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Okay, I'm back. Hey, isn't it heartening to see how popular a great topic is?!?!
It's so comforting to see how eager everyone on
CI is to discuss this important subject.
'If I have spoken earthly things to you, and you do not believe, how will you believe if I speak to you of heavenly things?' (John 3:12)
What 'earthly things' is Jesus talking about here? When Jesus says I, does he also refer to the Old Testament as 'I'?
Would be very interested in your views. Thanks.
Any good answer to such a question deserves a strong foundation. The Catholic principle at the root of this subject is the following:
Grace Builds on Nature.
Just as the Old Testament was firmly rooted in natural phenomenon and man's perception of spiritual things was cloudy and vague, and the New Testament expands our comprehension of things spiritual, while not losing our firm foundation in our understanding of natural things, so too, the action of grace in our souls is helped by a sound footing in the physical nature of material things. Grace builds on nature.
The focus of the Scripture reference (John iii. 12) is on faith. The word "believe" occurs twice, only surpassed by "you" which occurs 4 times. The faith in question is "your" faith, that is, the faith of Nicodemus; but since it is in the plural number, "your" refers to others also besides Nicodemus, that is, US TODAY.
We do not receive our faith by any act of our own volition or effort or power. Modernism would have us believe that our faith is our own personal creation and that we can make of it anything that we want, because we have the power to create our faith and to destroy our faith, or, such things can happen without our direct, personal action. There is literally NO END to the problems that result in this error, for as St. Pius X said so well, Modernism is the synthesis of all heresies.
But I digress!
Faith is literally a gift from God, and it is something that we get when we ask Him for it. Grace builds on nature, and the gift of faith is a gift of grace. When we trust in God as a child trusts in his father, our natural beginnings provides a basis for grace to work, and this is the firm foundation upon which our faith will be supported with security, as a house built on a rock.
Without that foundation in earthly things, our faith would be built on sand, and when the winds of controversy blow and the waves of infidelity and schism and heresy and sin crash against it, the fall thereof will be great. Grace builds with strength on nature.
There are false religions that make up a 'god' of darkness and say that all material things are evil because nature is evil, and we must rise above all that to achieve our spiritual perfection. That's not the true Catholic religion. Matter is not evil, nature is not evil and material things are not inherently evil. Properly understood and rightly used, nature and natural things are what we have upon which grace builds an impenetrable fortress of faith -- and that's no small thing.
Nicodemus was a man who was well-known as a "master in Israel" (v. 10), yet he was having difficulty believing what Our Lord had to tell him. Jesus was asking him to step up to a higher level of knowledge and to allow his faith to grow, which is not in itself a NATURAL act. It would be an act of God for Nicodemus (or us!) to experience the construction of a strong faith within us, and while it might seem impossible to us, "Nothing is impossible with God." By his cooperation with God's grace he would rise to the new heights of grace and holiness that he could never achieve on his own. (It is this entire dependence upon God that Modernism abhors!) Nonetheless, the faith of Nicodemus would be anchored in nature, and it would be up to him to allow this new life of faith, his "belief," to be constructed upon the rock-foundation of "earthly things," as Our Lord put it.
This, as too all of Scripture, is a lesson for us all. We know about how babies are born, and we have our foundation in our Baptism and our life of grace, and in our Confirmation, then we are asked to see what Jesus means when he says to Nicodemus, "Amen, amen I say to you, unless a man be born again by water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." And our immediate, knee-jerk reaction should not be that of 'the master in Israel' Nicodemus: "How can a man enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born again?"
(BTW, if we truly believe what Our Lord said, we do not come in there and re-write His words in our minds as the Modernist heresy would have us do, and say that unless a man be born again by some metaphor of water and/or some alternative analogy to the Holy Ghost he can thereby be eligible for salvation even if he's invincibly ignorant, or whatever else a Modernist might dream up on the spur of the moment.)
Such a question might be 'natural', but it is not indicative of the right foundation upon which grace would be well built. And Our Lord at that point immediately corrected Nicodemus AND US ALL, by His use of the plural number. Grace builds with strength on nature when the nature is well-directed and true, but the building would be corrupted if it were built on a poorly-directed and false nature. This latter way is what happens with the error of Modernism, where the very foundation of thought is redesigned to uphold a structure of lies and falsehood as if it were somehow respectable.
Entire volumes could be written about this.
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