LIFE IN CHRIST: chap. 5, part 3

Lent with Fr Harton

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CHAPTER 5: FAITH (part 3)

We begin, then, with the confession of S. Peter, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. xvi. 16). This was the perfect expression of the Apostle’s faith and it is the ground of ours, faith in the divinity of our Lord and in the Father through Him. Faith not in this or that fact about our Lord, but in Him. We do believe in certain facts about Him—His Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension—all that we are told about Him in the Gospel, but these are all ancillary to our faith in Himself; it is in Him that we believe essentially and in Him as God. Those theories which detract from the divinity of Jesus cut at the root of all God’s gifts in Him; if He be not God, little reliance can be placed upon His revelation of the Father; if He be not God, there can be no grace such as we have been considering. It is because He is God that we can be saved. We must guard our faith in that holy mystery most jealously. “Faith in the divinity of Jesus is, according to the designs of the Father, the first thing needful in order to share in the divine life.”¹