Object of Faith is God himself and all that he reveals, considered both as the truth to which supernatural faith adheres and under the formal motive of God’s perfectly truthful authority as revealer.
God and the truths he reveals
Christian faith is first a personal adherence to God, the Father who reveals himself through the Son in the Holy Spirit. It is simultaneously assent to everything God makes known, because trust in the speaker includes trust in his word. The mysteries of the Trinity, creation, Incarnation, Redemption, Church, sacraments, judgment, resurrection, and eternal life are not detached data; they disclose the one divine plan and lead the believer into communion with God.
Theologians call what is believed the material object of faith. In the widest sense it includes God and every truth he has revealed. Within that object, God is primary: created realities, historical events, moral commands, and saving institutions are believed in relation to him and his revelation. No Catholic can preserve personal faith in Christ while knowingly rejecting a doctrine Christ entrusts to the apostolic Church as part of the same divine testimony.[1]
Personal adherence and propositional assent
Faith is not reducible to accepting sentences, yet it necessarily has intelligible content. A relationship with God that excludes what he reveals substitutes a preferred image for the living God. Conversely, bare recitation without personal trust and charity can leave faith unformed. The one act joins adherence to the revealer and assent to revealed truth, with understanding able to grow throughout Christian life.[2]
Material and formal object
The formal object answers why or under what aspect the intellect believes. Supernatural faith assents because of the authority of God revealing, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. This First Truth speaking is sometimes called the formal object quo, the light or motive by which the act is specified. God as the reality attained can be called the formal object quod. Terminology varies among scholastic authors, so the underlying distinction is more important than multiplying Latin labels.[3]
Motives of Credibility show that revelation is worthy of belief, but they are not the formal object of faith. Historical evidence, miracles, prophecy, the Church’s holiness, and rational arguments can lead a person to recognize the duty and reasonableness of belief. The supernatural act rests ultimately on God’s testimony under grace. A person who accepts a revealed proposition solely because an historian finds it probable has reached a natural judgment, not yet the same act of theological faith.
Formal motive and ecclesial testimony
The Church proposes revelation infallibly and gives the believer a public rule, but God remains the formal motive of divine and Catholic faith. Ecclesial authority does not compete with divine testimony; it identifies what belongs to that testimony. For truths definitively connected with revelation, the formal ground differs: assent rests on faith in the Holy Spirit’s assistance to the Magisterium and the Church’s infallibility rather than on a proposal that the proposition itself was revealed.
Extent, unity, and growth
The object of divine and Catholic faith is specified juridically in canon 750 §1: truths contained in the written or handed-down Word of God and proposed as divinely revealed through solemn judgment or the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium. A truth can belong to revelation before its definitive formulation; when the Church proposes it as revealed, its public doctrinal status is manifest and all the faithful must believe it with divine and Catholic faith.[4][5]
The hierarchy of truths orders doctrines according to their relation to the foundation of Christian faith, but it does not permit selective assent. Every dogma has the same formal motive because the same God reveals it. Some mysteries illuminate many others more directly, and catechesis properly begins from Christ and the Trinity. Greater centrality is not a license to deny a less central revealed proposition, just as the unity of faith does not make all doctrines interchangeable.
Implicit and explicit faith
The believer cannot explicitly understand every implication of the deposit at once. Faith initially embraces God and the whole revelation entrusted to his Church, while catechesis, worship, study, and holiness make its content increasingly explicit. Implicit adherence is not permission to persist in contradiction once the Church’s teaching is known. Growth in understanding perfects the act by bringing more of its objective content into conscious confession and life.
References
- 1.Doctrinal Commentary on the Concluding Formula of the Professio fidei — The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on revealed and connected definitive truths, logical and historical necessity, distinct grounds of assent, and illustrative examples of each doctrinal category
- 2.Catechism of the Catholic Church, 142–184 — Faith as personal adherence to God and free assent to all that he reveals, its divine formal motive, ecclesial profession, certainty, freedom, necessity, and relation to understanding
- 3.Dei Filius, chapters 3–4 — The First Vatican Council on God’s revealing authority, the object and motive of supernatural faith, the Church’s proposal of revealed doctrine, and the legitimate work of reason within faith
- 4.Dei Verbum, 7–10 and 21–26 — Vatican II on Scripture and Tradition as one sacred deposit and supreme rule of faith, and on the living Magisterium as their divinely commissioned servant and authentic interpreter
- 5.Code of Canon Law, canons 747–755 — The canonical norms governing the Church’s teaching office, infallible acts, revealed and connected definitive doctrines, religious submission, and the definitions of heresy, apostasy, and schism