Cry 'Woof'
In last week’s selection from Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis talked about how faith spreads from one person to another, as light spreads from one candle to another at the Easter Vigil mass. In paragraphs 38 and 39, he talks about this light spreads through time, from generation to generation:
The transmission of the faith not only brings light to men and women in every place; it travels through time, passing from one generation to another. Because faith is born of an encounter which takes place in history and lights up our journey through time, it must be passed on in every age. It is through an unbroken chain of witnesses that we come to see the face of Jesus.
Now this makes sense. Even in the hard sciences, where it is possible to arrive at new knowledge through experimentation, we acquire most knowledge by learning from others, from those who have gone before. In principle I could repeat the Michelson-Morley experiment; but in practice, I don’t. I take it on faith—that is, I trust my teachers.
But in the case of historical knowledge passed down through the ages, how do we know this witness is trustworthy? Pope Francis faces this problem directly:
But how is this possible? How can we be certain, after all these centuries, that we have encountered the “real Jesus”? Were we merely isolated individuals, were our starting point simply our own individual ego seeking in itself the basis of absolutely sure knowledge, a certainty of this sort would be impossible. I cannot possibly verify for myself something which happened so long ago.
How do we resolve this?
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 Church is a Mother who teaches us to speak the language of faith. Saint John brings this out in his Gospel by closely uniting faith and memory and associating both with the working of the Holy Spirit, who, as Jesus says, “will remind you of all that I have said to you” (Jn 14:26). 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.
I’m sure we’ve all heard the transmission of the faith down the ages being compared to a game of “Telephone”, where one person is given a message, and whispers it to another, and to another, until by the last person the message has warped beyond all recognition. I’ve always thought this a bad comparison; the game purposely omits every mechanism by which the listener can verify what he heard, and inserts every mechanism by which the message can be garbled, whether by mishearing or by what would be out-and-out malice in a more serious context. But regarding important matters, the situation is the opposite: the speakers and listeners go out of their way to make sure the message is transmitted successfully. (We see this in the preservation of ancient manuscripts.)
So the correct transmission of the faith is not impossible even in human terms. But as St. John tells, we have a guarantee from Christ Himself: the Holy Spirit “will remind you of all that I have said to you.” God is not absent. God did not create the world and then wander off; God is present at each place and in each moment, and Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would take part in our remembering of the faith.
There are two things to take away from this. First, even in human terms, the faith isn’t something you can have just on your own—you receive it from those who have gone before. And second, Jesus’ guarantee goes along with that particularly body of people we call the Church; for the Holy Spirit is said to be the soul of the Church.
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photo credit: Vincent_AF via photopin cc
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