Gospel Guidebook: Getting and Keeping It Right 
한국어 日本語
Gordon Clark Was Wrong about the Nature of Faith
by Robert P. TerryUpdated May 24, 2026
On this website, I have written much about the importance of understanding faith correctly. A misunderstanding about faith results in a misunderstanding about the Gospel. If we get faith wrong, we get the Gospel wrong. All Christians say "Amen" to John 3:16 and Acts 16:31, but the problem is that Christians have vastly different opinions about what it means to believe. They use the exact same words, but often mean different things. Likewise, most Christians would have no problem saying "Christ did it all," but again, "all" is relative to one's system of belief. What "all" means to one person can be very different from what "all" means to another person. It might have been for this reason that Jesus said to be careful "how you hear."
I believe that one of the greatest deceptions of Satan has been his redefining of words that are vital to correctly understanding the Gospel. It is my opinion that Satan isn't afraid of the millions of sermons available on the Internet, and seemingly endless supply of Christian books and Bibles. Satan knows that there is a veil over the minds of the people, so that when verses like John 3:16 and Acts 16:31 are preached, people are unable to interpret them correctly, being enslaved to false notions about what words like "believe," "faith," "Son of God," and "Christ" mean. The Gospel is like a beautiful necklace, but people have become unable to discern it because it has become all knotted up. Anyone who has ever had to untie knots in a necklace knows how time consuming and how frustrating it can be to have to carefully pull each strand of the necklace out of other tightly tied strands. To understand the Gospel correctly, it has become necessary to pull apart the strands of lies, something that could take a tremendous amount of time for people heavily indoctrinated by the teachings of the Christian churches.
For a while, I thought it was enough to describe faith as mental assent, a propositional attitude of belief, but just like the words mentioned above, the word assent can mean different things depending on whom you ask. The word assent is an important word for Gordon Clark. The word appears 275 times in his book What Is Saving Faith?. He views "saving faith" as a type of assent (that is, assent according to his understanding of the word). I put the words "saving faith" in parentheses because the very concept of "saving faith" is quite telling, as if faith were an essential element of salvation itself, rather than the bare persuasion of a salvation that is true even before it is believed (or assented to). Did Christ actually save anyone on the cross, or did He just make people savable if they practice their "saving faith" correctly? Dear reader, I'll leave that question to you to ponder, but in this article, rather than discuss Gordon Clark's understanding of justification, I want to focus on his description of faith and his understanding of assent.
Gordon Clark taught that faith involved a volitional element. Now, I don't doubt that the maintenance of diachronic or inaugurated faith involves the volition of the believer, but to say that volition is involved in believing (whether inaugural or diachronic) is an entirely different thing. Gordon Clark almost admits this much in his Interlude on the Head and the Heart when he says, "Yet there can be no volition without a prior intellection," but, regrettably, he limits intellection to understanding. He asserts several times that "believing is volitional assent," but he never attempts to prove this. In fact, his own statistics tell a different story. He says, "But in the Bible the heart [i.e., the place where believing takes place], in about 70 or 75 percent of the instances, means the understanding, without affirming or denying the presence of a volition." If so, then to believe in one's heart may very well not involve the volition at all. And yet, despite this statistic, he goes on to say in the same paragraph, "Now, belief is definitely intellectual and volitional." If this weren't strange enough, what's even stranger is that earlier in the book, he approvingly quoted H. H. Price as saying, "assent may be voluntary in the long run, at least sometimes, even though in the short run it is quite beyond our voluntary control." In other words, diachronic faith (i.e., assent in the long run) may involve the volition, but inaugural faith (i.e., assent in the short run) is beyond the control of the volition. If this is so, belief is not volitional assent.
Gordon Clark also said that "Commands are addressed to the will. Emotions are involuntary," as if to imply that commands cannot aim at producing non-volitional responses. There are plenty of commands in the Bible that aim to stir or quiet the emotions, such as the command "Do not fear." This being the case, the command "Believe" does not require belief to be volitional. Rather, if I were to command you to "Believe that the moon is made of cheese," could you by the power of your will, just like that, believe it? The basic voluntary control that exists when performing actions, such as raising your hand immediately when commanded to raise your hand, simply does not exist for some mental states, including emotions and belief, yet there are commands in the Bible to rejoice, weep, and believe. Now, alternatively, if I were to command you to "Believe that the sun is bright," are you really making a volitional decision to believe this? If you think so, ask yourself if you could have used your volition to believe otherwise? Isn't it obvious that belief doesn't allow for a volitional decision about whether to be in such a mental state? Isn't it true that the moment of belief is just the moment of being persuaded by the evidence for something apart from any direct control of the volition? Now, it might objected that these examples of the moon and sun are too handy, even contrived, but that the volition is involved when belief or disbelief is not evidentially compelled. To this objection, I would say that a propositional attitude is not limited to belief and disbelief, but also includes withholding of belief, and that withholding of belief is just as involuntary as belief. In other words, if the evidence doesn't compel you, you can't just use your volition to choose whatever you want. For example, if I were to command you to "Believe that Leviathan lives at the bottom of the sea," and you were uncertain about the evidence for and against this proposition, could you, just like that, use your volition to arbitrarily believe or disbelieve it? Wouldn't you have to withhold belief until you were persuaded otherwise?
In contrast to Gordon Clark's description of faith, I'd like to suggest that faith does not involve any act of the will (as if the propositional object of faith needed the concurrence of the volition!) nor does it involve any act of appropriation or choosing. Rather, faith is an involuntary doxastic attitude of being persuaded by the evidence for a proposition. When the Apostle said that the Gospel reveals the righteousness of God from faith to faith and that the Gentiles who had not sought after righteousness had suddenly attained unto it by faith, he was signaling that faith is being passively persuaded by the revelation of the righteousness of God (i.e., not depending on the volition of man — John 1:13, Romans 9:16). William Alston was correct when he said, "volitions, decisions, or choosings don't hook up with anything in the way of propositional attitude inauguration, just as they don't hook up with the secretion of gastric juices or cell metabolism."
Now, whatever good might have been salvaged from Gordon Clark's book What Is Saving Faith? was hopelessly lost in his accompanying book The Johannine Logos (the two works are bundled together in the same book). In Chapter 5 of that book, he says, "The truth that saving faith produces works does not advance [Manton's] argument. To say that true or saving faith (since belief in a falsehood is true or genuine belief) produces works does not imply that faith is other than assent. Why should not assent produce works?" Because assent is assent, a mere propositional attitude. It can't build your car or love your neighbor. Once assent is defined to produce works, it is no longer assent. But in saying this, Gordon Clark shows his true colors, revealing that his conception of faith is ultimately not very different from the conception of faith of those whom he criticized in his book. They may describe faith differently, but in the end, they all require faith to include a works-producing principle. But how can a mere propositional attitude produce works? It can't. By itself, faith cannot do anything expect involuntarily assent to propositions. But if faith doesn't produce works, how is it related to works? When diachronic faith is nurtured by the will of the believer and combined with other variables, such as desire, that create motivation for works, it helps create the conditions necessary for performing works, and to the extent that there are no confounding variables (such as irrationality, stress, fear, physical constraints), finds itself in a positively correlative relationship with works.
So, what does this mean? It means that justification by faith is not the sinner using his will to make something true that was not true until it was assented to, but is the recognition of what was true even before it was believed, namely, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, who wrought a justifying work on the cross for sinners. Justification does not depend on (nor can be commingled with) the volition of man. The Apostle described justification by faith as God giving the light of knowledge to a darkened heart to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.