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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
This study begins from a discussion of reason and faith, moves into a consideration of the theology of revelation, and then returns to treat the theology of faith which in the author's judgment is the more fundamental concept of Christian theology. How can one person find faith in history when another can only find probability? Perhaps we achieve what others enable us to achieve. The author suggests a transition from Jesus as man of faith, capable of acknowledging God and being hopeful in and through the ordinary stuff of human existence, and inspirer of faith to Jesus as himself drawn into the faith of his followers and given the titles they gave him.
1 Surlis, Paul, ed., Faith: Its Nature and Meaning (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972)Google Scholar.
2 Denzinger, H., Enchiridion Symbolorum, ed. Schönmetzer, A. (Rome: Herder, 1965), 798Google Scholar; hereafter referred to as Denz., and I use the older numbers retained also in this edition. Some official texts used in this article can be found in English translation in Neuner, J. and Roos, H., The Teaching of the Catholic Church (New York: Alba House, 1966)Google Scholar.
3 Denz., 3004.
4 Denz., 1789.
5 For a more detailed description of the cultural events that led to Vatican I's declaration on reason and faith, see my The Problems of Religious Faith (Dublin: Helican, 1972Google Scholar; Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1975), Part One.
6 Denz., 1795.
7 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 1, art. 1Google Scholar. See my “The Historical Church as Mediator of Faith,” in Surlis, , ed., Faith: Its Nature and Meaning, pp. 116ffGoogle Scholar.
8 On this general impression of the irrationality of faith, see my “The Problems of Religious Faith,” The Living Light 10 (1973), pp. 532–544Google Scholar.
9 I hope I show in this context that I have benefited from one criticism at least offered by Dionne, J. Robert in his perceptive review of my Problems of Religious Faith in Theological Studies 35 (1974), pp. 357–361Google Scholar.
10 McGrath, P. J., “Faith and Reason,” in Surlis, , ed., Faith: Its Nature and Meaning, pp. 133–149Google Scholar.
11 This predominance of interest in revelation in itself indicates a certain priority of revelation over faith as a theological convention, which I think should be reversed.
12 For an exhaustive survey of the topic of revelation in the Christian tradition see Latourelle, R., Theology of Revelation (New York: Alba House, 1966)Google Scholar.
13 This kind of understanding of Chalcedonian christology which in our tradition over-divinized and thus half-dehumanized Jesus has been under reconstruction for some time now by several Roman Catholic authors. See, for instance, Schoonenberg, P., The Christ (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971)Google Scholar.
14 See the Decree of the Holy Office, Lamentibili (June 3, 1907)Google Scholar. Denz., 2021–2.
15 Denz., 2145.
16 Denz., 3538.
17 Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 397ffGoogle Scholar.
18 Heidegger, formulated it: “Why are there assents rather than nothing?” in An Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale University Press, 1959), p. 6Google Scholar.
19 Hick, John, in his Faith and Knowledge (2nd ed.; Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 23Google Scholar, refers to Dom Mark Pontifex's Religious Assent, M. C. D'Arcy's The Nature of Belief, and Dom Illtyd Trethowan's Certainty as members of this class. These British writers have the example of Newman's Grammar of Assent before them, the thesis that men do not normally reach their living certainties by means of deductive logic or proof in the strict sense, but by innumerable indications of great variety and widely differing weight, and by what Newman calls the illative sense.
20 Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology, I (University of Chicago Press, 1951)Google Scholar.
21 Jaspers, Karl, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), p. 8Google Scholar.
22 Hick, , Faith and Knowledge, p. 97Google Scholar. Though I think that Hick's first chapter in his second edition on “The Thomistic-Catholic View of Faith” is too general and too indiscriminate in applying the epithet “Faith as Propositional Belief,” and though I think that many of the objections to his theory of eschatological verification have still not been satisfactorily answered in this second edition, the main aim of the book is achieved. Drawing on James, Newman, and Kant, while criticizing much that these and others say, Hick does a fine job on working out an epistemology of faith.
23 Monden, L., Faith: Can Man Still Believe? (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1970), p. 153Google Scholar.
