Did Zane Hodges Believe That Saving Faith Is Intellectual Assent?

As I mentioned in an earlier blog (see here), Dave Anderson argues in the book A Defense of Free Grace Theology that Wayne Grudem’s view of saving faith is essentially that of nearly all Free Grace advocates. Anderson even goes so far as to suggest that Zane Hodges agreed with Grudem’s view.

Zane Hodges was my advisor on both my Master’s Thesis and Doctoral Dissertation at Dallas Theological Seminary. He was on the original board of GES, from 1987 to 1995. He was my mentor from the time I received my doctorate in 1985 until he died in November of 2008. I spoke with him all the time. We had thousands of conversations about the Scriptures. Many of those conversations were about faith and saving faith.

Hodges told me on many occasions that faith is assent. He did not like the designation intellectual assent, since he felt it showed an emotional detachment. He felt that most often when people come to faith in Christ, there is joy in knowing that they are guaranteed to spend eternity with the Lord and His people. But he agreed with Gordon Clark that all faith is being convinced that a proposition is true. Like Clark, he rejected Berkhof’s view that saving faith has three components: notitia (understanding), assensus (assent), and fiducia (trust), saying that the third element is faith, not a part of faith.

After favorably citing Berkhof’s three-aspects of saving faith, Anderson selectively quotes from Hodges’s book Absolutely Free:

To describe faith that way [as mental assent] is to demean it as a trivial, academic exercise, when in fact it is no such thing. What faith really is…is the inward conviction that what God says to us in the gospel is true (p. 72, citing Hodges on p. 31).

He then goes on to say that “Hodges further defines faith as ‘firm conviction,’ ‘childlike trust,’ ‘an act of appropriation’ of the truth of the gospel, [and] an ‘act of trust’ (p. 72). You may notice that those are snippets from four different places in Absolutely Free (pp. 28, 38-39, 40-41, 32).

Anderson was not quoting from the Second Edition. So I’ve gone back to the first edition to check his citations. Going to the source shows that Anderson has absolutely (pun intended) misrepresented Hodges, though I suspect that Anderson did not write this, but one of his assistants, for I do not believe he would blunder like this. I find six errors he made in his one full citation and many more in the four snippets.

First, Anderson should have cited the title of Hodges’s chapter on faith: “Faith Means Just That—Faith” (p. 25). The very title refutes Anderson’s suggestion that Hodges believed faith includes emotional and volitional components.

Second, in Absolutely Free, under the heading “Intellectual Assent” (p. 29), Hodges makes it clear that faith is intellectual assent (pp. 29-32). As I mentioned above, he does not like that expression because it typically implies “detachment and personal disinterest” (p. 30). But Hodges clearly affirms that faith is assent or intellectual assent, contra Anderson.

Third, Anderson fails to point out that Hodges specifically rejects Berkhof’s position: “It is an unproductive waste of time to employ the popular categories—intellect, emotion, or will—as a way of analyzing the mechanics of faith. Such discussions lie far outside the boundaries of biblical thought. People know whether they believe something or not, and that is the real issue where God is concerned” (p. 31).

Fourth, the example Hodges gives of faith contradicts Anderson’s position. “Do you believe the President will do what he has promised?” (p. 27).

Fifth, Hodges cites his agreement with Gordon Clark and his book Faith and Saving Faith (p. 28, endnote 3, found on page 207). Yet Anderson, just before he cited Hodges, had favorably discussed Berkhof’s view. He clearly gives the reader the impression that Hodges agrees with Berkhof’s view.

Sixth, Anderson inadvertently distorted what Hodges was saying in the only full citation, and that only two sentences, which he gave. Anderson cited Hodges as writing:

But here is what Hodges actually wrote:

Does [faith] involve the intellect? Of course! But is it mere intellectual assent? Of course not! To describe faith that way is to demean it as a trivial, academic exercise, when in fact it is no such thing.

What faith really is, in biblical language, is receiving the testimony of God. It is the inward conviction that what God says to us in the gospel is true (Absolutely Free, p. 31, italics his).

Notice that Anderson changed “mere intellectual assent” into “mental assent.” He left off the word mere, which Hodges emphasized, and he changed intellectual assent to mental assent. (He also for some reason failed to italicize inward conviction as Hodges did.)

Worse still, notice the words that were left out after the ellipses (…): “What faith really is, in biblical language, is receiving the testimony of God.” Receiving the testimony of God is being convinced it is true. It has no emotional or volitional aspect. Leaving that out radically distorts what Hodges was saying.

I also found errors in all four of the snippet citations.

“Firm conviction” indeed occurs on page 28. However, the entire context shows that Hodges did not mean that faith is more than assent. Hodges was discussing if someone believes the President will do what he said he would do. He then discussed whether you could believe that and yet “go out and break a law.” He said that whether a person broke the law had no bearing on whether he believed. “What has my breaking a law got to do with my firm conviction that I can trust the President in anything he says?”

“Childlike trust” is not found on pages 38-39 as Anderson said. It is found on pages 38 and 60. In both contexts Hodges is speaking of saving faith as simple faith. It is “simple faith in Christ” (p. 38) and “saving faith is a simple and uncomplicated issue” (p. 60). No emotional or volitional component. No commitment. Just being persuaded.

The words “act of appropriation” do not occur on pages 40-41 as Anderson says. Those words are found on page 42. Anderson reported that Hodges spoke of “‘an act of appropriation’ of the truth of the gospel.” The words of the truth of the gospel are not in quotation marks in Anderson. Nor are they in the context when Hodges talks about an act of appropriation. What Hodges was talking about was the woman at the well believing that Jesus is the Messiah who guarantees everlasting life to all who believe in Him (p. 42). “Her faith was her act of appropriation,” Hodges wrote. He was speaking of her drinking, or appropriating, the living water.

The words act of appropriation also occur on pages 85, 106, and 212 (endnote 1, going back to page 41). None of them refer to anything more than assent.

The final snippet, “act of trust,” is found on page 32. That is where Hodges was discussing how a single look of faith to the uplifted serpent (John 3:14-15) or a single drink of the living water (John 4:10-14) resulted in everlasting life. Nothing about any emotional or volitional component.

That same expression, act of trust, was used by Hodges on pages 29, 62, and 149 (endnote 1). In all those uses Hodges is simply referring to being persuaded. It should be noted that Hodges wrote Absolutely Free in 1989. At that time he still frequently used trust as a synonym for faith. As time went on, he did that less and less, because as he once told me in his office in the mid to late 90s, he was convinced that while trust did have some overlap in meaning with belief, people could become confused by it.

None of these snippets show that Hodges believed that faith is more than assent, agreement, being convinced, being persuaded, or acceptance of a truth of a proposition.

I urge everyone to read what Hodges actually wrote. Hodges was contradicting the Lordship Salvation view of saving faith. That is, Hodges was contradicting, not supporting, Grudem’s view of saving faith. Anderson has unintentionally distorted what Hodges believed and taught.

I hope Anderson and Grace Theology Press publish a correction. Knowing Zane as well as I do, I am sure that he would be very upset to have his words distorted in this way. I know I am.

by Bob Wilkin