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Today, we are pleased to share excerpts from Chapter 4 of Thomas Merton’s book Life and Holiness. In this chapter, he emphasizes that salvation comes solely through faith. Chapter 4 – The Life of Faith Faith in God“Only by faith can we truly accept Christ and his Church as our salvation. Without faith, one is a Christian in name only. One belongs to the Church, not as to the body of Christ but as to a social institution, a religious organization, and one conforms to the generally accepted norms of Christian behavior not out of love for God, not with any understanding of their inner meaning, but merely in order to live up to the minimum standard of good conduct which will guarantee acceptance by the group. Christ made it clear that there was a direct opposition between faith and human respect: ‘How can you believe who receive glory from one another, and do not seek the glory which is from the only God)’ (Jn.5:44). If faith is so important, what is its real nature? Is it merely the intellectual acceptance of a few selected dogmas proposed to our belief by the authority of the Church? It is more. Naturally, faith implies the acceptance of dogmatic truth, but if it is only this, it does not go far enough. Merely to submit, even to submit one's judgment, is not yet the whole of faith. It is only one aspect of faith. In the last five centuries, due to the confusion of doctrines and the wrangling of sects, the authoritative definition of dogmatic truth has come to have a very great place in Catholic life. But this extraordinary emphasis must not give us a wrong perspective. Faith is not merely the acquiescence of the mind in certain, truths, it is the gift of our whole being to Truth itself, to the Word of God.” THE EXISTENCE OF GOD “A life of faith is certainly irrational unless it presupposes the reality of a God in whom to believe. And faith should be intelligent. It does not draw its light from reason and from intelligence-- it is on the contrary a spiritual light for the intellect, coming from beyond the sphere of our own limited understanding. It is not a Bat contradiction of reason, but transcends reason in a way that is still reasonable, hence So Anselm's saying: credo ut intelligam, ‘I believe in order to understand.’ This is a more Christian, as well as a more human statement than Tertullian's credo quia impossible (I believe this because it is impossible) though the latter paradox is rhetorically significant as an expression of the mystery implicit in the Christian life. […]”
