( Since this letter sets down my current thoughts on this matter pretty well, I thought I'd post it, after some slight revisions )

Dear David,

I do not believe in implicit faith. And there is no emotion involved -- just the opposite. My emotions lead me violently away from such a thing as "implicit faith," but I have worked hard to get over my emotions. I am just trying to make distinctions and to see how St. Alphonsus could have said it was a "sufficiently probable" idea.

Keep an eye on the thread I started about sufficient and efficient grace and how this led to dangerous speculations. From here I mean to build the thesis that implicit faith is possibly a casuistic absurdity rather than a heresy.

Just as you can achieve the effects of baptism without water, some have speculated you can have faith without faith. But this is not to say that faith in Christ and the Trinity isn't necessary -- it just becomes implicit, like it was for people before the Incarnation.

No one has satisfactorily explained what are the conditions for implicit faith, or how we can know if it exists, without falling into quasi-Pelagianism, like Garrigou-Lagrange who says merely following the natural law is an act of supernatural faith. ( This is not semi-Pelagianism or Pelagianism as they are historically known, but a new kind of error, hence "quasi-Pelagianism ).

But merely to speculate on "implicit faith" generically, like St. Alphonsus did, may not be heresy ( this depends on whether it can be said that explicit faith ever became part of the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium ).  It usually becomes a heresy, in my opinion, if you actually try to apply it to concrete circuмstances, like by saying a Jєω who worships in a ѕуηαgσgυє has it. How can you have implicit faith in Christ at the same time as you have a twisted conception of God the Father? Is the conception of Christ latent or implied within a false picture of God the Father? Even by the standards of the implicit-faithers, this does not work.

There are many hypothetical cases of "implicit faith" and taken individually, most of them are probably heresy. But taken generally, implicit faith ITSELF is not heresy. Like if you speculate about a native who is cut adrift from his tribe, who is completely isolated, and who isn't engaging in idolatry. He might look up at the stars and believe in something akin to the true God, and by implication, the other two members of the Trinity.

I am not saying that I believe in implicit faith -- I do not -- I'm just treating it as a speculation that has been permitted by the Church, asking myself why it has been permitted by the Church.
I feel this is more sensible than radically throwing out four hundred years of theology that no Pope ever condemned. But undoubtedly you will say that I'm veering off and overthinking it.


Yours,

Mike.