One Sign in our Day

Bob Drury - One Sign

\"Bob

In my August 5th post, I claimed that the foundation of all human knowledge is one’s own personal experience. Further I noted that no one can acquire a firsthand experience of science from scratch because science is cumulatively vast and technology dependent. Scientists accept almost the entirety of their knowledge of science, even in their area of expertise, on faith in the testimony of others regarding the instrument dependent measurement of the properties of material things. This renders science gnostic in practice, though not in principle. Science is removed from everyday personal experience because it is technology dependent, e.g. microscopy, biochemistry and atomic physics. The typical assent to science is not only faith based, but science itself is elitist. Although assent to revelation is also faith based, it is not gnostic or elitist in principle or practice. It is compatible with one’s knowledge of philosophy, which is based on one’s immediate everyday experience. Of course, ultimately science too is based on everyday experience, but proximately it is based on technology, beyond common purview.

On the one hand, we have assent to science based on faith in humans, but lacking an immediate confirmation in our personal knowledge. On the other, we have assent to revelation based on faith in the Catholic Church immediately compatible with our personal knowledge of philosophy. For example, the standard of human behavior in revelation is compatible with the standard of human behavior known from philosophy. The morals of revelation is a slightly larger set than the ethics of philosophy. In contrast, our knowledge of God and our relationship to him through philosophy is meager compared to such knowledge in revelation, but compatible with it. However, something more than mere compatibility is needed for the assent to faith in revelation. It is a sign.

Revelation is by definition beyond the scope of unaided human reason. Although the Catholic faith is a grace from God, its authenticity as revelation requires a sign. This is because grace does no violence to nature, including human reason. Our situation is beautifully expressed by Blaise Pascal as quoted by Blessed John Paul II in Fides et ratio, paragraph 13, “Just as Jesus Christ went unrecognized among men, so does his truth appear without external difference among common modes of thought. So too does the Eucharist remain among common bread.” It is remarkable that the central miracle of our faith is accepted by us as such without any appearance of its being a miraculous sign.

Our faith is filled with the acknowledgement that the authenticity of revelation requires a sign. Phillip implies the need for a sign, “Show us the Father. That will be enough for us.” Jn 14:8. The apostle Thomas claimed that his faith could not be based on the testimony of others, but upon an immediate sign to him, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my fingers into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Jn 20: 25. St. Paul received a dramatic sign of whom he asked, “Who are you, sir?” The reply was, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.” Acts 9:5. None of us expects any sign so dramatic, including that of changing water into wine at Cana, “Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs in Cana in Galilee and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him.” Jn 2:11.

The Catholic Revelation was complete 2000 years ago in Jesus (CCC 66). Lumen Fidei, paragraph 38, notes:

I cannot possibly verify for myself something which happened so long ago. . . . Faith’s past, that act of Jesus’ love which brought new life to the world, comes down to us through the memory of others — witnesses — and is kept alive in that one remembering subject which is the Church. . . . The love which is the Holy Spirit and which dwells in the Church unites every age and makes us contemporaries of Jesus, thus guiding us along our pilgrimage of faith.

The sign, that the Church is who she says she is, consists in the internal coherence of all that the Church teaches us in our day and in its compatibility with our everyday human knowledge, which is the foundation of all human knowledge. In view of the intricate beauty of the subject matter, this self-consistency and philosophical compatibility is beyond mere human capacity.

In this essay I wish to highlight just one sign, one thing that the Church teaches that could not be invented by man. Almighty God is humble, humble enough to be humiliated for the sake of his love for us.

As a youth I attended the Saturday matinee at the movies. If we were lucky, it consisted of a double feature of cowboy movies. Good triumphed over evil because the good guys were more skillfully violent than the bad guys. From the trailers on TV, I surmise that the action heroes of today’s films enforce justice and punish evildoers with incredibly greater feats of power and violence. We judge the US to be a great nation because of its military and economic power, enforcing good and punishing evil.

