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You have fallen into the mistake of assuming something that is not true. I have never claimed that faith is natural to man. On the contrary I have affirmed in a recent post that faith is the gift of God and not of man.


(Fred) Regardless of how you may wish to qualify your system of theology, either by affirming some aspect of prevenient grace or a neo-Lutheran view of saving faith, the issue comes back to the fact that you insist that faith begets regeneration, or a man being born spiritually. The various texts of scripture are quite clear that it is God who first regenerates the person, including the imparting of a saving faith, then the person believes the gospel. I would further add that God's regeneration always fulfills his purposes. In other words, God doesn't give every single person in the world the gift of faith by the means of a prevenient grace, and then it is left to all of those single individual persons to act upon that gift with their own choice to believe. In all insistence of regeneration taking place in the book of Acts, as well as in all discourses of regeneration by the apostles in their epistles, regeneration always, with out fail, imparts saving faith to a person and each and every person comes to salvation. This fact you cannot escape.

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Nevertheless, you cannot ignore other scriptures which show that receiving life is through faith.

(Fred) Neither I, Pilgrim, nor anyone else who has interacted with you, have ignored those scriptures. We have tried to show you, particularly Pilgrim who has done an admirable job, that you are mistaken that a person first has faith, then is born again. The language of the Bible, both in the original and any reputable translation, has saving faith dependent upon God first regenerating the person or bringing him to spiritual birth, THEN the person believes in faith.

Fred

"Ah, sitting - the great leveler of men. From the mightest of pharaohs to the lowest of peasants, who doesn't enjoy a good sit?" M. Burns