Theological Definitions of the Word Believe / Faith

Authors

  • Iosif TAMAŞ Faculty of Roman-Catholic Theology, “Al. I. Cuza” University of Iași, Romania

Keywords:

meaning, significance, intellect, intelligence, wisdom, heart

Abstract

The problem of meaning in the theological research (that soberness of throwing pearls to the swine – 7.6 Mt: “Do not give the holy things to dogs and do not throw pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot, then turn and rend you”) has nothing to do with the fragmentation of our “smart” thinking into linguistic and spiritual shades that easily provide the indicative synthesis for nowadays people, be they religious, priests or bishops. If we leave the theological language and we repetitively introduce “nuanced” words, we will not discern the divine charisms from the influences of the human faculties, purely natural, or even demonic. Therefore, where will the discernment of spirits be? Faith defends philosophy, it does not destroy it. Why would theology do such thing? We are masters in miming the Christian identity, even Oscar candidates. It is therefore essential, as a remedy, to look only to the mirror of our sacramental life of faith. In this central point of life – our life of faith – to install the difference between faith and religion, between the divine and the human, between sacred and profane. This is the hermeneutical key of reading the sacred texts where we can then discover the words of Jesus Christ in the spiritual perfection of creation, plus the love that leads us to knowledge. To discover / rediscover God is love, we must return to the root of our life to creation, where we discover / rediscover that we lost the significance of purpose. In the philosophical language love is defined as the desire to rule good forever, striving to become immortal. That will further outline the methodological remarks, i.e. assuming the scientific condition of being researcher of theology. In this regard we relate to the text of the Bible, the Word of God made flesh, as to everything is original, spontaneous, real in our life of faith, and we radically delineate the aphoristic texts. Thus, in this paper, we develop the following lines of research about faith: intellectual act at St. Thomas Aquinas, to stop later to faith, the act of the heart as taught by the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI.

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