The Padre at the church near where I live has told me that I need to have faith. I do not want to insult him by asking what faith is, because he has been a big help with just talking me through several difficult things that have been going on in my life recently.
So a simple question: What is faith and where do I have to go to get it?
I’m guessing it’s not something that I can order from
amazon.com or ebay.
My short definition of faith is “an act of the will by which one adheres to another who is known”.
The Hebrew word
aman is translated as “believe”, “trust”, “have faith”, and also “support”, “nourish”, and “make lasting”. A derivative word is
omenat, meaning “pillars” or “supports of the door” as in 2 Kings 18:16. Another cognate is
emunah, which is “faithfulness” or “trust”, as in Exodus 17:12 where God brought victory to Israel as long as Moses would hold his hands up. Aaron and Hur held up his hands so that they “remained
emunah until sundown”. All of these illustrate that faith is an action that we take, which is exactly what the Catholic church teaches. Faith
is a work, it’s about what you DO and not merely about what you believe.
We are not able to do this work by our own effort because of the effects of original sin. Each and every time we turn toward God and away from sin it is because God gave us
at that moment the grace to be able to do it. It is completely and totally due to the grace of God, who enables all of us at some point in our lives to perform the work of freely responding to Him by performing the “obedience of faith”. At that moment we truly have the choice that Adam had, to submit to God or submit to ourselves, and we only have that choice because of God’s grace.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church expresses this by saying that faith is an act of the will in which one turns toward God and away from sin; in which we decide that we will cooperate, with our intellect and will, with the divine grace that God gives us to enable us to comply with the moral law; it is a free response of the human person to the initiative of God; it is a personal adherence of the whole man to the God who reveals himself. It is the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that he has said and revealed to us, and that HolyChurch proposes for our belief, because he is truth itself. By faith “man freely commits his entire self to God.” For this reason the believer seeks to know and do God’s will. “The righteous shall live by faith.” Living faith “work
through charity.”
These are all actions, things we do in obedience to God. Thus the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:5 "Through Him we have received the grace of apostleship, to bring about the obedience of faith…” This obedience is the essence of Christianity: submission to the Eternal One who was enfleshed, and through that submission being brought into union with Him so that we may participate in His divine life.
It’s important to understand that the Catholic view is not that we are a spirit stuck in a body, nor are we a composite of a body, a soul and a spirit as is commonly held among Protestants. God created us as a body/soul unity, not two things stuck together but one whole. As we pray with our minds using words, so we also pray with our bodies using actions. As we submit to God with our wills, so we also submit with our deeds. To speak of “faith” as separate from “works” is schizophrenic, because faith is the assent of our minds enfleshed in our actions.
Faith is most certinaly NOT “belief in something without proof or evidence”. That’s called “credulity”.
