370 Vermigh responds by quoting Paul from Galatians 3, in which the Apostle assigns Christian content to Abraham’s faith.371 Vermigh then argues that like Abraham, who reconfirmed his faith, in Genesis chapter 15 (after his ‘initial justification’, recorded in chapter 12), Christians must likewise reassert their belief in the promises of God. This is so, according to Martyr, because “Our minds are so weak that unless the words of God are repeated and impressed upon us, we easily resist faith.”372 Then, immediately after this sentence, comes the controversial statement concerning the need for justification to be “taken hold of” more than once, owing to our continual slips and falls into sin, necessitating that “our justification should be repeatedly renewed.”373 After analyzing this context, James concludes, “It seems clear that the issue Vermigh is addressing is the weakness of human faith not the weakness of divine justification.
Vermigh is admitting that even in the justified person, faith needs rekindling at times. But he is not at all suggesting that a person can fall out of justification, since justification is exclusively the work of God and not man, as Vermigh understands it. For him, divine justification is not subject to the weaknesses of fallen creatures, but is determined by the faithfulness of God. This is confirmed in the paragraphs immediately following our text, where Vermigh stresses that the power of justifying faith lies not in the faith of the individual, but in the object of faith, namely, Christ.374
The disagreement between Donnelly and James highlights the tensions within Vermigh’s doctrine of justification. Let us recall James’s statement with which we concluded our previous section: “justification is like a pebble dropped in a pond” creating ripples throughout the lifetime of the sinner such that one has an “ongoing need for forgiveness, even after justification has been pronounced.” To the extent that justification entails this ongoing, future-directed movement that includes sanctification, Donnelly’s suggestion that Vermigh believed one could fall away from justification on account of sin is sustainable. Furthermore, Donnelly is undoubtedly right that this position of Vermigh’s differs from that of latter Calvinists, as such Reformed thinkers more clearly distinguish the categories of justification and sanctification in Calvin’s duplex gratia.375 However, the subtlety with which Vermigh defines justification in terms of a first righteousness, which, in a strict sense, is purely forensic, followed by the broader expression of righteousness in an ongoing development of virtue, makes it difficult to define his position on perseverance with quite as much clarity and precision.
After the nuances of Vermigh’s doctrine have been observed and requisite qualifications have been made, we must ultimately disagree with Donnelly, if, by his assertion that “Vermigh teaches that man can fall into sin and thereby lose justification,” he means to say that one loses his righteous state coram deo. Because Vermigh understands the formal cause of a believer’s justified state to be the imputation of Christ’s righteousness,376 those who have genuinely believed, according to Vermigh, must also realize future justification.377 Such faith, says Martyr, “cannot be completely extinguished,”378 even though the experience of sin necessitates Christians to repeatedly take hold of and renew the reality of their justification. In short, since Martyr understands God’s redemptive activity to be immutable and efficacious, those whom he regenerates also persevere.379
There is precious little in Vermigh’s Romans locus (or any of his loci on justification) on the role of the sacraments in mediating justifying grace. Martyr first addresses the issue in proposition one, in which he confronts the position of his opponents with regard to the role of ceremonies.380 The Catholic position was, according to Vermigh, inconsistent for the way it ascribes “the forgiveness of sins and the bestowing of grace to the sacraments, just as in the Old Testament they were attributed to circumcision.”381 Apparently, his opponent’s position was also to regard the ceremony of circumcision as having a continuing validity in the New Testament sacraments, so that it contained the “power of justifying.”382 In no uncertain terms, Martyr opposes this notion.
Indeed, we utterly deny that any sacraments bestow grace. They do offer grace, but it is by signification. For in sacraments and words, and in the visible signs, the promises of God made through Christ are set before us. If we take hold of those promises by faith, we obtain a greater grace than we had before. And with the seal of the sacraments, we seal the gift of God that we embraced by faith.383
In keeping with this statement, Vermigh explicitly rejects the Catholic doctrine of baptismal regeneration.384 To make the point, he showcases Abraham who was justified by faith before receiving the sign of circumcision. Likewise, says Martyr, believers in Christ are justified before they are baptized, “for our baptism corresponds to the circumcision of the ancients.”385 He also repudiates the sacrament of penance: “Auricular confession also, derived from the papists, is completely superstitious; therefore we utterly reject it, for they impose it as something necessary for salvation and a reason why sins should be forgiven, which they are never able to provide from the testimonies of Scripture.”386 Ceremonies have no power to justify, according to Vermigh, any more than do the virtues of love and hope.387 “So great is the opposition between grace and works,” Martyr concludes, “that Paul says, ‘If of grace then it is not now of works, and if of works, then it is not of grace.’”388
By the time Vermigh reaches the conclusion of his locus, he has forcefully argued that “justification exists by faith alone.” All along, it has been the main idea toward which his treatise has driven, and, at his conclusion, it is where he lands. In light of this strong emphasis, it can be difficult to understand how Vermigh’s doctrine of justification holds sola fide together with the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. In other words, what is the logical relationship between these two forms of righteousness? The answer to this question comes into focus when we analyze justification’s formal cause.