Friday, March 13, 2009

What Is Faith in Christ?

I want to understand better the connection between faith as an indirect method of knowledge and faith as it pertains to Christ. I know the connection is there because I live it every day, but I want to examine it closer, to test it in its particulars so I don't miss anything. 

I return again to the book on faith: Is It Possible to Live Like This? Faith by Luigi Giussani. Giussani is an authority for me - which is to say, he tells me things that I don't fully understand or believe and when I follow them I grow. Here's what Giussani says:
"How do you come to know Christ? Clearly, from our outline of the methods that reason uses, the one that has to be applied here is faith. We don't know Christ directly. We know Christ neither through evidence nor through the analysis of experience" (25). If someone disagrees with this point, I would like to see an explanation.
A curious thing about Giussani is that he always insists that the method by which we come to know Christ must be the same method that the disciples came to know him. In the book on faith, he describes five passages, or moments, in the progressive coming to know Christ better: 
  1. An encounter
  2. An exceptional presence
  3. Wonder
  4. Who is this man?
  5. Responsibility before the fact
Giussani insists: the problem that we have with faith in Jesus is the same problem that the disciples had:
"The moment the question 'Who is Jesus?' was posed for the first time is the instance in which the problem of faith entered the world. Not faith as a simple method of reason, but as a method of reason applied to something supra-reasonable, beyond reason, unthinkable, inconceivable. Faith as a method of reason applied to something inconceivable, because everything this man said was unconceivable" (27). 
If you don't feel this inconceivability, then the note on page 27 points to John 1:35ff (the ff means start at 1:35 and keep reading until you see it).  Here we can see that faith in Jesus is different because the object is different: not this or that, but Someone who is beyond what we can conceive, better than we can imagine. 

Grace builds on nature, stretches it, changes it, but it doesn't wipe it out. It doesn't replace human nature with something alien. Faith does not turn men into angels who know things directly. 

6 comments:

Scott W. Somerville said...

John 7:17 has one key to the question. Jesus said, "If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority."

The WILL is crucial to faith. So is that combination of will, emotion, and intellect that we call "trust." Faith differs in this respect from the experimental method, where the objective scientist tries to keep his emotions and desires out of the mix. What Christians call "faith" only "works" if our emotions and desires line up with what God says.

Dcn Scott Dodge said...

You are correct in that will is crucial to faith and that our will (i.e., making choices that go against what we sometimes want and feel like doing, or not doing), which we seek to exercise in cooperation with grace, is what ultimately results in aligning all of our emotions and desires with God's will for us. Giussani calls this living in the awareness of one's destiny. After all, fundamentally, love is not a feeling, but an act of the will, that is, a choice.

However, this only serves to turn the question back on itself. I believe this is what Fred, and Giussani, are getting at: What is it that enables our will to triumph over errant feelings and emotions if not faith, our reliance on the truthfulness of Christian claim of what God has done in Christ and living our lives in accordance with this fact that is constitutive of reality?

By stating up-front that faith is an indirect method of knowledge that comes to us by means of an event that becomes an encounter (i.e., something that happens to me), usually an encounter with a witness, it is clear that we are not approaching the matter of faith from a scientific standpoint.

Fred said...

Does anybody disagree that the object of faith is a person, Jesus of Nazareth — who is the meaning of everything?

Deacon Scott - if you get a chance, I would be interested to see what you would say about the five passages of faith (you can re-purpose material from your presentation if needed). The interesting thing is the priority that Giussani puts on the initiative of God in Christ: 4 steps of God's initiative and 1 step of man's response to God.

Scott S — I'm happy to see the reference to the Gospel of John. I'm not sure what I'll be posting about the phenomenon of witness in reference to Christ but it's clear to me that an extraordinary object (the person of Christ) an extraordinary witness is needed...

Dcn Scott Dodge said...

I agree wholeheartedly that the object of faith is Jesus Christ. I appreciate you stating that clearly. It is too easy to talk about faith in a fuzzy, generic manner. While I use the word faith to mean "faith in Jesus Christ", this may not be the take away. I can certainly repost my talk here.

Anonymous said...

re: Deacon Scott's "usually an encounter with a witness," Karl Adam had this to say in 1924:
"How is faith in Christ attained? The apostles attained it preparatorily by His personal teaching, fulfillingly by the Pentecostal gift of the Holy Spirit. So we also: preparatorily by the teaching of His living, apostolic Church, fulfillingly by the operation of His grace. Not from lifeless records, but from the *living witness* of a living organism sustained and animated by Him, from immediate contact with Christ living in His Church."

where one could define "encounter" as preparation is to consummation, as courtship is to marriage - once we accept the gift, "we see" (this Sunday's 2nd scrutiny Gospel at http://www.usccb.org/nab/032209b.shtml) and may sin of our own volition, without preparation and fulfillment we would be blind and have no sin?

check out Amy Welborn's new Beliefnet blog,
http://blog.beliefnet.com/viamedia/2009/03/silence-1.html
where she's hosting a multi-thread posting on "The Spirit of Catholicism" the book the quote is from (under 'analytical contents' at ch4)
God Bless Clare Krishan

Anonymous said...

... and re: If you don't feel this inconceivability could it be that we're adolecents, prepubescents, that all we know is a kinda dependency of childhood, our physical natures? We may encounter the exceptional presence but not have the metaphysical maturity to recognize it, as male youths often do not appreciate the attentions of the opposite sex who sensual precociousness is awakened before that of their male contemporaries, with the onset of their menses? My metaphor in perhaps not rigorous, but in our time and in our culture of widespread contraceptive usage is it no wonder that 'wonder' at 'exceptional presence' never proceeds to "who is this man? The world of permanent childhood of self-castration has no meaningful concept of virility... The Church's teachings on the culture of life make the encounter with faith in eternal life possible and for this very reason must be vigorously promoted - it is as if we moderns have permanently postponed menarche...