Tag Archives: Theological Virtues

Faith and the Suspicion of God

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Are you suspicious of God?  This is a rather strange question to open an essay, especially one written by a believer.  It seems to be the question of the skeptic.  If we are honest, we will admit that, yes, on some level, I am suspicious of God. That level of honesty is difficult because it shatters the image each of us has of himself as a Christian.  Nevertheless, it is there.  God has willed it (even if only permissively) as an effect of the Fall.  We have each inherited from Eve a suspicion that God might not totally have our best interest at heart.  Satan placed the question of whether God was holding out on her in her heart and its echoes have been heard in the hearts of her progeny ever since.

There is further proof that suspicion is part of our default condition.  In those children whom He has adopted in Baptism, God has placed the remedy—Faith.  Without it we will eternally go on questioning God’s motives.  With it, suspicion is wiped away.  The point is that Faith is not natural, not something we can obtain or, once we have it, even increase on our own.  It is beyond our natural capacities and is totally supernatural.  Upon hearing of the power of Faith (Lk 17:5, Mt 17:20), the disciples do not say “Lord we will try harder to believe”, but “Increase our Faith.” 

Despite its supernatural origin, it is nevertheless a habit infused into our souls that we have the power to use.  But in order to use it properly, we must become more aware of its mode of operation. 

Natural vs Supernatural Faith

Oftentimes we equate supernatural Faith with human faith and think it simply means trust.  Like supernatural Faith, natural faith is a form of belief based on trust.  We might have faith that a pilot has been properly trained and therefore get on a flight even if we are anxious about flying.  Natural faith is based on reasons—the airline would not want to put inexperienced pilots in the air because it is too great of a liability, we know someone who is a pilot and he went through years of flight school, the FAA unlike most government agencies is effective in monitoring airlines, etc.  Ultimately there is a leap of faith involved, but the leap is based upon solid reasoning.

Supernatural Faith is not quite the same.  Like natural faith it involves first believing someone (trust) before believing in his testimony.  But with Faith there is no leap of faith involved.  God has picked us up and placed us across the chasm of mistrust and doubt.  He has given us a share in the trust that Christ had in the Father.  Now, Christ did not have Faith because He had the Beatific Vision from the moment of His conception, but nevertheless He merited for us the foundation of Faith—trust.  The problem is that we often put the cart before the horse and focus on what is revealed before we address the issue of trust in the Revealer.

There truly is no such thing as an “intellectual conversion”.  You can think all of the doctrines of the Faith are reasonable and still not have Faith.  You simply have right opinion.  That is a good thing, but it is not Faith.  Faith consists first in trusting the Divine Person and then, knowing that He cannot deceive or be deceived, you believe everything that He says. 

There is a great recent example of this in an interview Jordan Peterson gave.  Anyone following him over the last few years will see that he is coming to think like a Christian.  He even admits to seeing Christ as an important historical figure who lived.  But he does not, and never will be able to, convince himself that Christ lives.  He still sees Him as living in the past and only influencing today through some natural progression of His doctrines.  This is natural faith, but, as I have said previously, one does not graduate from natural faith to supernatural Faith.  Pray that he receive the gift of Faith.

Disposing Ourselves to Receive Faith

We can detect our own tendency to naturalize Faith by how we respond to the interaction between Christ and the Apostles when He tells them it was because of little Faith that they could not cast out the demons (Mt 17:20).  Most of us read that as a rebuke.  But how can He rebuke them for something that they don’t naturally have?  Instead He is making them aware both of the power of Faith (it can move a mountain) and their need to ask and ready themselves to receive an increase (Lk 17:5). 

Because Faith is the foundation of the spiritual life and thus the deeper the foundation the taller the edifice that can be built upon it—but we said it was a gift and thus we cannot strictly speaking increase our faith we can ask for more faith and do certain things which dispose us for a reception of stronger Faith.  As St. John Henry Newman says :

“…with good dispositions faith is easy; and that without good dispositions, faith is not easy; and that those who were praised for their faith, were such as had already the good dispositions, and that those who were blamed for their unbelief, were such as were wanting in this respect, and would have believed, or believed sooner, had they possessed the necessary dispositions for believing, or a greater share of the them.”

St. John Henry Newman, Dispositions for Faith, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions.

There are two things in particular we can do to dispose ourselves to receive an increase in Faith.  First and most importantly is to ask.  Admit your unbelief and ask for an increase in Faith (Mk 9:24).  Second, exercise the virtue of Faith.  When you exercise the “muscle” of faith through its exercise, you will be ready for the Divine Spotter to add more weight on the bar of Faith.  The three exercises that are particularly helpful are:

  1. Make acts of faith, especially by reciting the Creed.  But also in general by affirming that you believe any particular doctrine you happen to come across in your spiritual reading or discussion.  I find this practice particularly helpful during homilies that otherwise would not move me.
  2. Study the Faith.  When you also understand you are able to make a firmer assent to what is believed.
  3. Teach the Faith or openly profess the Faith in front of others.  This requires first a trust in God that He rewards those who proclaim Him and then a trust that He has spoken truthfully.

What is Faith?

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There are certain terms within the Christian lexicon that are so familiar that we can, like St. Augustine’s own struggle with time, define them as long as no one asks.  Faith is just one such term.  It serves as a catch-all term that encompasses in generality belief and trust, although often in such an ambiguous manner that we strain to see what it is clearly.  Yet it remains a most important term, one by which, Sacred Scripture tells us, we are saved.  Therefore it behooves us to spend some time reflecting on faith.

