DRAFT OF A CHAPTER

 

FAITH AND OUR BELIEF SYSTEM

Charles P. Poole, Jr.

Original version 1955; rewritten January, 2004; revised June, 2006.

 

CONTENTS

 

            1.  Introduction

            2.  Faith as Expounded by Tanquery.

            3.  Thesis Approach to Faith

            4.  Development of Dogma in Patristic Era

            5.  Tradition

            6.  Faith Clarified by the Catechism

            7.  Fides et Ratio

            8.  Unexpected Revelations

            9.  Christian Revelation is Worthy of Belief

          10.  Discussion

          Appendix: Texts of Theses Found in Tanquery

 

1.  INTRODUCTION

 

           It is interesting to ask ourselves the questions: what do we believe, why do we believe, and, how do we believe.  In other words, what exactly is Faith?  St. Paul provides us with a good initial observation that puts the subject in context:  “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and the evidence of things unseen”(Heb 12:1).  “Without faith it is impossible to please him, for anyone who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb. 12: 6).  The First Vatican Council (1870) defined faith as “a supernatural virtue whereby, with the favor of God and the help of grace, we believe what is revealed to be true, not only because of its intrinsic truthfulness perceived by the light of natural reason, but based on the authority of the revealing God himself ” (Adolphe Tanquery (AT), p. 77).    However during the past century the general attitude in the Church toward the subject of faith was not shaped by St. Paul or by council declarations, but rather by other sources.  One of the main sources during the first half of the 20th century was the treatises of Tanquery, of greatest importance during the past decade has been the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and potentially of significant impact is Pope John Paul II’s 1998 Encyclical to the bishops of the world Fides et Ratio.  We will examine and comment on these three documents.   

 

Go to Top

2.  FAITH AS EXPOUNDED BY TANQUERY

 

          One of the principal characteristics of Christianity is the faith of its adherents.  The nature of faith has always fascinated me, and in my freshman college year at Fordham, 1946-47, I spent some time investigating the topic. I had in my possession the six volumes of the standard seminary text series by Tanquery.  Three of the volumes were entitled Synopsis Theologiae Dogmaticae, and the other three were entitled Synopsis Theologiae Moralis.  The three moral theology volumes were subtitled “ad usus seminariorum,” for the use of seminarians.  The preface to the first dogmatic edition, reprinted in one of the volumes, was dated March 7, 1894, feast of St. Thomas Aquinas.  I had the 25th edition Dogmatic Theology volumes and the 11th edition Moral Theology volumes, both sets from 1944. Apparently these volumes had not been translated into English to force seminarians to become skillful in reading and understanding Latin. Since I had taken four years of Latin in the Jesuit High School Brooklyn Preparatory, and I had spent seven months in the Jesuit Novitiate St. Andrew on the Hudson where we spoke Latin, I was able to handle the Latin of Tanquery.

 

           The style and format of these volumes were especially impressive.  Almost every page had several footnotes citing sources and other relevant material from the scriptures, ecumenical councils, church fathers, papal encyclicals, theologians, and other sources.  Terms were carefully defined, erroneous opinions were carefully refuted, and all teachings were put in a historical context. 

 

          The second dogmatic volume contained the treatise on faith entitled de Fide.  It had an initial section, two chapters, and took up 145 pages of the 840 page volume.  A brief two-page introduction was followed by four pages with decrees and canons from the first Vatican Council which took place in 1870.  There were nine canons presented, all in the form: “Si quis dixerit, . . ., anathema sit,” or “If someone should say, . . ., let him be condemned.”  An example is:  “If someone should say, that there is no true and properly expressed mystery found in divine revelation, but that universal dogmata of faith are able to be demonstrated and understood through reasons formally worked out and (derived) from natural principles, let him be anathema” (AT  70).   Anathema is a biblical Greek word meaning cursed; e.g. St. Paul said “If anyone preaches to you a gospel other than the one that you received, let him be anathema.”   Proclaiming anathemas was a common practice at the Council of Trent, and at some earlier ecumenical councils, ever since the third such council held at Ephesus in the year 431 had issued 12 anathemas on topics concerning the divinity and humanity of Jesus.  Anathemas serve to put limits on positively stated proclamations of faith. The Second Vatican Council did not issue any anathemas.  In the joint agreement on Justification signed by the Catholics and Lutherans the anathemas from Trent on justification were declared to be no longer applicable.  Comparable condemnations on the Lutheran side were also declared no longer applicable.  After the anathemas in Tanquery came a three page discussion of the object, use and subdivisions of the de Fide tract, including a descriptive diagram which showed the relationships between the subdivisions.  This was followed by ten pages discussing various diverse meanings of the word faith, with an emphasis on genuine and erroneous notions of its use in a theological context.  

