What is the source and status of faith? Is it the God-given means whereby the God-given justification is received, or is it the condition of justification which it is left to man to fulfil? Is it a part of God’s gift of salvation, or is it man’s own contribution to salvation? Is our salvation wholly of God, or does it ultimately depend on something that we do for ourselves? Those who deny the latter (as the Arminians later did) thereby deny man’s utter helplessness in sin, and affirm that a form of semi-Pelagianism is true after all. It is no wonder, then, that later Reformed theology condemned Arminianism as being in principle a return to Rome (because in effect it turned faith into a meritorious work) and a betrayal of the Reformation (because it denied the sovereignty of God in saving sinners, which was the deepest religious and theological principle of the Reformer’s thought). Arminianism was, indeed, in Reformed eyes a renunciation of New Testament Christianity in favour of New Testament Judaism; for to rely on oneself for faith is no different in principle from relying on oneself for works, and the one is as un-Christian and anti-Christian as the other (Johnson and Packer’s introduction to Luther’s Bondage of the Will).
What follows are some thoughts on faith from Theodore Beza’s Confession (1560). His thoughts show the same basic thought as Luther. Faith does not originate and come from the sinner, but instead it comes from God. Faith does not come from a will that is free from God (a free-will), but from a will that has been renewed and made alive by God and so it is now spiritually capable to receive Christ alone for its righteousness and its all. It is not just an intellectual faith which one has of the facts, but it is a renewed soul actually receiving Christ as his or her life. IN this we can see grace in salvation from beginning to end. It is grace that chooses the sinner and it is grace that gives faith in the renewal of the soul and in uniting it to Christ. That was Luther, Calvin, and Beza. That is Bible.
The Holy Ghost then is the same by whom the Father puts and keeps His elect in possession of Jesus Christ His Son, and consequently of all the graces which are necessary to salvation. But first it was necessary that the same Holy Spirit make us capable and fit to receive (Eph 1:17) the same Jesus Christ, which He does in creating within us by His mere divine goodness and mercy what we call faith, the only instrument of taking hold of Jesus Christ (John 3:1-13, 33-36) when He is offered to us, and the only vessel to receive Him…
He created in us likewise this means of faith which He requires of us. Now the faith of which we speak is not to believe only that God is God and that the contents of His Word are true (for the devils have this faith and cannot but tremble at it, James 2:19), but we call faith a certain knowledge (I Cor 2:6-8) which the Holy Ghost by His grace alone and goodness engraves more and more in the hearts of the elect of God, by which each one of them being assured in his heart of his election, applies and appropriates to himself the promise of his salvation in Jesus Christ. Faith, I say, believes not only that Jesus Christ is dead and risen for sinners (Rom 8:16, 39), but proceeds to embrace Jesus Christ in whom alone he trusts and so assures himself of his salvation that he doubts not (Eph 3:12). For that reason St. Bernard said, according to all the Scriptures that follow, “If you believe that your sins may not be put away, but by Him whom you offended, and also who is not subject to sin, you do well; but yet join thereunto another point, that is to say that you believe also that by Him your sins are forgiven…
How this is to be understood, which we say as St. Paul says, that we are justified by faith alone. The reason is because faith is the instrument which receives Jesus Christ and as a consequence receives His righteousness, i.e., all perfection. When we say then as St. Paul said that we are justified by faith alone, it is not to say that faith is a virtue which makes us righteous in ourselves before God (for that would be to set ourselves in the place of Jesus Christ, who alone is our perfect and entire righteousness); but we understand that we are justified by faith because it embraces Him who justifies us, i.e., Jesus Christ, in such a way that it unites and knits us together with Him to be partakers of all the goodness which He has—He, who being granted and imputed to us, is fully sufficient to make us perfect and accepted as righteous before God…
But this it appears that to be assured of our salvation by faith is not any arrogance or presumption; but on the contrary, it is the only means for taking all pride from ourselves and to give all glory to God. For faith alone teaches us to go out of our own selves and to know that in us there is nothing but the matter of damnation, and sends us to one alone—Jesus Christ, by whose righteousness alone it teaches and assures us that we will find salvation before God…
God Loves... Himself 
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