Question: Active faith and passive faith. Passive faith is merely acknowledging a belief. Active faith involves putting that belief into practice through actions and behaviors. What kind is true biblical faith? 1) purely intellectual, where one merely holds beliefs; 2) actively living out your beliefs through actions.

Please give clarity, pastor.

In Christ

S—.

Answer: Thanks for the email, S—.

You draw a distinction between passive and active faith, where active faith means putting your faith into practice, and passive faith does not. That is basically right. There is a real difference there.

To clarify, to believe is to be persuaded that something is true. It does not involve your actions. Instead, it involves persuasion. You understand something, and then you become convinced that it is true. For example, the commandment “Thou shalt not murder.” If you are persuaded that killing innocent people is wrong, then you believe that commandment is true.

Once you believe something is true, you can act consistent with that belief or not. For example, David believed that murder and adultery were wrong but he chose to act contrary to his beliefs and sinned against Uriah and Bathsheba. When David sinned, he was not putting his faith into practice. Instead, he was being a hypocrite and a sinner. We do the same thing every day.

But then you ask, “What kind is true biblical faith?” I think you might be asking whether we need to put our faith into practice in order to be eternally saved. If so, the answer is no. Paul said very clearly:

But to the one who does not work, but believes on him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited for righteousness (Romans 4:5, emphasis added).

To be justified, you must stop working and believe in Jesus. In your terms, we are eternally saved by passive faith—i.e., faith without works. We simply receive salvation from Jesus by grace, through faith, apart from works, as a gift (cf. Eph 2:8-9). He does all the “activity” in salvation—He died for us, rose again from the dead, and made our salvation possible. And when we believe in Him, He justifies us, forgives us, declares we have eternal life, redeems us, adopts us, saves us from wrath, and makes us members of His body, among other benefits. We do not do any of those things to ourselves. It is all passive on our end. We are simply (passively) convinced that the gospel is true.

However, we should also have an active faith in the sense of putting our faith into practice. We do not do that for eternal salvation but because that will lead to greater spiritual maturity and greater usefulness in serving others. The Letter of James is all about this. We go through trials, as do our neighbors. And we are called to have a lively faith—one where we put our faith into practice. If we do, it will lead to greater maturity for us (James 1:2-4) and help to deliver suffering neighbors from their trials (James 2:14-17).

We should both have faith and live by faith but for different benefits.

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