 

          Chapter 1 entitled The Act of Faith (De fidei actu) explained the formal and material objects of faith, the method or mode of producing faith, and some  properties of the act of faith.  The chapter ends with some remarks on the status of faith in those who sin mortally,  those who profess heresy, and those who are in purgatory.  The second chapter emphasizes the factual nature of dogmas, their possible development over time, their stability, and their unchanging quality.  This chapter explains the relationship between dogmas which express what we believe, and theology which analyzes, probes the meanings of, inter-relates, systematizes, and draws conclusions from dogmas. The roles of philosophy, history, and the natural sciences in theology were discussed. 

 

Go to Top

3.  THESIS APPROACH TO FAITH

 

          The main conclusions of the de Fide treatise were presented in the form of theses, and we will comment on several of them. Their texts in Latin are provided at the end of this chapter.    

 

          The first thesis to consider is terse and to the point.  Thesis generalis: “An act of faith is elicited by the intellect under the command of the will, with the inspiration of God and the help of grace” (AT  118).   It is a characteristic feature of the scholastic approach to theology to emphasize that a human being has both an intellect and a will, and to clarify their respective roles.   We attain faith through the grace or action of God, not just by our own efforts.  Grace can come through the urging or example of friends who are believers, through reading, and in other ways.  There is a divine element in any conversion to Christianity, and making an act of faith is one step in the process. A further thesis states that “Christian revelation is indeed believable, and it becomes worthy of belief not only by the internal experience of it or by private revelation, but indeed and in particular by external signs, especially by miracles ” (AT  94).  The main point, i.e. that Christian revelation is worthy of belief, which we call the Believability Thesis,  is of great importance.  In our secular culture it is widely held that certain truths of revelation, such as the incarnation, the resurrection, miracles, etc., are at such variance with science and common sense that they are simply unworthy of belief by an intelligent and educated person.  The Believability Thesis states just the opposite.  At a later point we will elaborate more on this.  The subsequent points, namely acquiring belief by internal experience, by private revelation, and by miracles, concern paths  to faith..  St. Paul was converted by a private revelation, and the journeys to belief described in the gospels were often accompanied by miracles.  Many modern conversions involve inner experiences, but less common in our contemporary society is private revelation and the role of miracles. It seems to me that Tanquery is a little too impersonal in his approach to the acquisition of faith

 

          There are three additional important theses or statements presented by Tanquery in his de Fide treatise.  The first thesis is: “Divine revelation was completed during the apostolic age ” (AT  165).  The second thesis is: “The development of dogma consists in providing an explanation that is clearer and more fruitful (uberior)” (AT  170).   The third is the statement: “In the sources of revelation there are certain truths which are only obscurely or implicitly presented. The Church has the right to define clearly and distinctly those things which are obscure or implicit ” (AT  171, 173).    

 

          These three statements are of particular importance.  The first is a common belief of Catholic, Orthodox, and the majority of Protestant Christians.  It is sometimes stated that revelation officially ended with the death of the last apostle.  From the Catholic viewpoint no new dogmata can be added to what we are required to believe.  Everything has been revealed already, and is contained in Scripture, Tradition, or both.  This is an important aspect of our faith that has been emphasized in recent decades.  It is important because many members of  the Marian movement put great stock in messages that have been reported as received by various visionaries from the Virgin Mary and other sources during recent centuries. Some of these revelations have been public events, and others have been purely private.  The Church has declared some of these as “worthy of belief,” such as the public ones  at Guadalupe (1531) in Mexico, Lourdes (1858) in France, and Fatima (1917) in Portugal.  There have also been ‘approved’ private revelations such as those to St. Margaret Mary, .and more recently to St. Faustina.   However by implication these reports must also be categorized as “acceptable for disbelief”.  There is certainly no obligation to accept them, and there is no onus associated with rejecting them.  There are some Catholics who put great emphasis on these events as urgent appeals from heaven to contemporary humanity which we dismiss at our peril, while other Catholics choose to ignore them.   In this volume they will not be of much concern to us

 

          Immediately after his de Fide treatise Tanquery explains that belief in the existence of God can be arrived at by reason.  This discussion was not included in the de Fide sections because faith is not needed to reach this conclusion.  The pertinent thesis given by Tanquery is “The existence of God can be known with certainty from those things which exist, by the natural light of human reason” (AT  218).   The importance of this thesis will become clear during our later discussion of Christian revelation being worthy of belief. 

