Saving or efficacious faith is not the same thing as the best faith man can muster through the exercise of the will. According to our Lord Jesus in John 4:13-14, efficacious faith is that which is given to the believer by God and this same faith will become in the believer a spring of water welling up to eternal life. 

13 Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.” John 4:13-14 (NASB)
Efficacious adj. producing the desired effect – from The Oxford New Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus Third Edition.
Christian faith has appeared to many an easy thing; nay, not a few even reckon it among the social virtues, as it were; and this they do because they have not made proof of it experimentally, and have never tasted of what efficacy it is. For it is not possible for any man to write well about it, or to understand well what is rightly written, who has not at some time tasted of its spirit, under the pressure of tribulation; while he who has tasted of it, even to a very small extent, can never write, speak, think, or hear about it sufficiently. For it is a living fountain, springing up into eternal life, as Christ calls it in John iv.1
Saving or efficacious faith is not the same thing as the best faith man can muster through the exercise of the will. According to our Lord Jesus in John 4:13-14 (above), efficacious faith is that which is given to the believer by God and this same faith will become in the believer a spring of water welling up to eternal life. This is not belief that is the product of reason or intellectual assent. It is not a belief that the believer must generate and desperately hold onto lest it be diminished and be lost. In the excerpt from Martin Luther’s letter to Pope Leo X, Concerning Christian Liberty, we read that those who conceive of faith as something done by the believer count it as simply a social virtue and that is an easy thing. Luther says that those with this concept of faith believe as they do because they have not experienced efficacious faith and have never tasted the great strength there is in it. I contend that the purveyors of the Seeker-Sensitive, NAR, and WOKE forms of “Christianity” are of the same sort of faith Luther is contrasting in this letter with genuine believers who are so because they have drunk of the water given to them by the Lord that has become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life. These of the New Type of Christianity have a faith consisting of works-righteousness. This is a man-made faith not the efficacious faith that is a gift of God (Ephesians 2:1-10). 
Efficacious faith produces genuine Christians, while man-made “easy” faith, which is works, does not as Luther shows us here:
We first approach the subject of the inward man, that we may see by what means a man becomes justified, free, and a true Christian; that is, a spiritual, new, and inward man. It is certain that absolutely none among outward things, under whatever name they may be reckoned, has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or liberty, nor, on the other hand, unrighteousness or slavery. This can be shown by an easy argument.
What can it profit the soul that the body should be in good condition, free, and full of life; that it should eat, drink, and act according to its pleasure; when even the most impious slaves of every kind of vice are prosperous in these matters? Again, what harm can ill-health, bondage, hunger, thirst, or any other outward evil, do to the soul, when even the most pious of men and the freest in the purity of their conscience, are harassed by these things? Neither of these states of things has to do with the liberty or the slavery of the soul.
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Let us ask ourselves in the heat of our anger against injustice: Am I indignant because God’s name is not being hallowed, because His kingdom is not being valued, and because His will is not being done, or is it my own name, kingdom, and will that are being transgressed? May we have a fiery indignation for God’s law, but may we “be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32) especially when we ourselves are reproached.

Hot indignation seizes me because of the wicked,who forsake your law.
Psalm 119:53 ESV

Indignation is anger that specifically arises over unfair treatment or, we might say, over inequality or injustice being committed. Given that justice and equality are chief topics at present, it should not surprise us also to find much indignation within public discourse, nor should its presence necessarily be written off as a bad thing in itself. The vision of a society where no arguments ever happen and all of life is spent roasting marshmallows over a campfire singing “kumbaya” is a reality that will not be achieved in this life. Does not Proverbs 27:17 say that “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another”? Blades can only be sharpened by removing bits of steel with another steel until an edge is formed. A society without any friction whatsoever is as useful (and as dangerous) as a bunch of dull knives. This is true even of the church, where rebukes and discipline are at times necessary, just as even Paul once rebuked Peter (Galatians 2:11-14).
No, indignation itself is not a problem, but we may certainly be indignant over the wrong things. The last few passages in our study of Mark may serve as a helpful guide since indignation has made a number of appearances.
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Owen’s defense of Reformed teachings such as definite (or limited) atonement, unconditional election, and the priority of the divine decree are particularly expressed through scholastic methodology. Owen provides a valuable model for those in the Reformed and Protestant tradition for how theology may be done with depth, insight, and profundity.

