Beliefs and practices

Concepts of faith

The idea of faith shared by all Christian churches is rooted in the New Testament. But the New Testament idea of faith is not simple; indeed, it possesses a breadth of meaning that has led to varying understandings, even within a single Christian communion. Most modern interpreters of the New Testament would agree to a description of faith as the personal knowledge of God revealing himself in Christ. Yet it is doubtful whether the post-Reformation theology of any Christian church has presented faith simply in these terms.

Well before modern theologians considered the meaning of faith, Christian thinkers, beginning with St. Paul and the Evangelists, sought to explain faith. In the Synoptic Gospels, God was the object of faith, and faith itself was belief in Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God. The Apostle Paul taught that faith meant belief in Christ and the preaching of Christ, which is the word of God, as well as obedience to Christ. Faith also was the key to salvation, and as such it offered confidence in the reconciliation with God. For St. John, faith was inspired by miracles and was knowledge of Jesus as the Messiah. The Apologists and other early writers commented on faith, but the most influential discussion of faith was that of St. Augustine, for whom faith was the acceptance of revelation and the freely given gift of God. This idea was developed and given official sanction at the second Council of Orange (529), which declared that the beginning and even the desire of faith was the result of the gift of grace. In the 13th century St. Thomas Aquinas defined faith as an intellectual assent to divine truth by the command of the will inspired by grace and the authority of God. Aquinas’s definition was made canonical by the Council of Trent (between 1545 and 1563) and Vatican I (1869–70). The fathers at Vatican II (1962–65) confirmed this understanding of faith in the dogmatic constitution Dei verbum (November 18, 1965; “The Word of God”), which declared that faith must be preceded and assisted by “the grace of God and the interior help of the Holy Spirit.” Vatican II stressed that both the bestowal of grace and the human response to it are free acts.

Preambles and motivation of faith

Two subjects are key to understanding Catholic faith: the preambles of faith and the motivation of faith. The preambles of faith include those rational steps through which the believer reaches the conclusion that belief in God is reasonable. The freedom of faith is respected by affirming that such a conclusion is as far as the preambles can take one. That is, the preambles show that there is good evidence for the existence of God and that belief in God is reasonable, but they cannot establish God’s existence with absolute certainty or beyond rational doubt. Thus, the preambles leave one free to accept faith or to reject it.

Traditional approaches to the preambles include the study of the scientific and historical difficulties raised against the Christian fact itself (i.e., the Incarnation, Resurrection, Ascension, and glorification of Jesus Christ), against the Roman Catholic interpretation and proclamation of the Christian fact, or against the Roman Catholic claim to be the exclusive custodian of revealed doctrine and the means of salvation. In their earlier forms, these studies attempted to show that faith is the necessary result of a purely rational process. But a faith that proceeds necessarily from reason alone can be neither free nor the result of grace.

The study of the motivation of faith attempted to meet this difficulty. Some analyses presented faith as resting solely on evidence and clumsily postulated a movement of grace necessary to assent to it. Normally, however, one "wills" to believe something only in cases where the evidence for the belief is less than rationally compelling. Ultimately, the Roman Catholic analysis must say that the evidence that belief is reasonable can never be so clear and convincing that it compels one to believe on rational grounds alone. At this point, the will inspired by grace chooses to accept revelation for reasons other than the evidence.

The motive of faith that has been presented by Catholic theologians is “the authority of God revealing.” It is held that the preambles of faith show that it is reasonable to believe that God exists and that he has revealed himself. This evidence, together with an acceptance of the notion that, if God reveals himself, he does so authoritatively (i.e., through church authorities), motivates a person to make the act of faith. The problem with such an analysis has been to define how the authority of the revealer is manifest to the believer. It seems that the notion of the authority of God revealing must be an object of faith rather than a motive, because the believer cannot ever experience the conjunction of this authority together with the fact of revelation. This dilemma caused an increasing number of Catholic theologians to move closer to a view that emphasizes faith as a personal commitment to God rather than as an assent to revealed truth.

Heresy

Heresy is the obstinate denial by a professed, baptized Christian of a revealed truth or of that which the Roman Catholic Church has proposed as a revealed truth. The unbaptized are incapable of heresy, and the baptized are not guilty of “formal” but only of “material” heresy if they do not know that they deny a revealed truth. The seriousness with which Roman Catholicism regarded heresy is shown by the ancient penalty of excommunication. Civil penalties, including death, did not appear until the age of Constantine. Lesser civil disabilities continued in force, though the law was often ignored, into the 20th century. Protestant governments were often as severe as Roman Catholic governments in the suppression of heresy.

Roman Catholic theologians often deal with heresy, paradoxically, as a necessary step in the development of dogma. They point out that the questions raised by heresy are often legitimate, though heretics too quickly assume a one-sided and exclusive view of the doctrine they wish to impose on the entire church. Modern studies have noted that many of the criticisms of the church made by the heretics of the early 11th century were made by the papal reformers after 1050. In recent times many of the theses of Modernism, which were condemned vigorously by Pius X in 1907, found their way into Catholic theology later in the 20th century.