24 Ibid., p. 154.
25 Gabriel Moran has privately taken me to task for bracketing him with Latourelle in the analysis of the literature in my Problems of Religious Faith. I think that the differences between the two have appeared more clearly in work published after his Theology of Revelation (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966)Google Scholar, and I hope I do justice to the difference factor here, though I still cannot agree that revelation takes priority over faith as a fundamental concept of Christian theology.
26 The great strength of Moran's The Present Revelation for me lies in his probe of the religious dimension of a depth of human experience already under much investigation by scientist, psychologist, ecologist, liberator, and so on. I am not so sure that his formula of a universal revelation with particular concrete expressions of it does full justice to the basic role of particularity in history. And my disagreement on the priority of the revelation category over faith should be set against his contrary argument on pp. 40ff. A similar result to that of Moran's in the understanding of revelation is achieved by Piet Fransen by taking an approach that is quite unusual, but quite promising for the final unity of theology. His “Divine Revelation: Source of Man's Faith,” in Surlis, , ed., Faith: Its Nature and Meaning, pp. 18–52Google Scholar, attempts to understand revelation by means of the theology of grace and the experience of grace. The experience of grace in its personal character and its universal dimension becomes our key to the understanding of revelation-talk.
27 By far the best book on this little known aspect of Aquinas's thought is Preller, Victor, Divine Science and the Science of God (Princeton University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, especially the last chapter.
28 Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 1, art. 6. Aquinas is quoting Isodore, gratefully.
29 Buber, Martin, I and Thou (New York: Scribner's, 1958)Google Scholar.
30 Buber, Martin, Two Types of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1961)Google Scholar.
31 Vorgrimler, H., ed., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, III (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), pp. 177ffGoogle Scholar. For critical recognition of the ecumenical possibilities of this approach to faith, see Berkhof, H., “The Act of Faith in the Reformed Tradition,” in Surlis, , ed., Faith: Its Nature and Meaning, pp. 99–115Google Scholar.
32 See my “Christian Faith as Personal Response,” in Surlis, , ed., Faith: Its Nature and Meaning, pp. 53–69Google Scholar. For a harsh criticism of the “personal encounter” model of faith, particularly when used to cover over the traditional epistemological difficulties of the subject, see Hepburn, R., Christianity and Paradox (London: Watts, 1958), p. 30Google Scholar.
33 Divine revelation, if that phrase is taken literally, must always be definitive for man. Notice that the only way in which Christians could accept the Hebrews/Jews of what Christians call the Old Testament as recipients of divine revelation was to regard that revelation not only as preparation for, but as prophetic of Christianity. The only other alternatives would be to consider God as one who successively reveals parts of a whole revelation, or one who gives different, unconnected, if always better revelations, and both of these alternatives raise problems for man's concept of God that man has not yet fully faced, and would probably be most reluctant to face.
34 A cognate point is made by Berger, Peter, A Rumor of Angels (New York: Doubleday, 1969)Google Scholar, especially in his chapter on “Relativizing the Relativizers,” though Berger, being a sociologist, pretends that it is the discovery of something called the sociology of knowledge.
35 Bultmann, R., The Theology of the New Testament, I (New York: Scribner's, 1951), p. 26Google Scholar.
36 Marx's second thesis against Feuerbach reads: “The question of whether human thinking can arrive at objective truth is not a theoretical but a practical question.” For a commentary on this thesis which will prevent its interpretation in too pragmatist a sense, see Bloch, E., On Karl Marx (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), p. 81Google Scholar.
37 See for example the systematic theology of Segundo, J. L., A Theology for Artisans of a New Humanity (5 vols.; Maryknoll: Orbis, 1973-)Google Scholar.
38 In between the two, a living illustration of the difficulty at times of distinguishing clearly between them, stands the neo-marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. His philosophy of hope, coming from a declared atheist, makes some men wonder what faith means if not what Bloch so brilliantly describes, or else what God could mean to Bloch if Bloch is forced to deny God so completely.
39 I might say though that I have tried to work out some of them in my Pròblems of Religious Faith (Dublin: Helicon, 1972Google Scholar; Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1975). Meanwhile, the second paper which I hope to write and publish shortly in some journal should provide the kind of development asked for by Lauder, Robert in his review of my Problems of Religious Faith in Cross Currents (Fall, 1974): 481Google Scholar.