Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I. What is Faith?
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Old Testament
o neeman - God does not deceive
Abrahams obedience and fidelity
o heemin to say Amen to God
Davids gratefulness to God (he is always sinning yet God still
chose him)
o The appropriate response to Gods faithfulness to his covenant
promises Avery Dulles
New Testament
o Pistis belief, obedience, trust, hope
o Pisteuien to believe; an acceptance of the kerygma (verb form)
o Pisteuien eis - Jesus calls people to believe in him
Raymond Brown
o Woman with Hemorrhage
If I touch even just his garments, I shall be made well
The desire toward Jesus
Faith represents an activity of the believer, an energetic,
importunate grasping after the help of God C.E.B.
Cranfield
clinging heaven by the helms Francis Thompson
o Hebrews 11:1
Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of
things not seen
Structure of Faith
o Orthodoxy proper understanding of faith
Doctrine
Faith personal knowledge of Jesus as my Lord and
my God
o Assurance that God is there
Believing - involves a deep knowing (can be like how
we know we love our family and friends)
Revelation is a complex of truths which are offered to
us through the grouping of concepts which are bound
together by Christ, the prophets, and the apostlesIt
goes without saying, however, that faith is not
terminated with the simple conceptual or verbal
statement, but rather with the reality, the mystery
itself. Doctrine, as conceptual signs, is the means for
the believer to give assent to doctrine understood as
the realities signified by the signs. What is revealed....
is God himself, His eternal decreed [and] mysteries.
Rene Latourelle
The very word paradox is paradoxical. Let the paradox be. Remember
after all, that the
Gospel is full of paradoxes [eg. polar reversals like The first will be the
last], that man is himself a living paradox, and that according to the
Fathers of the Church, the Incarnation is the supreme Paradox. Henry
de Lubac
1. Certain yet Obscure
a. Certain
i. Because of revelation God reveals himself to us through
miracles and Jesus
ii. Show me one who loves, and he or she feels what I am
saying. Show me one who desires or is hungry, or one who is
thirsting in the desert, sighing for the fountain of the eternal
homeland; show me one such, and that one will understand
what I am trying to say Treatise on John by Augustine
iii. Gods absolute love: Faith is, first of all, the belief that there
is absolute love. Beyond that the believer need posit nothing
else - Hans Urs von Balthasar
1. How we understand is how we experience love
2. Gail: There are many kinds of love family, friends,
workmates, significant others and because of that,
we are aware that it is indeed possible that there is a
love that can go beyond that and that love is
absolute God. In believing that, Balthasar says that you
need not believe anything else.
b. Obscure
i. the profoundly mysterious identity of the God who revealed
himself in that way to Israel alone, yet revealed himself as
supremely hidden: Deus revelatus tamquam absconditus.
Louis Boyer
1. God revealed himself to us but he did not reveal
everything. He dwells in inaccessible light
ii. Like the ocean, the revealed mysteries of God have a visible
surface, beneath which lie hidden and unfathomable depths
John Saward
1. Weve only covered the surface. There is a lot more to
see.
2. Free yet Morally Obliging
a. Free
i. Authentic freedom the capacity to do good
1. We were meant for goodness (made in the image of
God; made with freedom)
ii. Two levels
1. Categorical Freedom freedom of choice
a. Freedom doesnt mean you have a variety of
choices. It just means you decided to choose.
2. Transcendental Freedom freedom as the self
formed by choices
a. Freedom is not indefinite choice but definitive
commitment. It is not the capacity for indefinite
revision, always doing something different, but
the capacity to create something final,
irrevocable, and eternal. It is to become a
particular kind of person Karl Rahner
b. It is our choices, Harry, that show us who we
truly are, far more than our abilities
Dumbledore
iii. Freedom is in the choosing: A choice that defines our whole
vision of life
1. I think freedom - at least what we usually think of it is an illusion. As far as I can tell, absolute freedom
doesnt exist. I think we all have some measure of
freedom, but in the end we have to choose who or
what will be our master. For some people its their
Lexus or their big house or their love of gourmet food
or their music. For some people its their career. For
some people its their family. Its a question of what
you want to give your life to, or for. Michael
Enright
iv. faith...cannot be ranged side by side with other choices,
however momentous these may be.... Of its nature, it is
architectonic and claims to engage, to shape, to evaluate the
whole life. Furthermore... faith is a facing of eternal destiny;
not the selection of one among many possibilities, but the
option for my only ultimate destiny. All other choices are
made between Gods creatures; faith is a choice of God.
