[Jacobus] Arminius freely represented faith as the gift of God and magnified the “acts of Divine grace” that “are required to produce faith in man.” He lists the divine decrees thus: “(1) It is my will to save believers. (2) On this man I will bestow faith and preserve him in it. (3) I will save this man.” (Subsequently, he clarifies “bestow faith” as “administer the means for faith.”) In spite of all I have said above,[1] then, I do not finally object to saying that faith is the gift of God.
But if that terminology is to be used, one must clarify exactly what it means, as follows:
- The capacity to believe is from God.
- The possibility of believing is from God.
- The content of belief—the gospel truth—is from God.
- The persuasion of truth which one believes is from God.
- The enabling of the individual to believe is from God.
But the believing itself can finally be done by no one other than the person called upon to believe the gospel, and that will to believe savingly is the free decision of the individual. If calling faith “the gift of God” is meant to depreciate that, then I must deny the terminology. Since it is not Biblical terminology in the first place, perhaps it is best to discard it.
Had it been important to indicate that salvation is to faith, that faith itself is part of the effects of salvation rather than a condition for salvation, one can think of numbers of ways the New Testament writers, and Jesus Himself, might have expressed that. Instead, […] the New Testament everywhere presents faith as the condition for salvation that man must meet.
Robert E. Picirilli, Grace, Faith, Free Will: Contrasting Views of Salvation: Calvinism and Arminianism (Nashville, TN: Randall House, 2002), p. 167, emphases in original
Copyright © Robert E. Picirilli, 2002. All rights reserved.
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Note
1. For the author’s full(er) discussion on the concept of faith as a gift of God, see Picirilli,
Grace, Faith, Free Will, pp. 165–7. Also, see Picirilli’s discussion on the relationship between ‘pre-regenerating grace’ (i.e. prevenient, divine enabling grace), human depravity, and salvational faith in the context of classical Arminian theology in
Grace, Faith, Free Will, pp. 149–59. —J. D. Gallรฉ
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