SPE SALVI

We must return once more to the New Testament. In the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews we find a kind of definition of faith which closely links this virtue with hope. Ever since the Reformation there has been a dispute among exegetes over the central word of this phrase, but today a way towards a common interpretation seems to be opening up once more. For the time being I shall leave this central word untranslated. The sentence therefore reads as follows: “Faith is the hypostasis of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen.” For the Fathers and for the theologians of the Middle Ages, it was clear that the Greek word hypostasis was to be rendered in Latin with the term substantia. The Latin translation of the text produced at the time of the early Church therefore reads: Est autem fides sperandarum substantia rerum, argumentum non apparentium - faith is the “substance” of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen. Saint Thomas Aquinas, using the terminology of the philosophical tradition to which he belonged, explains it as follows: faith is a habitus, that is, a stable disposition of the spirit, through which eternal life takes root in us and reason is led to consent to what it does not see. The concept of “substance” is therefore modified in the sense that through faith, in a tentative way, or as we might say “in embryo” - and thus according to the “substance” - there are already present in us the things that are hoped for: the whole, true life. And precisely because the thing itself is already present, this presence of what is to come also creates certainty: this “thing” which must come is not yet visible in the external world (it does not “appear”), but because of the fact that, as an initial and dynamic reality, we carry it within us, a certain perception of it has even now come into existence. To Luther, who was not particularly fond of the Letter to the Hebrews, the concept of “substance”, in the context of his view of faith, meant nothing. For this reason he understood the term hypostasis/substance not in the objective sense (of a reality present within us), but in the subjective sense, as an expression of an interior attitude, and so, naturally, he also had to understand the term argumentum as a disposition of the subject. In the twentieth century this interpretation became prevalent - at least in Germany - in Catholic exegesis too, so that the ecumenical translation into German of the New Testament, approved by the Bishops, reads as follows: Glaube aber ist: Feststehen in dem, was man erhofft, Überzeugtsein von dem, was man nicht sieht (faith is: standing firm in what one hopes, being convinced of what one does not see). This in itself is not incorrect, but it is not the meaning of the text, because the Greek term used (elenchos) does not have the subjective sense of “conviction” but the objective sense of “proof.” Rightly, therefore, recent Protestant exegesis has arrived at a different interpretation: “Yet there can be no question but that this classical Protestant understanding is untenable.” Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a “proof” of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a “not yet.” The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future. (7)

Pensées September 21, 2007

The real insight of Augustine’s psychological analogy for the Trinity is not its “explanation” of the fecund mystery of the divine nature, but rather its discovery that the mind is a created pattern of Trinitarian existence naturally and supernaturally - by divine grace – fit for participation in Uncreated Life.

Pensées August 13, 2007

Catholic theology takes for its proper object the mysteries of faith per se. Evangelical theology, on the other hand, takes as its proper object the mysteries of faith per scriptura. Thus while there is an analogous formal object (the text being a divine communication in words and propositions of the substantial truth), there is a strikingly different material object evinced by the methods of analysis.

Evangelical theology draws near to its object exclusively by means of a grammatical and logical analysis of the text, carrying out its investigation entirely within the dimensions of a literary phenomenon.

Catholic theology, on the other hand, encounters its object both intra-textually and extra-textually. Once it has found its object by means of the text, it must take hold of the substantial mystery (the object per se). This act is one which necessarily transcends the interpretation of the embodiment of the mystery in text and enters upon an encounter of understanding and love of the great truth itself, an encounter which yields insights not predetermined by the text.