Recognizing that the Church is Revealed
We often find ourselves in this age in the habit of considering “religion,” “faith,” and “belief” as merely subjective realities. Due to Relativism–with roots in Kant’s notion of the mind’s activity in creating reality/morality–we can think of the object of faith as created by the person who has faith. There are other tendencies as well, such as regarding the subjective experience of a person as more important than reality.1
For instance, even our use of the term “faith” is often incorrect because of the subjective qualities we give to it. Faith is, in fact, the virtue by which we believe God on his own authority: it is a truly human act, our adherence to God in obedience. However, do we find ourselves talking about “different faiths”? What do we mean, there? Do we mean that God reveals contradictory truths to us?
No. In fact, what has happened in our minds is that we have become more concerned with the experience of believing something than with the truth of what is believed. Even then, we ought to be more concerned with God’s activity. Faith is a gift; it is an infused virtue, not something we can acquire but which God can freely give to us. We should not treat faith–or the life of faith, then–as something which we ourselves construct.
We are not active before God. We are passive, and we must recognize that in humility. We do not find ourselves in a world where everyone is trying to get to know God by different paths. We find ourself in a world where God became man and revealed himself to us fully. God himself established the Church into which we must be incorporated. This Church is here in our day and age, and she can be found at your local Catholic Church.
Why do we all pretend to be agnostics, searching for an unknown God when God must always and has already taken the initiative?
From Dominus Iesus, #7:
The proper response to God’s revelation is “the obedience of faith (Rom 16:26; cf. Rom 1:5; 2 Cor 10:5-6) by which man freely entrusts his entire self to God, offering ‘the full submission of intellect and will to God who reveals’ and freely assenting to the revelation given by him”.15 Faith is a gift of grace: “in order to have faith, the grace of God must come first and give assistance; there must also be the interior helps of the Holy Spirit, who moves the heart and converts it to God, who opens the eyes of the mind and gives ‘to everyone joy and ease in assenting to and believing in the truth’”.
The obedience of faith implies acceptance of the truth of Christ’s revelation, guaranteed by God, who is Truth itself: “Faith is first of all a personal adherence of man to God. At the same time, and inseparably, it is a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed”. Faith, therefore, as “a gift of God” and as “a supernatural virtue infused by him”, involves a dual adherence: to God who reveals and to the truth which he reveals, out of the trust which one has in him who speaks. Thus, “we must believe in no one but God: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit”.
For this reason, the distinction between theological faith and belief in the other religions, must be firmly held. If faith is the acceptance in grace of revealed truth, which “makes it possible to penetrate the mystery in a way that allows us to understand it coherently”, then belief, in the other religions, is that sum of experience and thought that constitutes the human treasury of wisdom and religious aspiration, which man in his search for truth has conceived and acted upon in his relationship to God and the Absolute.
This distinction is not always borne in mind in current theological reflection. Thus, theological faith (the acceptance of the truth revealed by the One and Triune God) is often identified with belief in other religions, which is religious experience still in search of the absolute truth and still lacking assent to God who reveals himself. This is one of the reasons why the differences between Christianity and the other religions tend to be reduced at times to the point of disappearance.
1 One of the books I encountered over the summer even claimed that “true Christians” would not be disturbed by the discovery of Jesus’ tomb with his remains present there since the “experience of resurrection” is what is important rather than the historical event of the Resurrection. (I’d like to introduce that author to my good friend St. Paul. “If Christ is not risen, your faith is in vain.” Doesn’t sound like a “true Christian,” I guess.)