catholicism 101 -- part 10

CATHOLICISM 101

(The outline of this series is taken from Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion.)

Church of the Holy Cross
April 27, 2008

Part 10
Christian Duty: Christian Belief: The Three Great Creeds

- “I believe in God, the Father Almighty…”

• The Bible doesn’t demonstrate the existence of God, it assumes the existence of God.

• That God is, is thought by the authors of Scripture to be a universal instinct of the human heart.

• Part of the problem with contemporary people is that their hearts have very often been removed, or turned to stone (as CS Lewis warned in The Abolition of Man.

• Thus the Lord, foreseeing this problem, says through the prophet Ezekiel: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36.26).

• “For man believes with his heart and so is justified…” (Rom. 10.10).

• Yet there is compelling evidence, accessible to the mind and appealing to the intellect.

• There are philosophical demonstrations, like the “Ontological Proof” of St. Anselm – which philosophers have been contemplating for over a thousand years.

• There is, more recently, the “Argument from Fine Tuning” – much discussed in the media lately: the idea that the conditions that would allow life (or even matter) to emerge in the universe can only possibly occur within a very tight range of values for the universe’s physical constants, that if any of these constants were just slightly different than it is, then life would never have been able to evolve in the universe.

• As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the
soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright
wings.

• What we are after is FAITH in God, not merely a bland acknowledgement that he is. St. James says: you believe that god exists? Congratulations. “Even the demons believe… and shudder” (James 2.19).

• But faith is not just a servile acquiescence to an assertion, uninformed by the mind.

• Faith in God rather implies a relationship, a giving of oneself in trust.

• St. Augustine chronicles his discovery of faith in his Confessions. The famous passage from the beginning says “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” And about the quest for God, St. Augustine says “Whither might I withdraw beyond heaven and earth that from thence my God might come into me, when my God has said ‘I fill heaven and earth’?” Augustine finds God by searching his own heart.

• So you have to have a heart. From the Sayings of the Desert Fathers: Abba Pambo said “If you have a heart, you can be saved.”

• Creation speaks of God.

• Indeed creation is God’s first language, his first disclosure of himself, the analogiam creationis (which is why catholic Christians put such an emphasis on materiality – bread wine, male, female, etc. – it speaks of God, or rather God speaks of himself through his making it what it is). Gen. 1.1.

• Psalm 102.25: “In the beginning, O LORD, you laid the foundations of the earth, * and the heavens are the work of your hands…”

• As Hopkins said, the world is CHARGED with the grandeur of God.

• Romans 1.20: “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”

• Part of the danger we face is allowing our culture to take away our hearts of flesh and give us hearts of stone, at which point God becomes invisible to us. Our challenge is to see him everywhere, but we have to have FAITH to do that, and to have faith, we have to have a heart.

• St. Augustine, again in the Confessions: “I questioned the earth, and it said, ‘I am not He;’ and all that is in it confessed the same. I questioned the sea and the depths, and the creeping things which have life, and they replied, ‘We are not your God, seek above us.’ I questioned the blowing winds, and the whole air with its inhabitants replied ‘I am not God.’ I questioned the heavens, the sun, moon, stars; ‘Neither are we God whom you seek’ they said. And I said to all those things which stand about the doors of my flesh, ‘You have told me of my God, that you are not He; tell me now something of him.’ And they cried out with a loud voice, ‘He made us.’”

• Belief in God is nearly universal in humanity – it is built into our souls. God is at the bottom of the endless inquisitiveness of young children first being awed by the world: “Why…? Why…? Why…?” He lies just beyond the reach of the instruments of the astronomers and physicists – he is the object of their search, the cause of causes.

• And if he is there, then it stands to reason that he would reveal himself to his creatures. And so he has: through creation itself, in the heart of man, in Scripture, and finally and definitively in his Son.