Is John Piper Confusing Faith & Works?

Piper’s Confusion Over Final Salvation and the Covenant of Works

Piper, where there's, we would say he's bringing in some confusion because, again, he openly rejects a logos for hermeneutic or an understanding that there's actual distinction in the Bible in this, and he also rejects a covenant of works.

And you're going to be able to see that because it influences his understanding as he's dealing with biblical text. So, he first introduced this concept in his book Desiring God, this idea of a final salvation.

Jesus, the Judgment, and Final Salvation by Obedience

So, this is from his book What Jesus Demands from the World in 2015. Jesus says that on the day of judgment, people will go away into eternal punishment because they really failed to love their fellow believers.

As you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. There is no doubt that Jesus saw some measure of real, lived-out obedience to the will of God as a necessary final salvation, okay?

We would agree, and the confessions agree, that those who have faith that has been granted to them by the Spirit have a faith that produces good works. Amen. We would agree with that. But there's nowhere in Scripture that we would ever conclude that God examines those good works as an entrance fee into heaven.

What Piper has done here is he has added something on the end of faith. What he's done is, well, you can enter into a right relationship with God by faith and law and justification, but your eternal destination, which is heaven, that is granted by works.

Yeah, it's faith and works. I mean,.

That's effectively the schema. You enter into a right relationship with God by faith alone, you're justified by faith alone, but you're finally saved by faith and works. We agree, to John's point, with the reform through history, that where there is faith, there will be obedience.

Where there is faith, there will be good works. But faith and obedience are not one in the same, and faith and works are not one in the same. It is Christ alone who is the ground of standing before God now and forever, and we receive what Christ has done by faith alone.

He says, in final salvation at the last judgment, faith is confirmed by the sanctifying fruit it has borne, and we are saved through that fruit and that faith. So that last clause is the problem. We are saved through that fruit and that faith.

A tree that's alive bears fruit, but you can't duct tape fruit to a tree. You can't reverse engineer this thing. You can say that where there's faith, there will be fruit. That's true, but then you can't turn around and say, well, produce fruit to be saved.

The Reformed Distinction Between Faith and Works

Jon Moffitt.

So we've gone from Desiring God in 1996 to 2015 to today. I mean, he wrote that, I think, two years ago or a year and a half ago.

Justin Perdue 2017. It was the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Jon Moffitt.

Sometimes people say, well, yeah, you're reading a younger man's writing. As they grow, they've changed their mind. Really, Piper's only gotten stronger in his defense of this throughout the years. Justin Perdue.

Justification by Faith Alone and Future Hope in Romans 5:1

This next one dovetails with it. Well, the question is, how does a person enter into right relationship with God? Piper's right about this. The Christian answer is sola fide, faith alone. We agree, but be sure you hear this carefully and precisely.

He says, write with God by faith alone, not attain heaven by faith alone. There are other conditions for attaining heaven, but no others for entering a right relationship to God. Again, we are drawing a distinction here between justification and final salvation.

You're bifurcating those two things in a way that the Scripture just plainly doesn't. Paul, for example, in Romans 5 .1, this immediately comes to mind. Knowing then, having been justified by faith, we now have peace with God.

Then he goes on in the coming verses to talk about how we know that faith produces all of these things, hope and character and all the rest. He says that that's the case because of a very future-oriented reality that the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, and we hope in the Lord.

Present justification and future hope are very much tethered together in the mind of the Apostle Paul. Whereas I think Piper, with the best of intentions, is driving a wedge between those things, saying you can have present justification, but then your final salvation and your future hope is conditioned upon you bearing appropriate fruit.