Blessed Assurance

As faith is the first vital act that every true Christian puts forth, and the life which he lives is by the faith of the Son of God, so it is his next and great concern to know that he doth believe, and that believing he hath eternal life...

Thus Isaac Chauncey in his preface to John Owen's posthumously published work on the Evidences of the Faith of God's Elect.  Chauncey here envisages a two-step process, if you like.  Firstly there is faith, and by this he means not just intellectual assent to Christian doctrine but a living faith, a trust in Christ, such that the believer's life is now lived in Christ as Christ lives in him.  This first step is the thing which resolves all the biggest questions: by this faith, the believer is united to Christ, and with Christ destined for eternal life and glory.  But there is a second step here.  The believer, having believed, now seeks to know that he has believed.  This is a second-order concern, dependent on the reality of the first step, and with lesser consequences.  Faith leads to life; knowledge of one's own faith leads to assurance, comfort, and the blessings in this life that accompany confidence in one's relationship with God.

But is this right?  Is there a second-order move, after believing, whereby one must examine one's own faith in order to ascertain whether it is possible to discern in it the marks of genuine trust (and therefore, somewhere in the background, the evidences of election)?  Is that how faith works?

One study which might be attempted would be a biblical one.  It would be helpful to have a full contextual exegesis of 1 Corinthians 13:5, for example.  But it is also not unreasonable to ask some theological and pastoral questions of this viewpoint.  For example, theologically, faith is rightly understood as the believer looking away from himself, to place his trust in another, namely Christ.  Righteousness is sought in Christ.  Life is sought in Christ.  This by itself ought to raise a question mark against the idea that having looked away from himself for everything that pertains to life and godliness, the believer is called to a reflexive self-examination to ensure that his faith is genuinely faith.  How is one to avoid making faith a kind of work, on this model?

Pastorally, does this view recognise how impossible it is for the Christian to really know themselves - their true life and identity being, after all, hidden with Christ in God?  Not to mention the mere psychological difficulty of analysing any of one's own subjective actions.  Of course there is value in such analysis, but ought we to resolve the believer's assurance of salvation to such a thing?

A larger question is: does this approach inevitably follow from the classical Calvinist doctrine of election?  Is it inevitable that people will want to answer the question 'well, am I elect or not?' - and if so, how would they go about answering except by examining their own faith?  Of course, the pastoral advice which the good Calvinist would give would be to look to Jesus, but it is not clear on Calvinist doctrine that this actually answers the question.

Personally, I think Chauncey's approach (and, of course, Owen's, since he reflects the theme of the treatise here) is deeply flawed, turning faith into non-faith.  Faith is always and necessarily other-regarding; it always looks away from itself to Christ.  If the believer puts his own faith under the microscope, he will always find it wanting.  (There is a question in my mind over whether the psychological phenomenon of faith - which is all I have access to - is identical with what the NT is talking about, but that's for another day).  If the believer lives by faith in the Son of God, then let them also be assured by faith in the Son of God, and not by second-order reflection on their own state of mind or feeling.