v. Faithful
Rom 4:11 father of all c uncircumcised
1Co 7:12 brother has a wife who is not c
2Co 6:15 or what part the c with the unbeliever?
Gal 3:9 faith are blessed with c Abraham
Gal 3:22 the promise .. by faith .. given to the c
1Ti 5:16 if any co any c have widows, let
6:2
(v. God, faith)
(ESQUERDA BIFET, Juan, Dictionary of Evangelization, BAC, Madrid, 1998)
Source: Dictionary of Evangelization
SUMMARY: I. Meaning and content of the word believer: 1. Believing as a typically human act; 2. Elements of Christian belief – II. The history of salvation, original place and sustainer of the Christian believer: 1. Historicity of the faith; 2. The current crisis of the Christian faith; 3. The God of the patriarchs; 4. The faith of the chosen people; 5. The factor that bases belief and its transmission – III. The believer in Jesus Christ Lord: 1. Christ, the maximum point of insertion of God in history; 2. Christ and the faith of the patriarchs; 3. The Christian believer and the Church – IV. Requirements of being a Christian believer: 1. Conversion and perseverance; 2. Growth and apostolate; 3. Self-realization and commitment in the world – V. The believer facing the future.
1. Meaning and content of the word believer
The term believer indicates the person – collectivity or individual – who believes, who has faith. The verb believe is frequently used in everyday language, and is equivalent to presuppose, think, be convinced. Used in a religious sense, the word believer assumes all the fullness of its meaning and its richness of content. This explains why the term preferably suggests the particular conviction of faith in religious matters. Multiple are the beliefs; they are distinguished according to the main elements of their content. He is a “believer” who accepts them. The Hindu, the Mohammedan, the Jew and, in general, everyone who professes a certain religion or belief is called a believer. We limit our consideration to the Christian believer. His problem is in part common to that of other believers; however, it also has characteristic features.
1. BELIEVING AS A TYPICALLY HUMAN ACT – First of all, we must consider the human aspect of believing, since “believing” is a human activity. By virtue of his rationality, freedom and affectivity, man believes and can believe. This activity of believing is as human as that of being able to use conceptual language. In believing we can discover three human qualities: openness to others as persons, the ability to perceive and value the meaning of what is told to us, the possibility of accepting it with adherence and esteem or of rejecting it as untrue. The need rooted in man to communicate with his fellow man stimulates and activates these three qualities of belief.
Man is fully realized only in exchange with others. Without mutual acceptance of what we say and what is told to us, that is, without believing and without being believed, human coexistence would be impossible.
The human ability to believe admits degrees, depends on other human qualities (which, in turn, conditions them) and, like everything that is human, can present defective and even abnormal manifestations. Likewise, the possibility of believing is subject to complex psychological and social laws. We cannot believe anything, or anyone, or under any circumstances; and to what we believe we can give greater or lesser adherence. Our reason behaves like a judge; it judges about the veracity of the person and the rationality of the content that communicates to us. Also our will and our affectivity, as well as our feelings, intervene and act as indispensable complements to belief, although to a different degree. Based on them, we have confidence in the person who speaks to us, we give importance to what he tells us and we adopt a certain attitude. Credulity or skepticism are vicious positions; you have to avoid them.
Faced with this complexity, it must be noted, first, that the necessary subordination of belief to reason does not constitute belief as a mere substitution of the power to know or investigate. By virtue of the other elements that belief contains, it not only enriches us with new knowledge, but also gives our intercommunication with others the typically human dimension of freedom and appreciation. To believe another is to accept him in my freedom and in my esteem; not to believe him is to reject him with a judgment of contempt.
On the other hand, the importance of believing is manifested in the fact that, in a certain way and up to a certain point, it conditions our reason and our reasoning, our will and also our feeling. All these human activities have their intrinsic limits more or less wide, according to personal capacity. But, at the same time, they are encompassed in what is usually defined as “mentality”. Mentality is a special way of thinking, deciding and valuing; therefore, it conditions the action. It characterizes individuals, communities, times and cultures. It is formed by the imperceptible fabric of psychological dispositions, of the proper way of living, of what is assimilated through education and the environment. In all this belief intervenes. Having a certain mentality can favor or hinder the acceptance of certain religious beliefs; but the mentality is constituted, in turn, by beliefs and is an unequivocal sign of the profoundly human reality of believing.
