THE ACTION OF FAITH
Introduction
We can over complicate both faith and revelation, but reason is the underpinning of faith, and what makes revelation credible. Faith alludes to intellectual belief and to logical belief or commitment. Knowledge coming from faith has its origins in the Word of God. Biblical authors didn’t really differentiate among faith as belief, and faith as trust, more accurately they were apt to regard ‘true faith’ as including what is held e.g., that God exists, that Jesus is Lord, and the individual promise to a being who is dependable, unfailing and able to save, that is, to believe in Christ as the route to Salvation. Revelation deals with the means by which God reveals his divine-nature, and mystery of the divine will and intention to us, and the body of truth He reveals.
A number of theologians hold that revelation comprises God’s action in salvation history through word and deed, ending in Jesus who intercedes and accomplishes God’s self-revelation, and the continual action of God to encourage individuals to yield to, believe and individually appropriate that reality. General revelation asserts God’s existence and qualities can be determined through a natural sense of God’s actuality and conscience as well as through scrutiny of the universe and history. Special revelation refers rather to divine self-disclosure to and through certain persons that bring about human salvation. Anselm spoke of Theology as: ‘fides quarens intellectum,’ ‘faith seeking understanding’. A statement in definition of Theology which has been unsurpassed in over 1000 years. God’s offer of revelation essentially entails what St. Paul termed ‘obedience to faith’ (Rom: 16-26). Revelation and faith are permanently coupled, and so there can be ‘no’ revelation devoid of an individual or of a community identifying it as such.
Revelation, as God’s extending of life and love, doesn’t grow to be revelation until the offer is experienced and recognized in faith. Without this offer of life and love, Christian life is not viable. For he offers himself by such objective things; events in human life, historical events, through individual objects and persons. In this act of faith, we act in response, by reaching out and accepting his offer. Faith like revelation is a gift of self, obtainable in three ways: by belief, emotion, and personal conversion. The act of faith is not a one-time act for we do it constantly, in our lives. It is the way the human person is open to or can offer their own personhood or subjectivity to God.
The act of Faith is the way we offer God something tangible such as personal commitment, assent to truth, a transformed conduct etc. Grace conversely, is the relationship intended when the individual acknowledges God’s revelation. It is God’s attitude toward us, and the attitude of us toward the gift, inviting God. Faith should be vigorous having an emotional, relational or trusting dimension. For we believe it to be true, we believe our salvation. For Dulles, (1999) ‘faith means acceptance of a revealed message on the word of the divine revealer’.
Faith accepts initially and persistently the offer of a bond and friendship experienced in moments of revelation. We are challenged daily to rekindle our faith as we encounter revelatory actions in our lives. God’s self-offering in revelation and our belief of him and consequent gift of faith unlocks the potential of life in his presence, but one exacting profound reflection and prayer as we experience his presence and challenge in our lives. Motivation in approaching faith is stimulated by God, he does this liberally, so that it yields its own contribution. You can only invite, and await a free reply.
Faith, but with Doubt
The individual doesn’t choose to have faith; they can only have it after being moved, however dramatically, by God’s offer of revelation. Doubting, struggling, and questioning, are forever elements of authentic faith. The British theologian, John Davies writes: ‘the enemy of faith is not doubt but the suppression of doubt’. In all imperative life decisions for example marriage, getting a profession or even becoming a priest, you don’t have unconditional certainty. We don’t know if we are doing the right thing in making these decisions. We may have near certainty or ethical certainty, but there is often a threat that what we are doing isn’t the right thing for us, or for the individual or individuals we are entrusting ourselves to. The response of faith also involves risk; it can only be an act that we do as a result of incomplete knowledge. Karl Rahner addressing the Spirit, states, an individual eternally asks questions. Our lucid, spiritual nature impels more insight of the act of faith made. It urges the individual to comprehend the faithfulness to progress and change that this belief calls the person to. Encapsulated in faith is a hunger for vision, a longing to understand and to see, since it doesn’t see, faith searches to see, and to comprehend. The need to comprehend is crucial, so if endeavours to comprehend faith is frustrated, if you halt attempts to comprehend why you believe, the entire faith endeavour fades and dies.
