One day I’ll have to write an article about John W. Robbins’ understanding of faith and saving faith.

Robbins was a disciple of Gordon H. Clark. He ran the Trinity Foundation, which publishes Clark’s books, including Faith and Saving Faith. That book has been influential in Free Grace circles because it clearly shows why works cannot be imported into our definition of faith, as so many Lordship proponents do. Robbins continued Clark’s defense of propositional faith. (And if I may offer a plug, in Beyond Doubt, I do the same and argue that assurance is propositional, too.)

Here is a great quote from Robbins unmasking the false distinction between head faith and heart faith:

“This writer, when a teenager, was told that some people would miss heaven by twelve inches—the distance between the head and the heart—because they believed the Gospel with their heads but not with their hearts…No one will miss heaven by twelve inches, for there is no distance between the head and the heart: “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” The head/heart contrast is a figment of modern secular psychology, not a doctrine of divine revelation. St. Sigmund, not St. John, controls the pulpit in too many churches” (John W. Robbins, “What Is Faith?” in Against the World: The Trinity Review, 1978-1988, p. 121).