John Owen (1616-1683), sometimes called “The Prince of Puritan Divines” is widely recognized as one of the greatest Reformed theologians ever to have lived. Owen’s works are valued for their theological depth and insight.  Owen’s writings demonstrate both rigorous logic and profound eloquence, as he marshals a host of intellectual resources in the task of articulating the truths of the Christian faith. While Owen was very well connected politically and in public life, serving as vice-chancellor of Oxford under Oliver Cromwell from 1651 to 1657, it is the richness of his thought that brought him the most recognition and attention.[1] Carl Trueman notes, “Owen was without doubt the most significant theological intellect in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, and one of the two or three most impressive protestant theologians in Europe at the time.”[2] Owen’s profound theological insight brought him widespread recognition and a reputation for depth of thought which remains to this day.
Yet, Owen cannot be seen in isolation from the world of which he was part. Indeed, Owen is rightly seen as part of a broader movement of intellectual currents present in Western Europe at the time. It is these movements which are key to properly understanding Owen in his own intellectual development and context. Chief among these is scholasticism. John Owen may be rightly said to be a Protestant scholastic, in a very similar manner to other great theologians of the era, such as Francis Turretin (1623-1687) and Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676). It is the purpose of this essay to explain Owen’s Protestant scholasticism and how it contributed to his articulation of classic Reformed theology.
Scholasticism
Scholasticism as a movement began in the Middle Ages as a method to teaching within the schools. It is from this that it receives its name. It was a movement of the schola, the school. As the great universities developed in Europe, they began to develop systematic methodological approaches to teaching theology, philosophy, and other subjects. At the heart of the scholastic method was the disputation, where magisters (teachers) and their students would engage in public debate over disputed points of teaching. The disputed points would be characterized in the form of a question. This method became known as the quaestio method.[3] This method was valued throughout the history of scholasticism. It can thus be seen in both the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century and the Institutes of Elenctic Theology of Francis Turretin in the seventeenth century.  Thus one of the core features of scholastic theology was its concern with working through questions of dispute and analyzing them exhaustively.
There are several points to be made about scholasticism. First, scholasticism was a method. It was not a communication of specific content. A specific doctrine or teaching would not qualify as “scholastic.” Scholasticism is a reference to the approach to teaching and assessing the content of the discipline. It is an approach which was developed in the schools as a way of handling different types of content. As Richard Muller notes, “’scholasticism,’ properly understood, indicates a method, capable of presenting and arguing a variety of theological and philosophical conclusions, and not a particular theology or philosophy.”[4]
The second point to be made about scholasticism is that it built upon formal principles of logic. Many of the debates and approaches were highly technical and focused upon logical analysis of argument. Questions in disputations often came down to discussions of whether or not a particular argument was logical or if it committed a certain type of fallacy. To this end, Aristotle’s logic was used. Aristotle’s Organon, or his logical writings, served to provide a logical foundation for the approach to theology and philosophy.[5] These writings provided theologians and philosophers with the tools necessary to analyze arguments and to judge their validity.
A third point to be made about scholasticism is that it was a method which made very fine distinctions and categories. This was an approach which allowed thinkers to work delicately and finely through each aspect of an issue, making important distinctions for each topic.[6] One example may be given of the distinction between the secret and the revealed will of God: one refers to His eternal decree, the other to his revealed law.[7] This type of distinction was made often in scholastic theology. Many theological categories and distinctions were developed through this approach.
Thus scholasticism, established in the medieval era, provided a means by which scholars could rigorously and logically work through certain subjects and handle them in a comprehensive fashion. This method was not immediately discarded in the Renaissance and the Reformation. Rather, it was adopted and utilized in new ways by Protestants.
Protestant Scholasticism
When Protestantism arose in the early 1500s, Protestantism took over many of the institutions of society, including the universities. As Protestantism developed in these contexts, Protestants began to use the tools and the training of these institutions for their use. This led to the development of Protestant scholasticism, where many of the same techniques and methods utilized in the medieval era were adopted in service of Protestantism. Protestant scholasticism was not completely identical to medieval scholasticism, but there was a commonality in that scholastic approaches were used in a university setting. These included the disputation, the use of Aristotelian logic, and the development of fine categories and distinctions in argumentation. The Reformed utilized this method particularly effectively across Europe, thus leading to the particular phenomena of Reformed scholasticism.
Reformed scholasticism was the use of scholastic methods in the service of Reformed theology. Following the Reformed tradition and theologians such as John Calvin, Martin Bucer, and Ulrich Zwingli, Reformed scholasticism utilized these same approaches in defense of Reformed teaching. The teaching of the Reformed confessions, such as the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession, the Canons of Dordt, and the Westminster Standards found great expression in the work of Reformed scholastic theologians.
The Reformed scholastics used methods like the quaestio method to achieve greater precision and accuracy in teaching and in developing their theology. They utilized the disputation as well, engaging in public disputations upon contested issues. The Reformation did not actually lead to a rejection of scholasticism, but a renewal of it in a new Protestant context.
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