 

Go to Top

4.  DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMA IN PATRISTIC ERA

 

            The completion or closure of revelation, discussed in the previous section, and the associated closure of the canon of scripture at the Councils of Hippo (393 AD) and Carthage III (397 AD), were only part of a larger picture.  It is balanced by the two theses concerning the development of dogma and the presence of inherent ambiguities in some aspects of the deposit of faith.  Historically the most important ambiguities concerned whether Jesus Christ is truly human, truly divine, both, or neither.  His humanity is attested to by many scripture passages.  He often referred to himself as the “Son of Man,” a term reminiscent of what the prophet Ezekiel often called himself.  The gospels report Jesus being conceived and born of Mary; they report him eating, growing tired, sleeping, suffering and dying, all characteristically human activities.  Thus the humanity of Jesus seems well established in scripture.  The gospels also report Him performing miracles, walking on water, reading minds, being transfigured, and rising from the dead, attributes that suggest divinity.  There is the statement that came down from heaven at Jesus’ baptism by John “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased,” and the statement of Jesus “The Father and I are one” (John 8:30), both indicative of Jesus’ divinity. However Jesus also said in John’s gospel (14:28) “The Father is greater than I.”  These last two pointedly contradictory statements demonstrate that there are ambiguities in the deposit of faith.   For example, the doctrine of the Trinity is not very clearly formulated in the scriptures, it is hinted at in the old Testament,  and it is at best only implicit in the New Testament. 

 

          During the first few centuries of Christianity, called the patristic era,  the Church wrestled with the problem of the humanity/divinity of Christ, with many believers holding diverse positions on the subject.  Some of the opinions which were later condemned became known as particular heresies.  The Gnostics denied that Jesus was human, and the Arians claimed that Jesus was a creature inferior to God.  At times during the 4th century of the Christian era half of the Church and half of the bishops were Arians.  The Monophysites held that Jesus had only one nature.   One of the main focal points of the discussion of the divinity of Jesus was whether or not one could rightly refer to Mary by the Greek term “theotokos” which is derived from the root words theos (God) and tokos (giving birth to).  Nestorius said no,  Athanasius said yes, and the Third Ecumenical Council held at Ephesus agreed with Athanasius, so Mary was accepted by the universal Church as being truly the Mother of God.  Nestorius himself was condemned as a heretic and exiled to Egypt.  It took the first four ecumenical councils (Nicaea 325, Constantinople I 381, Ephesus 431, Chalcedon 451) to bring controversies to an end, to formulate the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed,  and to clarify for all time our beliefs in the combined divinity and humanity of Jesus, and the trinity of persons in one God.  Thus it took 350 years after the end of the apostolic age for the Church to clarify its principal doctrines of belief.   It is interesting that this was done in a democratic manner by bishops voting at general councils endorsed by the Pope.   

 

          The final decisions of the councils might be looked upon as a compromise, or perhaps more realistically, as the acceptance of a middle opinion between extremes.  To arrive at this via media formulation, it was necessary to invent a new nomenclature, and to express doctrines in non-biblical language.  The entity that we call God consists of three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.   All three persons, being truly God, possess the divine nature.  The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, namely Jesus, who became man, also thereby possesses a human nature.  Tanquery clarifies the notion of the trinity by a thesis: “In God there are three persons who are truly distinct from each other, namely the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, each with one and the same nature ” (AT  338).   He also clarifies the God-man status of Jesus by the thesis fundamentalis: “The divine nature and the human nature were hypostatically united in the single divine person of the Word, so that Jesus Christ would be truly God and truly man ” (AT  620).    Theologically hypostasis is a word synonymous with person (prosopon). Again we encounter a new non-biblical terminology, namely “hypostatic union,” introduced to be able to formulate this thesis.  A much more protracted discussion of the Trinity and the hypostatic union is provided in the Trinity chapter on this webpage. 

