One occasionally encounters the view that saving faith is a gift from God, and that those who believe are able to do so only because God gave them the faith to do so. The scary correlate of this view is that those who don’t believe are plumb out of luck: God hasn’t seen fit to give them the faith they need.
Several of the contributors to the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (= TDNT [compiled in Germany before and after World War II]) operated from the premise that faith is a gift from God, and used that view as a datum in their theological unpacking of word meanings. H. Hanse makes the following remarks in an entry that he contributed to TDNT:
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