The one who seeks God · Revelation and faith

Choose an option and you are told at once whether it was right. The answer and the reason wait behind “Show the answer”.

A watercolor of a lamb walking a sandy path past a star, a leaf, and a seed toward a small wooden cross and a closed blue book

In every age and in every place, human beings have gone looking for God. What reason does the Church give for that?
1. Because people were frightened of nature and invented gods in order to appease it
2. Because it is nothing more than a cultural habit handed down from parents to children
3. Because the human person is made for God and carries in the heart a longing that God alone can fill
4. Because it is a particular leaning that shows up only among the few peoples who happen to have a religion
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Answer ③ Because the human person is made for God and carries in the heart a longing that God alone can fill
The human person is created by God and for God, so the desire to seek him is written into the heart. The first and the second are the familiar explanations that treat religion as nothing but a by-product of fear or of custom, and neither of them can say why that longing is never filled by anything else.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 27-30
Can human reason come to know that God exists?
1. It can. From creatures reason can arrive at the Creator — but it is revelation that makes known who he is
2. It cannot. Reason has nothing to say about God, and all that is left is a leap of faith
3. Not only can it — reason can also work out the inner mystery of God down to the last detail
4. The only way to know God is mystical experience, and thought cannot come anywhere near him
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Answer ① It can. From creatures reason can arrive at the Creator — but it is revelation that makes known who he is
The Church teaches that human reason, setting out from the created world and from the human person, can arrive at God. The second leans toward a fideism that leaves reason no part to play; the third toward a rationalism that shuts the mystery up inside reason.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 31-38
The words human beings use for God hold God fully, exactly as he is.
1. Yes
2. No
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Answer ② No
We speak of God with words borrowed from creatures, so our words really do point to him and yet always fall short. That does not mean nothing at all can be said — the Church calls this way of speaking “analogy”.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 39-43
Why did God not reveal himself all at once, but make himself known little by little over long ages?
1. Because he was angry at human sin and hid his face as a punishment
2. Because God's own mind changed as the centuries went by
3. Because he had to wait until someone came along who could write his words down
4. Because this is how God teaches — leading people a step at a time, so that they are able to receive what he reveals
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Answer ④ Because this is how God teaches — leading people a step at a time, so that they are able to receive what he reveals
Revelation is one story, running through Abraham and Moses and the prophets and completed in Christ; its slowness is God's patience, not his caprice. The first and the second are the same misunderstanding, that the one who changed was God.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 53-64
What does the teaching “Christ is the fullness of revelation” mean?
1. That new public revelation keeps being added, bit by bit, until the end of the world
2. That God has said everything he has to say in the Son, so there is no new public revelation after Christ
3. That an apparition approved by the Church adds new truths to the deposit of faith
4. That now that Scripture has been written, God no longer comes near anyone
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Answer ② That God has said everything he has to say in the Son, so there is no new public revelation after Christ
In giving us his Son, God said everything. A private revelation the Church has approved only helps people live the revelation of Christ more deeply; it neither corrects it nor fills it out — and none of that means God has now fallen silent.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 65-67
How are Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture related to each other?
1. Tradition stands above Scripture and is free to correct it
2. Scripture alone is the word of God, and Tradition is custom that people added on afterwards
3. They flow from one source, the same word of God, and move toward the same end, so the Church accepts and venerates both alike
4. They are two separate revelations, so where they clash you may follow whichever one you prefer
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Answer ③ They flow from one source, the same word of God, and move toward the same end, so the Church accepts and venerates both alike
Tradition and Scripture are two channels along which the one word entrusted to the apostles reaches us, and the Church receives both with the same devotion. The second confuses Tradition with human custom, and taking that view also rubs out the fact that the canon of Scripture itself was discerned within Tradition.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 80-83
The Magisterium is not above the word of God; it serves that word.
1. Yes
2. No
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Answer ① Yes
The Church's Magisterium holds the place of a servant, guarding what it has received and interpreting it faithfully. To picture the Pope and the bishops standing above revelation and inventing new doctrine turns that place upside down.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 85-87
What does it mean to say that Scripture was written under the inspiration of God?
1. That God is the true author, and that the human authors, writing with their own powers and in their own idiom, are true authors as well
2. That people simply took down what God dictated to them, word for word
3. That it is a record of religious experience left behind by deeply devout people
4. That God carved the letters with his own hand and sent the book down from heaven
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Answer ① That God is the true author, and that the human authors, writing with their own powers and in their own idiom, are true authors as well
God made use of human beings as true authors and not as tools, so in Scripture the word of God and a human way of speaking stand together. The second is the dictation theory, which rubs out the human author; the third does the opposite, shrinking Scripture until God's authorship is gone.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 105-107
How should a Christian treat the Old Testament?
1. As a document of the past that need not be read now that the New Testament has come
2. As the book of a God of wrath, to be held apart from the New Testament and its God of love
3. As background reading, useful only for learning about ancient history and culture
4. As inspired word of God in its own right, never to be discarded, and read in the light of Christ
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Answer ④ As inspired word of God in its own right, never to be discarded, and read in the light of Christ
The Old Testament has not been left behind by the New; it is the word of God in its own right. The first and the second are Marcion's old error — his attempt to cut the Old Testament away — still alive today, whereas the Church teaches that the two Testaments throw light on each other.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 121-123, 129
Is faith a gift of God, or an act of the human person?
1. It is something a person wins by their own decision, and grace has nothing to do with it
2. It is a gift in which God's grace goes ahead and leads, and at the same time a truly human act offered with reason and freedom
3. It is a blind leap taken with reason laid aside, so it cannot be called a human act at all
4. It is a state of feeling, a warmth in the heart, so there is nothing to do but let it come and go
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Answer ② It is a gift in which God's grace goes ahead and leads, and at the same time a truly human act offered with reason and freedom
Grace leads the way, and even so faith is a truly human act in which a person freely answers. The third leans toward a fideism that cuts faith off from reason; the fourth toward the misunderstanding that shrinks faith down to a feeling.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 153-155
Faith, once received, can never be lost.
1. Yes
2. No
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Answer ② No
Faith is a gift that can indeed be lost, which is why the apostle Paul urges us to hold on to faith and a good conscience. So the Church teaches us to keep faith alive by tending it with the word, with prayer, and with acts of love.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 162
Which of these states the relation between faith and science rightly?
1. The more science explains, the less room there is for faith to stand in
2. Scripture is a book that explains nature, so the conclusions of science have to be judged by chapter and verse
3. Both come from the same God, so what has genuinely been established on either side can never contradict the other
4. Faith and reason have nothing whatever to do with each other and never meet
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Answer ③ Both come from the same God, so what has genuinely been established on either side can never contradict the other
Inquiry carried out honestly by its own proper method does not collide with faith, because the one who gives truth is one and the same God. The first squeezes God into the gaps where knowledge has not yet reached; the second reads Scripture as a science textbook.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 159