 

5.  TRADITION

 

          We have seen how crucial the Ecumenical Councils were in the development and formulation of dogmas.  There is another aspect of this development which is also of historical and theological importance.  After the First Ecumenical Council held at Nicaea in 325 proclaimed that Jesus Christ was definitely divine there emerged two main schools of theology, one in Antioch, present day Turkey, and the other in Alexandria, Egypt.  The Antiochene school put its emphasis on the humanity of Jesus, while the Alexandrian school was anxious to preserve the divinity, so it stressed the unity of the divine and human natures in Jesus.   The Council of Chalcedon achieved a synthesis of the Antiochene and Alexandrian viewpoints which established a final agreed upon christology.  During these early centuries there were many bishops, popes, and other leaders called Fathers of the Church who were writing letters and treatises commenting on these theological problems and other issues of importance.  They wrote from the second century (Ignatius of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Justin, Polycarp) to the fifth century (Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, Jerome, John Chrysostom, Leo the Great, Patrick), and many of them quoted the scriptures liberally throughout their writings.  The writings of these Fathers of the Church plus the decrees of ecumenical councils constitute a written documentation of what is commonly referred to as Tradition.  They provide us with a record of the controversies that were working their way out toward the goal of the final official enunciations of our beliefs about the natures in Jesus and the persons of the Trinity.   Since the statements in the Creed come partly from the Scriptures and partly from Tradition it seems logical to include both Scripture and Tradition as foundations of our beliefs. 

 

Go to Top

6.  FAITH CLARIFIED BY THE CATECHISM

 

          In paragraph 26 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) we read “Faith is man’s response to God, who reveals himself and gives himself to man, at the same time bringing man a supernatural light as he searches for the ultimate meaning of life”. This is followed by several pages which discuss mankind’s search, the content of, and mankind’s response to revelation. The search occurs because “the desire for God is written in the human heart” (27).   The content is the earlier unfolding to the Jewish people, the transmission to us of the teachings of Jesus through the New Testament scriptures supplemented by Tradition and clarified by the teaching authority or Magisterium of the Church.  Our response is “a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed” (150).    

 

          The glossary says that faith is “both a gift of God and a human act by which the believer gives personal adherence to God who invites his response, and freely assents to the whole truth that God has revealed. It is this revelation of God which the Church proposes for our belief, and which we profess in the Creed, celebrate in the sacraments, live by right conduct that fulfills the twofold commandment of charity (as specified in the Ten Commandments), and respond to in our prayers of faith.  Faith is both a theological virtue given by God as grace, and an obligation which flows from the first commandment of God.” The second sentence enumerates, in order, the four subdivisions of the CCC: the creed, the sacraments, the Ten Commandments, and prayer.  These definitions emphasize that God has provided us with a revelation, and we are called to accept it.  

 

          The Catechism states that “By natural reason man can know God with certainty, on the basis of his works.  But there is another order of knowledge, which man cannot possibly arrive at by his own powers: the order of divine revelation” (50), and further: “man’s faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God” (35).  It also makes the following observation: “There will be no further Revelation . . ..Yet even if the Revelation is already complete, it has not been made completely explicit; it remains for Christian faith gradually to grasp its full significance over the course of the centuries” (66).   I did not find the expression “existence of a personal God” in this context in Tanquery. 

 

Go to Top

7.  FIDES ET RATIO

 

          Pope John Paul II asserts in his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio that God  has placed in the human heart the desire to know the truth, i.e. to know himself, and he further adds that “faith (fides) and reason (ratio) are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of the truth” (0). He stresses “that there is a profound and indissoluble unity between the knowledge of reason and the knowledge of faith” (16.4), then later in his encyclical he takes note of  “the opposition between “the wisdom of this world” and the wisdom of God as revealed in Jesus Christ” (23.1).  He balances this dichotomy with the optimistic observation that “men and women are on a journey of discovery which is humanly unstoppable - a search for the truth and a search for a person to whom they might entrust themselves.  Christian faith comes to meet them, offering the concrete possibility of reaching the goal which they seek” (33.3).  He expresses the conviction:  “It is unthinkable that a search so deeply rooted in human nature would be completely vain and useless” (29.1).    

 

          John Paul reminds us that “the Fathers of the Church entered into fruitful dialogue with ancient philosophy, which offered ways of proclaiming and understanding the God of Jesus Christ” (36.2).  These Fathers infused reason “with the richness drawn from Revelation” (41.2), “so faith builds upon and perfects reason” (43.2).  Commenting on the passage from the Book of Wisdom (13:5) “From the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their creator,” John Paul asks us “to recognize as a first stage of divine Revelation the marvelous “book of nature” which, when read with the proper tools of human reason, can lead to knowledge of the creator” (19).  This would involve a dialogue with modern science.  He mentioned that the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius of the First Vatican Council  “pronounced solemnly on the relationship between reason and faith,” declaring that “There are two orders of knowledge, distinct not only in their point of departure, but also in their object,” and “there can never be a true divergence between faith and reason.”   This council also affirmed “the natural knowability of the existence of God” (52.2). 

