Escaping Sea World for the World's Great Seas
Why Faith is More Than a Belief in Your Head; Day 13 of 40 in 'The Art of Dying Well by St. Robert Bellarmine'
A person who readily embraces ‘living faith’ in Jesus is like a whale who escapes the confinements of Sea World in order to discover the Great Seas of the World. (Free Willy!) Faith is not just about believing new oceans exist, but trusting Someone to liberate me so that I can be led to these fresh and inviting waters. Some people sadly believe that if they embrace Christianity, it will lead to a suffocating life of confinement. Jesus never speaks this way, but rather, He invites the whole human race to be set free through Him. This is what Jesus meant when he first came on the scene saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.” Jesus was offering a new Way of Life called the Kingdom of God, and it was not simply a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card for believing the right things. Faith runs much deeper than simply an isolated belief in your head.
In the New Testament, faith means trust, allegiance, and an embrace of a whole new way of being human in Christ. This new Way does include a set of beliefs, but they do not exist independent of the Grand Story, which is cosmic renovation. Christian beliefs are really living principles operating in a whole new reality that we enter into through the baptismal waters. Through faith, we begin seeing the world with a new set of eyes and long for all things to be under the reign of God, which Jesus calls the “Kingdom of God.” This is why Bellarmine states that people who say they believe in Jesus, but who actively reject this new reality do not ultimately have ‘justifying faith.”
There are people who believe in a false Christ. There are people who use Christianity for mere political purposes or moral causes, and they completely miss the boat on what faith means. Although Christianity does impact every aspect of what it means to be human, its does not serve the Old World Order. Christianity is the New World Order where Christ is King, and when we take Christ seriously, he makes us all uncomfortable. (If he hasn’t made you uncomfortable, perhaps you have never met Him!) We all have a bad diagnosis. We all have to repent and change. We are all in need of the Great Physician’s emergency procedures. But once we allow Christ to do His work in us, we walk away as a new man finally liberated to actually live.
In chapter 3 of ‘The Art of Dying Well,” St. Robert Bellarmine begins to define faith in the context of hope and love, which Catholic Christians refer to as the 3 theological virtues. He writes,
There are, therefore, three virtues, in which the perfection of the Christian law consists; charity from a pure heart, hope from a good conscience, and faith unfeigned. But as charity (Love, Agape) is first in the order of perfection, so in the order of generation, faith cometh first, according to the words of the apostle: "Now there remain, faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greater of these is charity."
Let us begin with faith, which is the first of all the virtues that exists in the heart of a justified man. Not without reason, doth the apostle add " unfeigned" to faith. For faith begins justification, provided it be true and sincere, not false or feigned. The faith of heretics does not begin justification, because it is not true, but false; the faith of bad Catholics does not begin justification, because it is not sincere, but feigned. It is said to be feigned in two ways: when either we do not really believe, but only pretend to believe; or when we indeed believe, but do not live, as we believe we ought to do. In both these ways it seems the words of St. Paul must be understood, in his Epistle to Titus: "They profess that they know God: but in their works they deny him." (chap. i. 16.) Thus also do the holy fathers St. Jerome and St. Augustine, interpret these words of the apostle.
If we are to learn ‘The Art of Dying Well,’ then we must be first possessed by Faith, Hope, and Love (See 1 Corinthians 13:13). Without Faith, we trust ourselves and modern society more than God. Our technology can only take us so far. It has never been able to overcome the inevitability of Death and so death still haunts us. Without Hope, we embrace a type of meaninglessness about our own existence and are filled with despair and anxiety about the future. Sadly, the only certain thing in a hopeless worldview is that we will die. Without the Love of God (Agape) in us, we are only left with a weaker love—-the love of ourselves and that of family and friends. But even that kind of love can fade, fragment, and fail us. Without something higher to bind us all, human love grows cold, because humanity was made to feast on that which is higher and transcendent. Humans are not mere mammals, and it is only through faith that we can discover our true, supernatural selves that God created us to be. It is through faith that we discover Love with a capital ‘L’ who is a Person.
Tomorrow, we will continue to take a look at the nature of Faith, Hope, and Love. -Kyle
Here is my newest video on my recent trip to the Sola Scriptura Debate at Franciscan University last Thursday. I got to meet Matt Fradd and countless others who have a great love of our Lord and His mission in the world. Enjoy!