Regeneration: Pre-Faith or Post-Faith; Either Apart from the Gospel, or Through the Gospel?

John Piper, a Calvinistic pastor, puts it this way:
“We can say, first, that regeneration is the cause of faith… Having been born of God results in our believing. Our believing is the immediate evidence of God’s begetting.”
Gordon Olson, a non-Calvinistic scholar, writes:
“Extreme Calvinists put the new birth before faith, since they believe that spiritually dead humans cannot exercise faith and, therefore, need to be born again before they can believe.”
I would not agree with Olson that this doctrine is necessarily an “extreme” form of Calvinism because most of the mainstream Calvinists today do adhere to it. Instead, I would argue that this point has not always been uniformly understood and adopted in the same way by all Calvinists, [3] which is typical with many of the most controversial points within the Calvinistic scheme.
The Calvinistic teaching has wrongly exaggerated the effects of man’s fallen condition resulting in a misinterpretation of man’s responsibility in light of God’s clear revelation. Calvinists say they believe men are “responsible” but they do not mean what most people think when they hear the word “responsible” (able-to-respond freely and thus guilty for that response).

What Calvinists mean is that mankind is justly punished even though they were born “unable-to-respond” willingly to God’s revelation. They do not mean that mankind is morally capable of responding to God’s appeals to be reconciled from their fallen condition (as implied in 2 Cor. 5:20, John 3:16 and elsewhere)" (Soteriology 101 .com).
Dr. James R. White asserts that "Regeneration Precedes Faith," demonstrating it from the text: 1 John 5:1 The distinction which dissolves the embarrassing difficulty is the precise distinction between a participle and a finite verb, as in this case, the use of the Present Active Participle as a "Gerundive Noun." So, the answer according to the Koine Greek Text, is "No: Regeneration does NOT precede the finite verb form of the verb "believe," but, does precede the Participial form of the verb "believe." Also, regeneration, according to the Koine Greek Text, does NOT occur "Apart from the Gospel," rather "Through the Gospel."

[krisjustin]

So the gospel precedes faith leading to fathering then believing.