 

8.  UNEXPECTED REVELATIONS

 

          The history of mathematics and science teaches us that when we are at a certain level of knowledge, and then probe more deeply into reality, we find out things that are totally unexpected, things that could never have been anticipated.  Examples from mathematics are imaginary and complex numbers, irrational numbers, different orders of infinity, and  noneuclidean geometry.  Examples from physics are seemingly continuous matter being composed of very small atoms, and the small nuclei of atoms being composed of even smaller quarks.  Examples from biology are tissues of organs being composed of cells, and the nature of the structure and the replication processes of DNA.  Examples from astronomy are the presence of moons that encircle some of the planets, the clustering of stars in galaxies,  the curvature of space, the expansion of the universe and its immense size.  In most cases the discoveries made in one generation were completely at variance with what might have been imagined as possible by earlier generations. There are exceptions to this, such as the early Greek philosophers who speculated on the presence of atoms, even though they lacked experimental evidence.  Many aspects of Christian Revelation are also in this category of being totally unanticipated, such as one person of the divine trinity assuming human nature, and coming down to Earth to suffer and die for our sins.  We should not be surprised when the realities of the revelation of God appear to be totally at variance with what might have been anticipated as being reasonable.  Thus what we receive in Revelation is about as alien to prior considerations as many major discoveries in science have been.  The world is not what we a priori expect, but we accept it as it is.  Assuming the existence of a God, and His ability to interact with created rational beings, the details of Revelation cannot be ruled out a priori, but should be accepted as possibilities.  Those with the gift of faith go a step further and accept them as realities. 

 

Go to Top

9.  CHRISTIAN REVELATION IS WORTHY OF BELIEF

 

          A statement in an earlier quoted thesis that is, in my opinion, unfairly rejected by scientists is: “Christian revelation is believable”, that is, “worthy of belief.”  From the viewpoint of a non-believing scientist, belief in Christian revelation is considered in the same category as belief in fortune telling or astrology.  All of these are considered as intrinsically unworthy of belief.   However there are some people who have convictions that totally lack supporting evidence, but are hypothetically possible, and hence not intrinsically unworthy of belief.  We  refer to such convictions as believable.  Examples are the belief in the presence of advanced civilizations of intelligent beings on distant galaxies, or the belief that within a generation science will develop artificial sense organs such as human eyes and ears that are as good or better than natural ones.  Neither of these beliefs is in opposition to what we accept as possible, hence we cannot show that they are untrue.  It will be interesting to examine in this context to what extent Christian revelation is believable.  In arguing for the position that it is believable we will accept as a starting point the claim that the existence of God can be proven by reason, and hence we assume that God exists.  Arguments in support of this existence will be presented elsewhere on this website. 

         

          It seems reasonable to expect that God is much higher in intelligence, wisdom and power than human beings, and that God had some purpose in creating such a vast universe.  It is also not unreasonable to expect that there must be some way or ways in which God and the world relate to each other, and that their inter-relationships would be somehow associated with the purpose behind the creation of the world.  The possible validity of these statements cannot be ruled out, but the likelihood  of their validity seems to be a not unreasonable assumption, as explained in the previous section. 

 

          Christian revelation is associated with some underlying assumptions which are not always specified, but seem to be implied.  The material world as we understand it from physics is four-dimensional, it is a world of three space dimensions and one time dimension. One could think about a larger overall world with a material and a spiritual component, or one could speculate about the existence of spiritual dimensions.  For example, souls after death are in a spiritual world, and the Transfiguration might be viewed as involving an interaction between spiritual and material dimensions.  These ideas are hypothetically possible, and hence not intrinsically unworthy of belief, so in our terminology we refer to them as believable.  

