MODULE ONE
Excerpt from Dynamics of Theology by Roger Haight, sj
Faith as a Dimension of the Human
Faith is a universal human phenomenon. All people live by some faith.
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People accept some center of gravity that balances the weights of the various values in
their lives. They adopt a system of meaning that establishes certain truths as fundamental.
Societies inculcate a variety of objects of faith that provide a unity, comprehensive order, and
intelligibility to life. These are objects of faith, because faith is the clinging commitment to those
objects, truths, and values which give meaning to human existence at its most fundamental level.
…Faith is a common human phenomenon, an essential dimension of human action that
constitutes integral human existence. All people have faith. Such a view may seem contradicted
by certain data….Like butterflies, some people cannot commit themselves to anything stable….
North American culture has engendered passionate consumers, whole society of people who
need, by, and use things up, ever new things, and whose life of work seems geared to this end.
Although H. Richard Niebuhr describes faith in one central and commanding
transcendent value as an ideal, the fact is that people are usually polytheists or henotheists who
either have many different faiths or whose god is always compromised by lesser gods. 1 Yet
beneath seemingly erratic behavior, insofar as it is responsible at all, one can find by reductive
analysis a dedication, a faith commitment, a direction, a path upon which the heart has been set.
The object of faith may rank fairly low on any scale of values. It may be concealed from
reflective evaluation. It can lie embedded in the implicit logic of a person’s or a people’s
behavior. But some object of faith is always operative insofar as it is constituted by the sum total
of all one’s actual decisions.
….The ultimate issue in the question of faith does not deal with yes or no, faith or
unfaith. Rather the point at issue is always which faith to choose: Which faith makes most sense?
….
Paul Tillich, in his classic Dynamics of Faith, [defines] faith as ultimate concern…faith is being
grasped by an ultimate concern.2 When the objective concern is really ultimate, transcendent, and
infinite, it is experienced as that upon which one stakes one’s being.
The essential point of this characterization of faith lies in the recognition that faith
consists in a dynamic commitment of the whole of human freedom in action…. This response
cannot be reduced to any specific “faculty.” It is not simply intellectual assent; not a pure
decision of the will; not merely an emotional feeling.3 None of these aspects should be excluded
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from faith….Faith reaches out from the depth of human freedom. Whether it be defined as
ultimate concern or as “setting one’s heart upon,”4 it takes the form of an engagement of all of a
human being’s energies and powers. It can in turn be mediated by a variety of different kinds of
experiences: a response to beauty, a negative response to human suffering, an attraction to a
supreme value or good, a decision to direct one’s whole life in a certain way.
Faith is central and centering: central because it emerges out of the center of one’s free
being; centering because it unifies, integrates, and holds together all aspects of the personality.
Of course, such a characterization of faith describes it in an almost ideal form. Faith takes on
different psychological forms according to different stages in its development.5 The principal or
confessed object of faith may actually have rivals that may or may not be conscious. Faith most
distinctively is an adult phenomenon, although it can still exist in less developed forms. Even
though they are human, new-borns do not have faith in the sense described here, any more than
they possess language in a developed way. Yet one should see continuities; basic human trust
can be nurtured from the very beginning of human life.6
Source: Roger Haights, sj. Dynamics of Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001.
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