Consider the ultimate action hero in the guise of Jesus of Nazareth. Prior to his execution, he is crowned with thorns and mocked as King of the Jews in opposition to Rome. He seemingly bides his time, accepting the humiliation. On the way to the site of execution he tells the sympathetic women of Jerusalem, “Weep not for me, but for yourselves and for your children.” Lk 23:28. In audience, we know he needs no sympathy. We are sure he is about to turn the tables on his tormentors crushing them with his power. Yet, at the site of execution, he is hanged, initiating a slow death. Surely the almighty action hero will respond to the final taunt of his tormentors, “Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe.” Mk 15:32. Instead, he dies. It is his corpse, which must be taken down from the cross.

Apparently, Jesus, as God, was not the ultimate action hero. As almighty God, he apparently was the humble father in his tale of the prodigal son. The father enables the free will of his son, giving him the inheritance due upon the father’s death. The son winds up with the choice of humbly returning to the father or pridefully entrenching himself in hatred of the one whose love alone, he now knows, yields happiness.

In accepting the humiliation of a tortured death at the hands of those he loves, almighty God humiliates our sense of justice in which the reward of good is earned by the skillful and the punishment of evil is inflicted by force. If we see this as foolishness for the foolish, we fail to see one sign. If we recognize this as the act of the ultimate revolutionary, humiliating our judgment that justice is achieved by force, we see in Jesus the face of the Father, Almighty Humility, and accept the Holy Spirit’s witness through the Church.

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19 thoughts on “One Sign in our Day”

  1. Thank you, Howard et
    al. Perhaps I should have emphasized the distinction between mundane knowledge
    and revelation. I was obviously impressed with their superficial similarity as
    expressed in the quote from Pascal. Of course, this concession would not
    satisfy Howard, if he judges science to be excluded from mundane knowledge due
    to its ‘tentative’ and “probable’ nature.

  2. So then faith is neither a virtue nor a supernatural gift according to your usage, merely the assent to something not confirmed by one’s own direct experience. This “faith” is not what the Church talks about. Scientists say that there is a qualitative difference between the tentative assent given in science and the Faith taught by the Church; the Church agrees; you apparently disagree with both.

    1. I don’t see any inconsistency in recognizing that the assent to revelation requires both grace and a sign of authenticity. Although we can do no good without the grace of God (John 15:5), we don’t simply go along for the ride. We co-operate with grace. So too, our assent to faith is both grace and an act of the human intellect and will.

    2. I don’t see any inconsistency in recognizing that the assent to revelation requires both grace and a sign of authenticity. Although we can do no good without the grace of God (John 15:5), we don’t simply go along for the ride. We co-operate with grace. So too, our assent to faith is both grace and an act of the human intellect and will.

    3. … and baptism is an act of getting wet, yet not all instances of becoming soggy are analogous to baptism. I suppose one might, for comic or poetic purposes, talk about someone being “baptized by rain”, or maybe even by motor oil, but it would not make a good analysis.

      Well, just as there is a qualitative difference in between baptism and falling out of a canoe, there is a qualitative difference between theological faith and the tentative assent that goes into science. If an angel of light appeared and denied that Jesus died on the cross (as may indeed have happened to Mohammed), it would make no difference to a faithful Christian. On the other hand, physicists were willing to toss much of Newtonian physics overboard when evidence for relativity came along, and the rest when the evidence for quantum mechanics required it.

      That’s not to say that there aren’t some beliefs related to the Church that are similar to the assent given to science. For example, it is not de Fide that the current Pope was born in Argentina. Maybe all his alleged “history” is a backstory created to hide the fact that he was the first human ambassador to Zeta Reticuli! Maybe he doesn’t even exist, and all the images we see are a carefully created media hoax! These fall into the category of stories too wild to even acknowledge them as possible without some pretty strong proof in their corner, but if somehow they turned out to be true they would still not destroy the Catholic Faith; if it could somehow be proved that Jesus never rose from the dead, it *would*.

      That’s to say nothing of the subjective *feeling* of faith, which many people mistake for faith itself. But we can discuss that later if you like.

    4. No, Howard, the church would continue. We place our faith in
      God. Just as the Jews and Muslims continue on without a risen
      redeemer, so too would the church continue to teach all those hard to know and understand parables and instructions which are so necessary to breaking the birth-life-death cycle. It’s why
      there remains 4 great religions – to synthesize into a coherant
      whole – a grand unified theology – and the CC will lead the Way.