At a particular level, faith is a bond to what another asserts. ‘It is precisely through this development of moral conviction that we can reach conclusions about the sincerity and competence of others. Without this cognitive method of faith, there would be no human development.’ Coming after Sacred Scripture and ancient custom, the Second Vatican Council provides a meaning of ‘faith,’ which is the nucleus for a modern mystical theology.
Can God be rationally discussed if we have no real perception of Him? If we have, what language can be employed to evoke His presence? Our verbal communication echoes numerous aspects of human experience, primarily sensory experience. Our inner experience then expresses itself in words drawn from sensory experience. Our inner-experience is conveyed by using words whose content develops originally from sensory experience. We have become adept at articulating abstract concepts in academic thought. Faith experience, conversely, is different. God is not an abstract concept, but a living presence with whom we are in relationship.
Describing this relationship intelligibly to call to mind, his ‘presence’ – the absolute ‘thou’, but is invisible, correctly speaking, we cannot, He cannot be defined; His presence is outside of definition. He is incomparable to anyone or anything else. Yet, the language of the Christian faith is employed to sketch this indefinable presence so it can be experienced as a mysterious reality. As Pascal has Jesus say in his meditation on ‘the mystery of Jesus,’ ‘You would not be looking for me if you had not already found me’. Wisdom and wonder and truth, identified in a fusion of faith and reason are key to Faith and Reason. Their absence diminishes man’s ability to know himself, the world and God. For all reason seeks the truth, ultimate truth about life will not be established by reason alone. Reason is the underpinning for faith and makes revelation credible.
Faith and Reason are distinct but not separated. Both are essential to Christianity. Faith is primarily an act of both intellect and the will, whereas reason is essentially an act of the intellect. Faith and Reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth, and God has placed in the heart desire to know himself. Knowledge coming from faith has its origin in the Word of God. Reason makes the way to faith effortless. St. Justin and the apologists saw philosophy as an introduction to the faith. Philosophical logic reveals Catholic faith doesn’t oppose reason, and can reveal arguments against the faith. St. Clement termed philosophy a stepping-stone to faith.
Reason shows there is a God, of power and divinity. It underpins faith and makes it credible. It is the common ground between the believer and unbeliever. Faith and the spiritual life defend the philosopher from intellectual pride which could hamper ability to investigate the truth.
Faith strengthened by love, facilitates the intellectual grasp of the truth about us and our real needs. St. John Paul II substantiated the agreement between knowledge of faith and knowledge of reason. Aquinas maintained since the light of reason and the light of faith both come from God there can be no opposition between them.
Revelation
The statement, ‘Christ is the Mediator and at the same time the fullness of all revelation,’ derives from Vatican Council II and its ‘Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation.’ The council document in relation to this is recognized as ‘Dei Verbum,’ 18th November 1965. The declaration on this subject is a landmark statement and is axiomatic to the teaching of the Catholic Church, and follows on from the councils of Trent and Vatican I. In the Old Testament God reveals his love through the great patriarchs and the prophets. Even in the beginning after man turns away from God through sin, he promises redemption. ‘After the fall, he buoyed them up with the hope of salvation’. Moreover, Abraham our great Father in faith has promised that his descendants will be as many as the stars, and subsequently through Moses and the prophets God teaches the people of Israel to look for a Messiah. i.e., ‘Through the prophets, God forms his people in the hope of salvation, in the expectation of a new and everlasting Covenant, intended for all, to be written on their hearts’. However, this promised saviour is not going to come as a king. It is a suffering servant that the mystery of God will enter into history, ‘and can only be inaugurated at a time to be decided by Yahweh’. ‘As many people were aghast at him, he was so inhumanely disfigured that he no longer looked like a man’. ‘Yet he was pierced for our faults and wounded for our sins’. Indeed, it is Yahweh who searches for humanity through his Covenant to Israel. However, Israel cannot respond adequately to the space that God provides through his loving covenant, and ‘it seems that these two simply cannot meet’. This failure to intersect sets the scene for, ‘The activity of God himself who steps out of his mystery and takes a hand in human history’’. This leads to the incarnation of Christ through our Blessed Mother, and, it is ‘here the impossible union of the spheres of existence is actual’.
