What Is Faith According to the Bible? — Owen’s Working Definition
⏱ 12 min read
You have been a Christian long enough to know the answer you are supposed to give. Faith is believing in Jesus. Faith is trusting God. Faith is the substance of things hoped for. You can produce the verses from Hebrews 11 on request. You can recite the catechism. You can pass any quiz on the doctrine.
And yet, somewhere in the chair time, the quiet question has not stopped surfacing — if I have faith, why does it not feel the way the writers in the New Testament seem to be describing it? Their faith moved bodies. Their faith carried them into fires and across oceans. Their faith was a thing they could not stop talking about. Yours is something you mostly remember to bring with you on Sunday. The difference between the two is not pious self-deprecation. It is a real diagnostic question, and you are right to be asking it.
This is a slow reading of John Owen — the seventeenth-century Puritan who wrote a treatise called Of Communion with God that runs to several hundred pages because he could not stop unfolding the same simple thing — on the question of what faith actually is, according to the scriptures he spent his life teaching. Owen’s answer, kept short, is this: faith is three things, not one. Most Christians know only the first of the three. The thinness you have been feeling in your own faith is not a sign that you do not have it. It is, almost always, a sign that you have been operating with the first part only, and the second and third parts — the parts that move the body and the affections — have never been properly introduced. If you want the practical home for the slow practice this essay walks, the Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around the daily 140-day rhythm in which the second and third parts of faith are quietly fed.
The viral version of this argument is Owen: faith is three things, and most Christians know only one. The unviral, slow version — the one Owen would actually defend — takes the rest of this essay to walk. The three parts are knowledge, assent, and trust (in older language: notitia, assensus, fiducia), and the work of faith is the slow, lifelong knitting-together of all three.
The first thing — and why it is not enough by itself
The first part of faith, in the way Owen and the older theologians used the term, is knowledge. Notitia in the Latin. It means: you have some accurate content in your mind about who God is, what He has done in Christ, what He is offering, what the gospel actually says. You know the story. You can give the explanation. You have the facts in roughly the right shape.
Most modern faith conversations stop here. Do you know the gospel? Yes. Then you have faith. The trouble is that scripture itself does not stop here. James names, with some bite, that the demons also believe — and tremble. The demons have the first part. They have the knowledge. They have the facts in the correct order. They do not have faith in the saving sense, because the second and third parts are absent.
Owen, reading carefully, sees this exactly. He never argues against the knowledge. He insists on it. He simply refuses to let his readers stop there. Here is the first line worth keeping near the page — the line that diagnoses the thin-faith condition before it offers the cure:
“They that know thee will put their trust in thee.” Men cannot abide with God in spiritual meditations. He loseth soul’s company by their want of this insight into his love. They fix their thoughts only on his terrible majesty, severity, and greatness; and so their spirits are not endeared. Would a soul continually eye his everlasting tenderness and compassion, his thoughts of kindness that have been from of old, his present gracious acceptance, it could not bear an hour’s absence from him; whereas now, perhaps, it cannot watch with him one hour.
— John Owen, Of Communion with God
Read that slowly. They that know thee will put their trust in thee. The verse Owen is quoting (Psalm 9:10) is doing a piece of work most modern readers skip. It assumes that knowing leads naturally into trusting — that the right kind of knowledge is the kind that bends the soul into trust. The two are linked. The trust grows out of the knowledge.
But — and this is Owen’s quiet diagnosis — the soul cannot abide with God in spiritual meditations because its insight into his love has not been allowed to be present. The knowledge has been one-sided. The soul has been taught terrible majesty, severity, and greatness and not been taught everlasting tenderness and compassion, thoughts of kindness that have been from of old, present gracious acceptance. The knowledge is technically accurate — God is indeed majestic and severe and great — and it is also lopsided. The half that has been taught will not bend the soul into trust. The half that has been left out is the half the trusting is built on.
This is why so many Christians have the first part of faith and never seem to get to the third. The content has been wrong-shaped. The mind has been given a Father it has to fear and not a Father it has been invited to abide with. He loseth soul’s company by their want of this insight into his love. The soul stays at the edge of the room, because the knowledge it has been operating with did not invite it in.
The cure, in Owen’s reading, is not to abandon the knowledge. It is to complete it. To let the second half — the love, the kindness, the gracious acceptance — come into the picture, slowly, until the knowledge is whole. Faith starts knitting itself together when the knowledge becomes the kind a soul could actually rest in.
The somatic moment — feeling for which faith you are operating from
Pause for a breath. Put the screen down for a moment. Bring one hand to the chest, just below the collarbone. Ask the body a question. When I think of God in this moment, is the chest opening, or is the chest tightening? Stay with the answer for one slow inhale and one slow exhale. The body is honest in a way the mind is not. If the chest tightens — if there is a small bracing, a slight pulling-back — your faith is operating mostly on the first kind of knowledge, the terrible majesty kind, and the second and third parts have not yet been allowed to come in. The bracing is the diagnosis. It is not a moral failing. It is a piece of information about which part of the knowledge has been fed and which part has been starved. The rest of this essay is the slow feeding of the starved part.
The second thing — and why this is the part most teaching skips
The second part of faith, in the older theology, is assent. Assensus. It means: the mind has not only the content (knowledge) but the agreement — the yes, this is true — sitting in the place where the will lives. The mind has signed the document. The proposition has been accepted as one’s own, not merely catalogued.
This is the part most modern Christian teaching skips, because it sits awkwardly between the heart and the head. Knowledge is easy to teach (give the content). Trust is easy to talk about (the fiducia sermons run weekly). Assent is the quiet middle stage where the mind does the work of taking the knowledge as personally true. Not just the gospel is true. The harder sentence: the gospel is true for me, this woman in this chair, with this history, with these doubts.