John Coventry
b. Moral Obligation
i. The will is drawn by love.... You have only to show a leafy
branch to a sheep, and it is drawn to it. If you show nuts to a
boy, he is drawn to them. He runs to them because he is
I think that this experience you are having of losing your faith, or as you
think, of having lost it, is an experience that in the long-run belongs to
faith; or at least it can belong to faith if faith is still valuable to you, and it
must be or you would not have written me about it. Flannery
OConnor
V. Conclusion
-
Faith is about what is beyond the horizon of the humanly possible. Faith is
exploring into what people could never achieve by themselves. Faith is the
mysterious need in us to get to where we could surely never go. Faith, in
fact, is about what we call God. Faith is the inkling that we are meant to be
divine, that our journey will go beyond any horizon at all into the
limitlessness of the Godhead... Faith is not something we possess. It is
something by which we are possessed. Herbert McCabe
And in the end, its not the years in your life that countsIts the life in
your years Abraham Lincoln
Mythic vision
o mythological seeing through Stephen Larsen
o Holistic
o Opens imagination beyond the created reality
o light beyond light
o To see mythically... is not just to fantasize richly... The mythically
awake imagination would rather see through the ordinary-seeming
surface of everyday life to discover the secret cause, the mythic
archetypal patterns beneath... Mythical forms light up our world;
they are the self-luminous forms that arouse psychological motives
and incite behavior... Ultimately our mythological seeing through
should transform us, not into cynics, but into believers of a new
kinds - in the reality and ubiquity of spiritual experience and in the
endless creativity of human beings in the face of it.... a whole
psyche perceives a wholesome universe, when one looks into any
mythology one finds a wisdom tradition embedded among its
images.
o Mythology has been discarded in the Hebrew Scriptures. In
mythological thinking, the beings of myth lord it over the lives of
men. But in the Old Testament, the world of mythology has been
exchanged for a world of freedom. Man is a partner of God through
a bond of love and kinship. Thorir Thordarson
Man is not seen as a lower being. The relationship between
man and God is one of freedom
III. The Second Creation Story: The Face of the Related God
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A cursory look at Genesis 1 in its historical context will make it clear that
it is written as a vigorous protest against the then accepted notions of
creation. The historical context of the Priestly account of creation is the
Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C. The exile was a devastating
experience for Israel politically and theologically. Those who survived the
trauma reasserted their belief in Gods power over chaos. They did this by
developing their own creation narrative. Anne Clifford
Following the movement of the text
o Chaos: The sea of reeds; flood story; darkness
World without form
o Kosmos: Light; light beyond light (God)
Ordering of the world
Morality
o A Christian way of living
o Mysticism is living the Christian mystery and allowing that mystery
to transform us Michael Stoeber
o We allow our understanding of the Creator God to shape the way we
interact with both the eternal Thou and eternal thou.
o Our reflections on faith help transform our action
The role of imagination
o We respond as we interpret the meaning of actions upon us
Richard Neibuhr
o through imagination we become artists of our moral lives and
must assume responsibility for the lives we are creating Richard
Gula
Judging Moral acts
o Object
o Intent
o Circumstance
Discernment
o Ignatian Spirituality: Is it desolation or consolation?
o The Inner Compass provides steps to take after discerning
whether its desolation and consolation Margaret Stiff
o You are tired (I think) e.e. cummings
o The paradox remains. We must continue to fight suffering, yet we
must also be prepared to see in it a loving principle of renewal. We
come to know our dependence and our helplessness and to
recognize that we cannot save ourselves. When it is our turn, no
one can persuade us that our own pain is not naked and raw. Pain,
whether mental or physical or the spiritual pain of the dark night of
the soul, hurts like hell and anyone who denies it is a fool and a
hypocrite. But we can't run away from it, and in it lies the possibility
of redemption for ourselves and for others if we can say, "For what
it's worth, take it, God, and use it. Use it for those tortured people of
Rwanda or the napalmed children of Vietnam. Use it to make me
grow in compassion. Use it any way you will." We may utter such a
prayer through clenched teeth, it may be dragged out of us, but if
we can hope one day to mean it, we are halfway to humility.
Mary Craig
To find hope and joy in the midst of affliction, rather than stoicism or
mere patient endurance that is the ultimate achievement of faith.
http://www.ignatianspirituality.com/6754/on-suffering/