Conclusion
The astonishing fact in the unfolding drama of revelation is that God freely chooses to reveal his Son as a slave and not a king. The Suffering Servant is God himself which turns human wisdom upside down, Balthasar writes, ‘Only God, who has the vision of his own wisdom, is able to reveal his wisdom’. Jesus reveals the mystery of God through his words and deeds; ‘He teaches men how God really is and since he himself is a man, astonishingly he teaches them to imitate God’. Christ is the supreme Mediator of Revelation, (Jn14:6) ‘I am the way the truth and the life’. However, it is through Christ’s brutal crucifixion, death and glorious resurrection that God reveals his ultimate plan for the universe. Desmond Power writes, when commenting on Balthasar, ‘The Son lays bare the heart of the Father as he becomes the servant of all and breathes into the world his Spirit of service and of taking the last place’. Indeed, Balthasar holds that true ‘agape’ (love) is, ‘an event between the Father and the Son, a twofold surrender in love towards the world that involves the whole Trinity’.
The late St. John Paul II writes, ‘Through this revelation, men and women are offered the ultimate truth about their own life and about the goal of history’. Thus, it is through God’s Divine Revelation in Christ that we receive the great gifts of faith, hope and love. This enables us human beings to believe in God’s revealed truths through the Holy Spirit. It is through this revealed faith we receive grace from God who wants us, ‘to share with us the divine benefits which entirely surpass the human mind to understand.’ The late Pope St. John Paul II writes, ‘mysteries hidden in God which unless they are divinely revealed cannot be known’. However, human reason ‘together’ with faith from revelation can help us .
Understand that it is Christ that is the Mediator and at the same time the fullness of all revelation. Furthermore, the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to the apostles has enabled Divine Revelation to continue to unfold in the lives of God’s children through faith, until today and into the future. Dei Verbum confirms to us Christian’s that there is to be no new public revelation until the glorious ‘second coming’ of our promised Saviour which can only fill our hearts with hope in our eternal God. Christ is the true ‘Mediator,’ and in the blessed Trinity God’s love radiates throughout all creation. Preaching at Oxford in 1830, John Henry Newman declared:
‘It is not here meant that any religious system has been actually traced out by unaided reason. We know of no such system, because we know of no time or country in which human reason was unaided… No people (to speak in general terms) has been denied a revelation from God…’.
The Saint was speaking out of his own Christian faith in an authenticated revelation. Steven Bevans rightly points out that revelation and faith are always connected. In other words, they are ‘correlative’. This concept was discussed at great length during the Second Vatican Council where a change and development in the Church’s theological understanding of the nature of revelation took place. Faith is a response as said earlier to Gods revelation, the result of His act of self-disclosure, showing the fundamental unity between faith and revelation. As Dermot Lane suggests: ‘the element of personal participation is integral to the experience of revelation’. He goes on to say, ‘Without a response in faith, revelation remains at the level of an unrecognized gift and an unacknowledged invitation. I.e., there is no real revelation for the individual until it has been received in faith’.
The Church received the ultimate truth about human life as a gift of love from God the Father in the revelation of Jesus Christ. ‘God so loved the world that he sent his only Son…’ (Jn. 3). By the revelation of Jesus Christ, God has made the truth about human existence and destiny accessible to every man and woman. Jesus Christ is not only the revelation of God to man, he is also the revelation of man to himself. As the late Pope, St. John Paul II suggests in his encyclical letter Fides et ratio: ‘Christ ‘reveals man to himself and makes clear his supreme calling, which is to share in the divine mystery of the life of the Trinity”… Faith is man’s obedient response to God’s revelation… “Men and women can accomplish no more important act in their lives than the act of faith; it is here that freedom reaches the certainty of truth and chooses to live in that truth’.
The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation – Dei Verbum, brings out strongly the Christocentric character of all revelation. Jesus Christ is the personal mediator and the fullness of God’s revelation. Revelation is about the personal communication and dialogic relationship that exist between God and humanity. Bevans again quoting the late Pope, St. John Paul II reminds us that ‘On the one hand, a person must believe in order to understand (credo ut intelligam); on the other she or he must understand in order to believe (intelligo ut credam)”.