We must admit at the outset that some of the ambiguity surrounding faith stems from a failure to distinguish between natural and supernatural powers.  Faith is both a natural and a supernatural act.  Put more accurately, there are two types of faith—natural and supernatural.  All men have natural faith, but not all men receive supernatural faith.  This distinction is often lost when countering atheists who insist that faith is unreasonable.  What they mean is that supernatural faith is unreasonable, while the Christian apologist insists that even the atheist has faith although what he means is natural faith.  The two end up missing each other entirely because they are on two different planes of argument.  Unfortunately, this distinction often becomes muddled in our mind and not just in our apologetics. 

Faith means an assent given to a particular proposition based not on direct evidence, but on the credibility of the witness.  One accepts the proposition as true because they believe the one who tells them.  As St. Thomas puts it, faith is the assent to those things which are unseen (ST II-II, q.4, a.1).  So, faith has two aspects, the “thing unseen” and the assent.  It is both knowledge and consent, requiring both intellect and will with an emphasis on the latter.   Faith, then, only pertains to those things we do not see—for to see brings certainty and requires no assent on our part.  Faith becomes a source of knowledge of many, many things, and thus we can see how it is indispensable for man to grow in knowledge of anything.

We can further our understanding if we grasp the difference between faith and opinion.  Because it rests upon the credibility of the witness always carries with it subjective certainty.  Opinion on the other hand is always accompanied by a fear or doubt that one is in error leading to some degree of reservation of full assent.  Doubt can move to certainty either by fully assenting to the trustworthiness of the witness or by gathering more evidence.  

Natural vs Supernatural Faith

The distinction between natural and supernatural faith then rests in who the witness is.  For natural faith, the witness is another man.  For supernatural faith, the witness is God Himself.  Blessed John Henry Newman defines faith as ““assenting to a doctrine as true, which we do not see, which we cannot prove, because God says it is true, who cannot lie.”  In short, faith is an act of trust in the authority of God as revealed.  What He has said becomes, in a certain sense, secondary, to the fact that He has said it.  Whatever He says we deem as true because He has said it.  It is in this way that faith becomes synonymous with trust.  Their “reasonableness” then takes a back seat and faith “comes from hearing” (Romans 10:17) the Word of God as such.

One does not “graduate” from natural faith to supernatural faith.  “Our vision of the face of God,” St. John Paul II says, “is always impaired by the limits of our understanding.  Faith alone makes it possible to penetrate the mystery in a way that allows us to understand it coherently” (Fides et Ratio, 13).  Because it is part of the human condition, especially in its fallen state, to abhor a mystery, we naturally shun divine faith.  Therefore, it must be bestowed upon us from above.  Supernatural faith is a gift and not something that we can achieve on our own.  It can grow through our actions once it is implanted, but it is never something we can achieve.  We can make no judgment upon it, we can only submit.  It is the giving of our minds to God so that He might fill them with knowledge of Himself.

To this point we have been overlooking an important aspect: if faith consists in assent to God’s Word, how do we recognize His voice?  The problem as Newman further explains is that “God says it is true, not with His own voice, but by the voice of His messengers, it is assenting to what man says, not simply viewed as a man, but to what he is commissioned to declare, as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador from God” (Faith and Private Judgment).  This is where the previously mentioned motives of credibility come in.  Many men purport to speak for God, but in only one place do we find good reasons to believe in the reliability of His witnesses—the Catholic Church.  Whether it be the prophecy, the miraculous endurance of the Church, or the manner in which it spread, there are reasons to believe that the fullness of Revelation subsists in the Catholic Church.  By having human faith in the Apostles and their successors, it prepares the way for the gift of divine faith given to us in Baptism.

This is exactly what we see during the Peter’s homily on Pentecost.  He provides them with the motives of credibility—the miraculous pouring of the Holy Spirit and an explanation of the prophets so that once they believed him as the messenger, they ask “what are we to do, my brothers?”  Peter tells them to be baptized so that they will receive the gift of divine faith.  Natural faith prepared their hearts for the gift of divine faith.

Practical Consequences

There are two further implications of this, both of which Newman addresses.  First, Catholics are often accused by Protestants of pinning their faith in the Pope or a Council.  But this is exactly what the first Christians did by submitting themselves to the Apostles.  It was reasonable for them to believe that what the Apostles preached was true and through the gift of divine faith they were given certainty that what they preached came from God.  It was their natural faith that gave them the proper disposition to receive the supernatural gift of faith.  They believed that God had revealed it and thus many of them were willing to witness to that truth through the gift of their martyrdom.

Secondly, those who subscribe to “Cafeteria Catholicism” do not have supernatural faith.  Recall that saving faith means an assent of the mind to God’s revelation.  To pick and choose what you will believe is not supernatural faith, but a form a private judgment.  It is only accidental that what you believe coincides with what God has truly revealed.  This is, at best, natural faith, although one would stain to defend it as faith at all since it rests neither on human or divine authority but on opinion.  This is also why the Church does not allow her children to entertain any doubts because a Catholic is only a Catholic while he has faith.  Faith is incompatible with doubt so that Newman says, “No one can be a Catholic without a simple faith, that what the Church declares in God’s Name is God’s Word, and therefore, true.”