Going by vague memory (I simply don’t have time right now to do anything detailed) Turretin answers the question about why faith is singled out in justification and salvation by saying that it, unlike the virtues of hope and love, is outward looking.

I just don’t see it.  Hope seems like it could be expressed in almost identical terms.  In fact, the Apostle Paul sometimes uses the term, “set one’s hope on God” in a way that seems identical to “trust in God.”

And love too, it seems to me, could be understood not as a form of working for wages, but rather an empty hand that receives all from the beloved.

I’m not sure that psychological analysis of the nature of the virtues involved is a profitable way to figure out why faith alone justifies (which it does, by the way).

Looking at Hebrews and Romans and elsewhere, I wonder if the answer shouldn’t be sought in God’s and Christ’s virtues, rather than in the nature of faith.  Maybe faith answers to God’s faithfulness, and the point is that our only hope lies in God’s promises and his character which demands that he fulfill those promises.

We trust God because he is trustworthy, and the Gospel reveals his trustworthiness.  For in the Gospel, God’s righteousness is revealed from His trustworthiness to our trust.

“By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised” (Hebrews 11.11).

Pastor Wayne Larson has posted some valuable thoughts here about Christian worldview and antithesis.

When I read them, it reminds me of some questions I’ve had (about my own past self among other things).

If you wanted to invent an engine for promoting self-righteousness and / or intellectual snobbery in the Christian world, could you find anything more effective than the “Christian worldview and antithesis” industry?  Of course, I don’t want to deny the valid points such thinking has.  Christian worldview thinking was promoted in the face of what was arguably an intellectual malaise of some sort in the Evangelical world.  But there is more than one threat to the Christian community, and perhaps there are some “side effects”to the medicine we’ve been promoting.

One other thought, maybe related maybe not: I’m not happy with the reasons I often hear articulated by Christians for church growth and outreach.  Yes, unbelievers need the Gospel.  I realize that.  But we also need to be sanctified.  And it has been established from the time of Adam and Eve, when God withdrew His presence to the other side of the firmament to let Adam and Eve learn how to treat one another, that sanctification comes from other people.

We need strangers.  We need the people who make us uncomfortable and offend us even.  Does that mean there are no standards for separating from wicked people?  Of course not!  But that fact simply does not justify our industrious production of subsidiary standards by with we judge and stand aloof from both Christian and non-Christian.

I think, to some measure, my thoughts here are related to this post. It is really all because I’ve repeatedly listened the our Bard of the Bible, Jamie Soles, who sings on my favorite album,

Jephthah was a fighter but he did not have much backing
All his brothers said “You’re not of us!” and sent him packing
How they wished when Ammon came
that they had not so done
For their one hope of victory was in this rejected son
Tell me, doesn’t that remind you of Someone?

Sure, it does.  But if I had been one of Jephthah’s “brothers” (the text is ambiguous and could be referring to a nuclear family or fellow residents of a town), I doubt I would have recognized it until the Ammonites forced me to take a second look.

By people of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners will I speak to this people, and even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord (1 Cor 14.21; Isaiah 28.11).

We want to listen to God, don’t we?