Faith is a Gift from God, Not TO Him

We talked a bit about what the “gift” is in Ephesians 2:8-9, what the early church father had to say about it, and how it all relates to Provisionalism.

[blakeclarkson]

Great truth! Totally agree! God is the founder and perfecter of our faith! There are many other verses on this subject that folks may be able to dance around, for a while, but in the end, they are just unavoidable!

[yvonnestone]

Always appreciate you, & I would only ad, Psalm 14, says " God looked down from heaven to see if anyone does good, or seeks God, or understands, and concludes there is none, not even one. God looking down from heaven is the foundation of all "freewillers", as they think He sees "faith" in them. So this destroys their whole argument. thanks, Bob stone in Mn.

[adsdavidson]

The gift of God is eternal life
Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

[RGrantJones]

Chrysostom, as translated in NPNF, first series, vol 13, page 67: " 'And that not of ourselves.' Neither is faith, he means, 'of ourselves.' Because had He not come, had He not called us, how had we been able to believe? for 'how, ' saith he, 'shall they believe, unless they hear?' (Romans 10.14) So that the work of faith is not our own."

[huntsman]

Interpretation A (James White)
After teaching about the gift of God multiple times in prior letters, Paul decides to teach an extremely complicated doctrine with an ambitious text.

Interpretation B
Paul is reiterating the same concepts to a different church. Attempting to note write multiple chapters on the topic, he condenses his work in Romans into a couple sentences.

Romans 3:24-25
"[All] are justified by his grace as a gift,  through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,  whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith"

Or simply "[All] are justified by his grace as a gift... to be received by faith"
Vs
"By grace you have been saved [as a gift] through faith"

Romans 6:23 ESV
"For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord"

[oracleoftroy]

James White, you are completely wrong here. The most logical way to write dates is year/month/day so that dates sort correctly. Day/month/year is the least logical, closely followed by month/day/year. You need to repent of your traditions and embrace ISO 8601.

[strouth]

It is discouraging that such an important message, inspired by God, is ambiguous and left to differing interpretations (even by biblical scholars). The potential for misunderstanding the message could have easily been avoided by simply replacing the word “this” with what “this” is referencing, be it grace, faith, or the entire preceding phrase.

[Rbl]

James, your exegisis saying all the preceding is the gift of does not fly with no sense...strangest verse in the Bible if that's true. The antecedant to "that" is faith..also it is Biblical to say faith is not of ourselves, we have several verses saying that faith is "of Christ"

[Bibleguy-uunr]

Augustine did not know Greek, therefor is not any sort of authority on this subject.

[File]

I was just thinking about this the other day.
I would say that “by grace” refers to God’s nature (as He is both merciful and righteous), “you have been saved” is action on God’s part (passive form of the verb “to save” indicates that – we don’t save ourselves, God saves us), but faith is something that man inherently does not have (being dead in sin), until born again by God. So “that” here would then refer to faith, regardless of the pronoun gender issue.

[glenncook]

Wow!!! I've never heard a man more predetermined to believe the lie of Calvinism...