[H]ow do individuals enter (and remain) in the redeemed community of God’s people? We enter by faith: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith” (Eph 2:8). All agree that God’s salvation requires a believing human response to God’s gift of grace. But not all agree on the nature of this faith, especially on how faith itself arises. Calvinists are quick to point to other verses where an exact description of faith’s origin appears to be provided: “through
faith—and
this not from yourselves,
it is the gift of God” (Eph 2:8, emphasis added).
If faith is not our doing but God’s gift, then the well-known features of Calvinism fall into place. Those who “have faith” have been given faith by God, and those who don’t have faith have not been given faith by God. By this view, faith becomes a function of divine causation operating according to the individual electing will of God.
But the terms
(faith, this, it) that seem so clearly linked in English are not so neatly connected in Greek. The English ear largely depends on word order for making sense of language, and so automatically presumes that
this (which “is not from yourselves”) must obviously refer back to
faith, since
faith immediately precedes
this in the word order of the text. But Greek, being an inflected language, actually depends on “tags” that are attached to words for guiding the reader. If our writer had desired readers to connect
faith directly to
this, these two words should have matched each other as grammatically feminine. We find, however, that
this, being neuter in gender, likely points us back several words earlier—to the idea of salvation expressed by the verb. Accordingly, we should read the text with a different line of connections as follows: “For it is by grace you have been
saved, through faith—and
this [salvation is] not from yourselves,
[this salvation] is the gift of God.”[1]
Jerry L. Walls and Joseph R. Dongell, Why I Am Not a Calvinist (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), p. 77, emphases and square brackets in original[2, 3]
Copyright © Jerry L. Walls and Joseph R. Dongell, 2004. All rights reserved.
In order to purchase Walls and Dongell’s
Why I Am Not a Calvinist (2004),* see the links to the following websites:
Notes
1. For further refutations of the strict Calvinistic understanding of faith as a gift of God, see Jack Cottrell,
The Faith Once for All: Bible Doctrine for Today (Joplin, MO: College Press, 2002), pp. 199–200 (this section may also be found in idem,
Set Free! What the Bible Says about Grace [Joplin, MO: College Press, 2009], pp. 227–9); Samuel Fisk,
Election and Predestination: Keys to a Clearer Understanding (1997; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002), pp. 32–6; Norman L. Geisler,
Chosen but Free: A Balanced View of Divine Election, 2nd edn (Bloomington, MN: Bethany House, 2001), pp. 188–99; and Robert E. Picirilli,
Grace, Faith, Free Will: Contrasting Views of Salvation: Calvinism and Arminianism (Nashville, TN: Randall House, 2002), pp. 165–7.
2. For the Calvinistic counterpart to this volume, see Robert A. Peterson and Michael D. Williams,
Why I Am Not an Arminian (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004). See also Roger E. Olson,
Against Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011); and Michael Horton,
For Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011).
3. To visit Jerry L. Walls’ website, see <
https://www.jerrylwalls.com>. —J. D. Gallé
* Unless otherwise indicated, I do not earn commissions (or favours, for that matter) for the purchase of books recommended or referenced on this website. For further information, see my web page, ‘
A Word on The Neo-Remonstrance Blog’.
