Assurance: Of the Essence of Saving Faith?
Does every true believer have full assurance, or is assurance a separate gift?
Settled clearly
Background
Calvin in the *Institutes* III.2 had tended to equate full assurance with the substance of saving faith: 'we make the foundation of faith the gracious promise…firm and certain knowledge of the divine benevolence toward us.' Beza pushed the equation harder. The early English Reformers (Cranmer, Latimer) took the same line: a true believer simply *is* assured. But Perkins's experimental tradition and the great Puritan casuists (Hooker, Shepard, Sibbes, Goodwin) had encountered too many troubled believers whose faith was real but whose assurance was wanting. By the 1640s the pastoral data demanded a softening of Calvin's strict equation. The Heidelberg Catechism Q. 21 still took the strict reading; the Belgic Confession was ambiguous.
The Assembly’s handling
The Assembly produced one of the Standards' most pastorally consequential clauses: WCF XVIII.3, that 'this infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties, before he be partaker of it.' This was the Puritan-experimental softening of the early Reformed equation. Assurance is attainable, ordinary for the regenerate to seek, but not constitutive of saving faith. The chapter goes on (XVIII.2) to ground assurance on the divine promises, the inward evidences of grace, and the testimony of the Spirit of adoption — three-fold rather than one-fold, accommodating both the Spirit-witness party (Goodwin, Cotton) and the marks-of-grace party (Hooker, Shepard, the syllogismus practicus tradition).
Parties
The Westminster pastoral softening
Saving faith and assurance are distinguishable. A true believer may have faith without yet having infallible assurance; assurance is attainable but is not of the essence of saving faith. Assurance has three grounds: the divine promises, inward graces, and the Spirit's witness.
- Anthony Tuckney (1599–1670)
- Herbert Palmer (1601–1647)
- Edmund Calamy the Elder (1600–1666)
- Edward Reynolds (1599–1676)
- Samuel Rutherford (c. 1600–1661)
The early-Calvin strict equation (not pressed at the Assembly)
Saving faith is itself the assurance of God's gracious favour; a believer without assurance lacks (to that extent) the substance of saving faith. The Heidelberg Catechism's Q. 21 takes this line.
The Tridentine alternative (rejected)
Assurance of perseverance is impossible in this life (Trent, Session VI, canon 16); a believer may have hope but not certain assurance. Rejected by the Assembly.
Confessional language
WCF XVIII.3: 'This infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties, before he be partaker of it: yet, being enabled by the Spirit to know the things which are freely given him of God, he may, without extraordinary revelation, in the right use of ordinary means, attain thereunto.' WCF XVIII.2: 'This certainty…is founded upon the divine truth of the promises of salvation, the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made, the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God…'
Ontology placement
This crux bears on the following attribute of the Westminster ontology. The Westminster baseline value is marked WCF.
V · Soteriology · Assurance
Legacy
The Westminster handling of assurance has shaped Reformed pastoral practice more than perhaps any other locus of the Standards. Owen's *The Holy Spirit*, Edwards's *Religious Affections* (1746), Spurgeon's pastoral counselling, and every subsequent Reformed treatment of the troubled conscience build on WCF XVIII.3. The 'free offer' debates of the 18th and 19th centuries (the Marrow controversy; the Erskines; M'Cheyne) are downstream of the Assembly's threefold-grounds account in XVIII.2.