Lou Martyn on “Faith”

J. Louis Martyn in his magisterial Galatians commentary gives a good Reformed/Barthian account of faith:

“Christ’s faith is not only prior to ours but also causative of it. The point is put beyond doubt when Paul says that the proclamation of Christ’s faithful death is what has the power to elicit our trusting faith (3:2). All of these passages, in a word, reflect Pal’s keen interest in the issue of the genesis of human faith. Those who believe in Christ are not puppets, moved about and made to speak by others … But, just as these persons are not puppet believers, so they are not believers as a result of an act of their own autonomous wills, as though the gospel were an event  in which two alternatives were placed before an autonomous decider, and faith were one of two decisions the human being could make autonomously. On the contrary, for Paul faith does not lie in the realm of human possibility. Even to speak of faith as a ‘possibility granted by God’ can be misleading. For faith is not an option human beings can choose. Thus, when Paul speaks about placing one’s trust in Christ, he is pointing to a deed that reflects not the freedom of the will, but rather God’s freeing oft he will. In Christ, the Son of god whose faith is engagingly enacted in his death, God invaded tehhuman orb and commenced a battle for the liberation of the human will itself. And in the case of believers, that apocalyptic invasion is teh mystery genesis of faith in Christ (cf. Phil 2:12-13; Gal 4:4-6).” Martyn, Galatians, 276.

See my older post Does God Create Faith?