Intellectualist faith?

Normally, those who think of themselves as people of the gospel do not openly deny the necessity of the new birth. But what if we did? We do not have to imagine, for that is effectively what happened in the 18th and 19th centuries with the Sandemanian sect. As Andrew Fuller (1754–1815) put it, the Sandemanians believed that saving faith is nothing but “bare belief of the bare truth”.

This was an intellectualist view of faith that sat especially well with the rationalistic times of the Enlightenment, though Robert Sandeman himself had an apparently evangelical logic for his view. Seeking to uphold a salvation that is all of grace, he argued that faith is really a human work if it involves any active leaning of the heart upon God. Faith must, he concluded, be nothing more than the mind’s assent that the gospel is true. It is an acknowledgment, not trust.

Sandeman’s teaching may have persuaded some, but it concerned many more. Leading the criticism was Fuller, who responded with what was probably his magnum opus, Strictures on Sandemanianism, in Twelve Letters to a Friend (1810). Fuller argued that Sandemanianism failed to see faith as a fruit of regeneration. In other words, only the person whose heart has been renewed by the Spirit will ever come to true, saving faith.