    5. Wrong, James. If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. If Christ were not risen, I would leave you to embrace your attempted synthesis of a false and rump Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism (possibly your big 4, there’s no reason to count tiny Judaism among them). I don’t know what I would do — maybe I would kill myself, like Alexei Nilych Kirillov, or kill someone else, like Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov, because it would not make any difference. Each of us would already be in Hell anyway.

    6. Your extreme and desparate urges would be indicative of someone who woke up one day to find there was no God..
      Big difference.

    7. You may think that the Resurrection of Christ is not essential to Christianity. If that is what you think, whatever your religion may be, it is not Christianity, and it is not Catholicism. I’m not sure you realize that “If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain” is a direct quote of Scripture. I hate to point things like that out, because they should be obvious to anyone with a decent education. If you take the risen Christ out of Christianity, what you have is a bigger waste of time than Dungeons and Dragons.

    8. Your homework is to study St. Thomas’ doctrines of:

      (1) lumen naturale
      (2) lumen fidei

      You are unaware of this distinction, it seems, and therefore you perceive Bob to be saying that faith is born of a natural light (lumen naturale); which it is not. Every Catholic here knows faith is born from a supernatural light (lumen fidei). We agree with you they are qualitatively different lights of knowing. But they are both acts of human cognition. Therefore the lumen naturale is considered anologically related to the lumen fidei, but only in the sense that lumen naturale::lumen fidei as natural::supernatural.

      Bob is 100% accurate in his account.

    9. Your homework assignment is to read the article on which you are commenting.

      “Scientists accept almost the entirety of their knowledge of science, even in their area of expertise, on faith in the testimony of others regarding the instrument dependent measurement of the properties of material things.”

      Such “faith” is only analogous, and only roughly so, to the theological virtue of faith. To use the same word without clarification is to invite misunderstanding.

      “This renders science gnostic in practice, though not in principle.”

      Now he is using a specifically religious term, further muddying the distinction between the tentative assent of science and the firm faith of religion.

    10. “Your homework assignment is to read the article on which you are commenting.”

      Sad.

      Have a good time Howard.

    11. I don’t think you saw the distinction between natural knowledge and merely probable knowledge. Knowledge can be natural but certain (like mathematics), or it can be natural and only probable (like science). Because scientific knowledge is only probable, it is not even a good ANALOGY for the knowledge of faith.

    12. Howard, (forgive me Jeff, can’t help it) Jeff wrote something that applies here. Maybe you can take a look.

      https://catholicstand.com/john-henry-newman-on-the-psychology-of-faith-and-reason/

      I know St. Thomas addressed this too. One of my personal favorites is the beginning of Book One of Summa Contra Gentiles, particularly Ch. 4. http://dhspriory.org/thomas/ContraGentiles1.htm#4

      No doubt you’ve heard of the “twofold truth” Howard, that’s a theme throughout Pope John Paul II’s Fides et ratio. Maybe this isn’t exactly what you are aiming at, but when any student of any discipline begins to reason about it, he does so with fiduciary knowledge, as Bob said.

      Or did I just totally misunderstand? If so, sorry, I’ll duck out.

    13. Listen, all I am asking is not to use the word faith in the sloppy way that people do when they talk about scientists having faith in published articles. If Bob had used more precise language that did not deliberately court misunderstanding, as he did in the first few sentences, I would have no problem with his article. But you can say “St. Thomas” until you’re blue in the face and it won’t make a sloppy use of the language anything better than a sloppy use of the language.

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  4. Another parallel corollary to the hero is sacrifice. Had Jesus rallied and slain all
    the bad guys, Christianity would not have thrived. All extraordinary causes – our salvation – must have people who are willing to die for them. The most obvious
    example in my time are the nuns who were killed in El Salvador at the hight of
    that brutal war. Their holiness demanded a corporeal and spiritual outcome.
    Shortly after their martyrdom this brutal war ended. It is the same for all humanity
    as there are a certain – as yet unreached – number of innocents who must be
    slain to achieve victory over evil (injustice). Some great souls ( Gandhi ) step
    up to the plate, some are forced.

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