 

          In our scientific probing into nature, both to ever larger and larger scales measured in billions of light years, and to ever and ever smaller scales measured in billionths of billionths of meters, physicists have always encountered structure which was unexpected, yet after extensive  study and experimentation the unexpected was accepted finally as true. This was elaborated upon in the previous section.  The same situation exists with Christian revelation.  The main facts and the details of Revelation are totally unexpected, but that does not mitigate against their possible validity.  These unexpected results are hypothetically possible, and hence not intrinsically unworthy of belief, so we call them believable.  The fact that Christian Revelation involves such unexpectedly high moral standards as being commanded to love our neighbor as ours selves, and loving and seeking the good of our enemies, reinforces its believability.  We conclude that Christian revelation is believable, that is worthy of belief.

 

Go to Top

10.  DISCUSSION

 

           Tanquery and the Catechism agree that the existence of God can be known by natural reason, but the Catechism extends this to “a personal God.”  They are both in accord  on the main concepts of the nature of faith.  The theses of Tanquery are expressed in a more formal and perhaps more precise manner, but those of the Catechism are written a language more appealing to a modern audience.  The encyclical of the Pope has a different aim and purpose, so it contains statements that complement those of the other two sources. 

 

          The First Vatican Council stated that “we believe what is revealed to be true,” and the Catechism is a little more explicit by mentioning “the whole truth that God has revealed.”  Our belief is in what we know has been revealed, and it also extends to what we do not know about revelation.  We do not merely accept certain parts of it, rather it is our duty to accept all of it, including clarifications of obscure aspects that may be established in the future.  In this sense faith in revelation resembles acceptance in other branches of learning.  If I study calculus or organic chemistry and cover the material in three quarters of the text book, then at the end of the semester I accept the validity of it all, including material I did not explicitly learn. 

 

          There is also an important sense in which faith in revelation differs from acceptance in other branches of learning.  Secular knowledge of the arts and sciences can be acquired without the help of God’s grace.  In making this statement we refer to the Catechism concept of grace as “the help God gives us to respond to our vocation of becoming his adopted children.”  Thus we can believe all the theorems of geometry without the aid of grace, but we cannot believe all the articles in the Creed without this assistance.  We can prove the theorems of geometry by reason, but we cannot prove the articles in the Creed bGo to Top y reason.  There is an essential difference between the two.  We can, however, increase our understanding of the articles in the Creed by the use of reason.   

 

APPENDIX

TEXTS OF THESES FOUND IN TANQUERY.

(Synopsis Theologiae Dogmaticae, Tomus II)

 

          Vaticana I definitio fidei: “virtutem esse supernaturalem qua, Dei aspirante et adiuvante gratia, ab eo revelata vera esse credimus, non propter intrinecam veritatem naturali rationis lumine perspectam, sed propter auctoritatem ipsius Dei revelantis”. (p. 77).

 

          Thesis catholica: Motivum fidei est auctoritas Dei revelanti (seu infallibilitas in cognoscendo et veritas in dicendo). (86). 

 

          Thesis de credibilitate revelationis : De fide est revelationem christianam esse certo credibilem,  eamque fieri credibilem non sola interna cuiusque experientia aut inspiratione privata, sed etiam et praecipue externis signis, praesertim miraculis. (94). 

 

          Thesis generalis: Actus fidei elicitur ab intellectu, sub imperio voluntatis, Dei inspirante et adiuvante gratia. (p. 117);  (requiritur gratia illuminationis et inspirationis) (118, vide 123, 129). 

 

          Thesis de confectione revelationis: Revelatio divina ita aetate apostolica completa est. (165). 

 

          Thesis de progressu dogmatum: Progressum dogmatum non in eo consistit, ut eis sensus tribuendis sit alius ab eo quem intellexit Ecclesia, sed in eo quo uberior et clarior praebeatur eorundem explicatio. (170). 

                  

          In fontibus revelatis veritates quaedam obscure et implicite continenter. (171); Ecclesia ius habet ea quae obscura et implicite sunt dilucite et diserte definiendi. (173).

 

          Thesis de trinitate: Tres sunt in Deo personae realiter ab invicem distinctae, nempe Pater, Filius et Spiritus Sanctus, in una eademque numerice natura. (338). 

          Thesis fundamentalis: Natura divina et natura humana hypostatice unitae fuerent in unica persona Verbi, ita ut Jesus Christus sit verus deus et verus homo.  (620; also 621, 646, 647; 672, 675). 

 

          Thesis de cognitione Dei: Existentia Dei per ea quae facta sunt, naturali rationis humanae lumine certo cognosci  potest.  (218).

 

          The proper order is: Crede ut intellegas, not Intellege ut credas.

 

Go to Top

 

.