The inalienably human dimension of belief provides the Christian believer with a starting point to appreciate the value of the act that characterizes him. Belief, carried out in the right conditions, updates, empowers and leads to maturity a very important sector of the believer’s human qualities: intercommunication with others. But believing manifests a peculiar value, because it helps to adopt an attitude that confers unity and strength to the psychological world of the believer. This “attitude” can reach its fullness and be radical and definitive. The ultimate attitude may involve risks, but it is enriching in a specific way. It gives man the adequate means to overcome the ‘triple anguish: pain-death, sin-condemnation, failure-meaninglessness of life, which Paul Tillich cleverly presents as constant dangers that threaten the psychological life of the human being’.
2. ELEMENTS OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF – As a consequence of what has been said, it can be affirmed that authentic belief actualizes a very rich and profound aspect of the human being. Christian belief embraces all the aforementioned elements and gives them concreteness and transcendence. Believing as a Christian empowers man’s communicability by opening him to God in Christ; it accepts the truth of his person by trusting in it and adhering to its content, and adopts a definitive attitude demanded by its absolute importance for one’s spiritual life. The three aspects: communicability, acceptance and definitive commitment, are inseparable and constitute Christian belief. Eliminating one or reducing to just one of them what is specific to Christian belief – as R. Bultmann, P. Tillich, H. Braun and others have tried – means weakening and, therefore, falsifying the richness and demands inherent to the Christian believer. . Furthermore, it is constituted as such by the mutual intertwining and harmonic result of these three elements under the action of divine grace and the Holy Spirit. That is why it can be affirmed that the Christian believer enjoys, by virtue of his faith, a “new” life. Now, all life, and even more so that of the human level enriched by a divine insertion -which is the main element-, has a multiplicity of aspects, complex laws and wonderful results that determine the Christian’s spirituality. To capture this spirituality, it is necessary to indicate, first, the original terrain, that is, where the Christian’s faith is born (II-111); then the demands he makes (IV); and, finally, the possibilities and obligations that it imposes on the believer in anticipation of the future (V).
II. the history of salvation,
original and sustaining place of the Christian believer
The original and sustaining place of the believer and, at the same time, the testing ground of his faith, is none other than human history itself, common to all men. The development of events becomes human history when freedom is inserted into them’. Due to it, every change in time bears the stamp of man and man, in turn, imprints on him a particular physiognomy.
1. HISTORICITY OF DF. THE FAITH – Human history, seen from the perspective of the believer, is characterized by the birth and decline of certain beliefs and periods in which faith or disbelief predominates. The historical study of faith also allows us to distinguish in it the elements received from other beliefs, the influences exerted by it, its various modes of expression and the characteristics of those who accept or transmit it. Accepting human history as the germinal and sustaining ground of faith and that faith is subject to the laws of history does not necessarily imply falling into historical relativism, which obviously empties Christian belief of its own content. To accept the historicity of the faith is to honestly recognize the complex problems that it carries with it. History discovers in the Christian faith vast strata that, like geological ones, not only settle, but are subject to gigantic pressures that pile them up one on top of the other. The Christian believer must be aware of these modifications, since they offer the complicated but realistic orography of his belief. This orography is essential to get to know one’s own faith in depth and contributes to the spirituality of the believer growing and being able to happily overcome the various “earthquakes” that occur in history.
2. THE CURRENT CRISIS OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH – Our time, if compared to other historical periods, appears to our Western gaze, in its most striking aspect, with crisis characteristics. There is a growing abandonment not only of religious practices, but also of faith in God, in Christ, in the Church and in what concerns the being and destiny of man. Believing is going through a critical moment of withdrawal. The abundant bibliography on the so-called “theology of the death of God” has laid it bare. What characterizes this critical period is not so much the “atheist” or “agnostic” response to man’s most transcendental questions (his being specific to him, his destiny, God), but rather this response given as Christian. The denial of what properly transcends the merely human content has always existed, although this denial now assumes greater breadth and depth. What is characteristic and typical of our time are the efforts that, from the initial believing position and relying, at least in part, on the same revelation, have been carried out to manifest the emptiness, according to certain authors, of the concept of God, of Christ, of the Church and of Christian love. Authors of the radical wing of the theology of the death of God,…