Week 4: Faith as a GIFT | Catholics on Call

by Stephen Bevans, SVD | March 8, 2013

That faith is a free gift of God is a doctrine that the church has long taught. Pope Benedict echoes this doctrine in the document calling for the Year of Faith: “The heart indicates that the first act by which one comes to faith is God’s gift and the action of grace which acts and transforms the person deep within.” However, the fact that faith is a gift on God’s part needs to be understood within the context of another traditional doctrine of the church as well—that faith is a free, fully human act. It is not imposed by God; it is not forced. As Pope John Paul II wrote in his document on priestly training, Pastores Dabo Vobis, “the gift of God does not cancel human freedom . . . .” God does not, as it were zap us with grace. The ability to make the act of faith is not a gift in some kind of mechanical sense.

Cardinal Avery Dulles explains that “the will in coming to faith is indeed moved by God, but God does not move it coercively.” The way I would explain this is that the ability to make the act of faith is a gift insofar as we could never say “yes” without God’s prior invitation. Years ago when I was in Rome as a student I studied with the eminent Maurizio Flick, who spoke about the workings of grace not in terms of the usual causalities of scholastic theology—instrumental, efficient, final, etc. Rather, he spoke about how God uses personal causality. Just like a human person offers friendship or love to another person, that friendship or love could never be forced upon the other. But the person’s presence, his or her powers of persuasion, even his or her insistence moves the other person to some kind of response. In either case, the initial offer is a gift—free, undeserved on the other person’s part, and seeking free and full response. As the famous author and spiritual writer Henri Nouwen once put it, “a gift only becomes a gift when it is received, and nothing we have to give—wealth, talents, competences, beauty—will ever be recognized as true gifts until someone opens his [or her] heart to accept them.

So God offers us the gift of faith. But we need to respond to make it a gift.

Questions for Reflection:

What do I need to do to accept God’s gift of faith in my life?
Why do you think that faith must be a gift, but at the same time a free human act?

Stephen Bevans, SVD

Steve Bevans is Professor Emeritus at Catholic Theological Union and the Faculty Moderator for Catholics on Call. He is a Roman Catholic priest in the Society of the Divine Word, an international missionary congregation, and served for nine years (1972-1981) as a missionary in the Philippines.

His publications include: Models of Contextual Theology (2002), Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (2004, with Roger Schroeder), Evangelization and Freedom (2009, with Jeffrey Gros), and Introduction to Theology in Global Perspective (2009).

He is past president of the American Society of Missiology (2006) and past member of the board of directors of the Catholic Theological Society of America (2007-2009). In 2009 he was visiting lecturer at Yarra Theological Union in Melbourne, Australia, and in 2013 he was the only Catholic to speak at a Plenary at the Tenth Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Busan, Korea.