Owen names this second part with great precision in the next passage. Watch how he describes it:
To give a poor sinful soul a comfortable persuasion, affecting it throughout, in all its faculties and affections, that God in Jesus Christ loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him, hath thoughts of tenderness and kindness towards him; to give, I say, a soul an overflowing sense hereof, is an inexpressible mercy.
— John Owen, Of Communion with God
A comfortable persuasion, affecting it throughout, in all its faculties and affections. That is the assensus in seventeenth-century Puritan English. The mind has not just signed the document; it has been persuaded throughout. The persuasion has spread into the faculties and affections — the thinking, the willing, the imagining, the feeling. The yes is no longer a head-yes; it is the kind of yes that runs through the whole person.
Owen is naming, with care, what most modern Christians have not had. The persuasion has been thin. The mind agrees that God in Jesus Christ loves me. The affections, though, have not been let in on the agreement. The will is still bracing for disappointment. The imagination, when it pictures God, is still picturing the terrible majesty and not the loving Father. The agreement is technically present in the head; it has not yet affected the whole person.
This is why your faith feels thinner than the writers in the New Testament describe theirs. They had been brought, by the Spirit and by slow practice, into the comfortable persuasion that affects the whole person. You have not been brought there yet, because the second part of faith requires repeated, slow, embodied exposure to the actual content of God’s love before the persuasion can soak through. The persuasion is not built in an altar call. It is built in years of small returns to the same true sentences until the whole person — not just the head — finally agrees.
This is also why the Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around the daily 140-day rhythm. The second part of faith is fed by repetition, not intensity. One short page each evening, with the same kind of true sentences, slowly soaking through the faculties and affections — that is the engine the persuasion grows in. The book is not a curriculum. It is a small daily room to keep returning to, so the yes of the head has time to spread into the yes of the whole person. (If the way you have been reading has been the productivity kind — chapter quotas, plan-completion, the high-effort version — inductive bible study for beginners — a 4-step method and SOAP bible study method — free printable worksheet walk the slow methods that feed assensus rather than just stockpiling notitia.)
The third thing — and what scripture actually means by faith
The third part is trust. Fiducia. This is the part most modern preaching means when it says faith. The leaning. The resting. The transfer of weight from your own legs onto the Person of Christ. The verb the New Testament uses again and again — believe into Him, trust in Him, abide in Him, rest on Him — names this third part.
The trust is what the first two parts are built toward. The trust is not a feeling, exactly, though feelings are usually involved. The trust is a resting of the weight. The soul that has the first two parts — the right-shaped knowledge and the comfortable persuasion that has reached the affections — naturally leans. The leaning is not effortful. It is the gravitational response of a soul that has finally been allowed to know God as the Father Owen has been describing. Here is the third line worth keeping near the page:
The soul being thus, by faith through Christ, and by him, brought into the bosom of God, into a comfortable persuasion and spiritual perception and sense of his love, there reposes and rests itself.
— John Owen, Of Communion with God
There reposes and rests itself. That is the third part of faith in Owen’s hand. The soul has been brought into the bosom of God — note the verb, brought, not climbed in by its own effort — and the bringing has produced a comfortable persuasion and spiritual perception and sense of his love, and the result is that the soul reposes and rests itself. The faith is the resting. The faith is the leaning into the One whose love the soul has finally been let in on.
This is what scripture means by faith, in Owen’s slow reading. Not the bare assent to a proposition. Not the white-knuckled trying to believe harder. The slow knitting of knowledge, assent that reaches the affections, and trust that rests the weight — all three of them, together, as a whole-person disposition toward the Father whose first notion toward you, Owen insists elsewhere, is eternal, free love.
(For the sister-essay on what believing itself looks like once the third part has come in, what does it mean to believe in Christ — Edwards on true belief walks Edwards’s complementary account of the affections. And for the practical version when the faith is weak in the third part specifically — when the knowledge and assent are there but the trust will not come — how to strengthen your faith when it’s weak — Spurgeon’s counsel is the Spurgeon companion.)
What this means for the way you have been operating
Most likely, you have the first part. Some of you have the second part, in patches. Many of you have asked, repeatedly, why does my faith not produce the rest the writers describe? — and the honest answer is that the third part cannot grow on top of a starved second part, and the second part cannot grow on top of a lopsided first part.
The work, then, is not to try harder at faith. The work is to feed the first part with the half of the knowledge that has been missing — the everlasting tenderness, the thoughts of kindness that have been from of old, the present gracious acceptance. Slowly. By daily exposure. Without the audit-engine running in the background.
The second part will follow. The persuasion will spread into the faculties and affections as the soul is repeatedly exposed to the right-shaped knowledge. The third part — the resting, the reposing, the leaning — will follow the second part the way water follows gravity. You will not have to manufacture it. You will discover, after months of the small slow practice, that you are leaning without trying. The faith has finally become the kind that scripture is describing.
This is the working definition of faith Owen would defend. Knowledge of the right-shaped God; assent that has reached the whole person; trust that rests the weight. Three things, not one. Most Christians have been operating with the first only, and have been wondering, quietly, why their faith feels thinner than the New Testament’s. It is not because they do not have faith. It is because two of its three parts have never been properly fed. (If the daily practice of feeding is what you have not yet started, how to bible journal for beginners and how to start a faith journal when you don’t know where to begin are the gentlest on-ramps. If the practice is started but the which verses, which days question is the snag, how to journal bible verses — step-by-step with examples walks the worked-example version. And if the which Bible question is still the obstacle, a beginner study bible for women — and how to use it without being embarrassed is the entry-level kit.)
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