Faith Is Knowing You Are Loved (By God)

Fr. Herbert McCabe once suggested that the heart of faith is trusting that you are loved. I think he was onto something.

It’s necessary for children to know that their parents love them — but this belief isn’t something children come to by analyzing the world. It’s something they begin with, something they do and must take for granted just starting out. Sadly, it’s also something they can become disabused of, depending on how they’re treated by their parents (or, as we’ll consider later, how they choose to mistreat their parents). We all know how deeply damaging it is for a child to question whether — or how much — they are loved by their parents. It's a very sad, almost infinitely tragic thing to contemplate: the psyche of a child who feels unloved. It breaks the heart.

I say it is necessary for a child to believe they are loved by their parents because once a child truly loses faith in that love, they begin to operate out of fear — and once that happens, their life starts to take on a very different sort of tenor indeed.

Here’s how Fr. Herbert McCabe explains the situation:

“What happens to the child who has lost faith in her parents’ love? The first thing is fear — a fear that she does not matter, that she has no value or importance. This is the fear that St. John says is cast out by love, by being loved, by knowing you are loved.

The child who is deprived of love is characteristically defensive. She is terrified of admitting any inadequacy or guilt — I mean terrified of admitting it even to herself. She becomes gradually self-righteous, convinced of her rightness, with a conviction that conceals, and is meant to conceal, a deep anxiety.

She is not able simply to accept herself, warts and all, as valuable because someone loves her. So she has to create a self-image for herself, a self-flattering image. She will have to protect her importance by having power over others. She will be terrified of being at the mercy of others, vulnerable to them.

She will guard her self-image with possessions which make her independent of others. She will at all costs protect what she calls her ‘freedom,’ meaning her isolation from others and the demands they might make on her. She will see the world as a place fundamentally of competition and struggle in which she has to win, rather than of friendship and cooperation.

All that is an image of disbelief. If you fail to believe that the most important and fundamental thing about you is that you are loved — if you fail to believe in God — then you have no recourse except to believe in yourself. All sin arises from the deep fear that is involved here.”¹

Surely there’s much to commend in those paragraphs. But without getting into the (quite complicated) theology of sin or even original sin, I can definitely tell you that as a father, one of the most important things I do every day is tell and show my children that I love them. I do this because I do love them — very deeply — and because I know how much it matters that they believe that. I’m far from perfect (heaven knows), and I make plenty of mistakes, but I know how essential their belief in my love is for their life and flourishing, and their ability to just get around somewhat normally in the world. To not be weird or a freak, like me ; )

Of course, this showing of love is compatible with moments when they might reasonably question it — because of trials I allow them to undergo or the disciplines I impose when necessary. Still, their questioning, or even occasional doubting, doesn’t mean they don’t believe in my love. And something similar, I think, can and should be said of the Christian faith: that such questioning and doubting is not the same as outright unbelief. In fact, in many ways — some obvious, some hidden — it can eventually, even if only after immense trial, lead to a much more intimate level of love and union with one’s Beloved (and ultimately wind up strengthening one’s faith which is, essentially, supernatural trust²).

Importantly — especially for the theological parallels — we also know that people can unreasonably question their parents’ love, engaging in a sort of voluntary ignorance or self-deception about it. This typically happens when various narcissistic tendencies take over, tendencies that, at some point, they willfully indulge. In such cases, they actually want to doubt — ultimately, to disbelieve — in their parents’ love, because they want to be right about something, or because they want to assert some independence they feel they lacked, or both. We’ve all seen situations where parents did their best, truly and commendably, to love their children, and yet the children turn on them, trying to paint them as villains when they clearly were not. These children are not doubters. They are disbelievers. And they have chosen their disbelief for reasons rooted in pride.

That, I think, is the much worse situation — and a much harder one to heal, both naturally and supernaturally. But I’ll leave that point for the reader to sit with, however much they like.

For now, I want to focus on this: of course it is, or at least can be, reasonable to question and even doubt God’s love. Whether we’re struggling with some teaching of the faith and unsure how it expresses God’s love, or (more commonly) we're grappling with the horrors of the world and the afflictions that strike us and our loved ones — the point I’m making, and that Fr. McCabe is making, is that such doubting or questioning is not (necessarily) unbelief.³ It’s not only not incompatible with faith, but in fact is often a necessary part of growing in one’s faith and love of God.⁴

As Fr. McCabe explains:

“Children, of course, quite quickly come to realize the importance of their parents’ love. And, quite soon, they need to be reassured about it. It is not enough for them to be told, to be kissed and cuddled and so on. They need to test it out.

Lots of the misbehavior of children is experimental — making sure that the love will still be there under all circumstances. I think that some of the things we class as doubt are often quite like this — testing out not so much God’s love for us as our belief in it, discovering how far our faith can go.

This seems to me not so much a good thing or a bad thing as an inevitable thing — as inevitable and necessary as the infuriating behavior of children.”

Of course, God is not like a human parent in this respect — God cannot fail to love us. The whole message of Christianity is precisely that: God loves us unconditionally. God loves sinners. That’s what the Cross is all about. There’s nothing more to it. Or if there is, it all ultimately reduces to that very simple but profound fact. (See? I’m not against all forms of reductionism!)

And this is an especially important fact to remember when it comes to Church teaching and doctrine as well — namely, that everything the Church teaches, in some sense, reveals something about God’s love for us. This isn’t always obvious, because it’s not always direct (sometimes it is very indirect!).⁵ But if you reflect long enough on any particular teaching — about the Eucharist, about Our Lady, about the Trinity, or some moral discipline or whatever else — what you’ll often find is that a deeper appreciation of God’s infinite love emerges through it, in one way or another. These teachings aren’t arbitrary, you realize. They’re not the result of power struggles, either. They are, properly understood, expressions of Love itself.⁶

And once we understand that, we also see why we have good reason to accept and follow these teachings—and to keep trying to understand them better. If they are expressions of love, and we trust that God loves us, then we can trust that these teachings are for our good, even when we don’t immediately see how (which, as we know, is rarely the case).

One final remark from Fr. McCabe:

“Faith can be, and has to be, expressed in propositions. But it isn’t about these propositions. The propositions themselves have continually to be tested, to make sure they are expressions of faith — and not of something else. That is, expressions of belief in God’s love for us.

The trouble arises because faith, like the human persons who have it, is a communal, social thing. You cannot have faith without the community of believers any more than you can have a human being without human society and human history.

So any expression of faith is also invariably an expression of our loyalty to — our belonging to — this tradition and community. This is not a bad thing. Indeed, it is an absolutely necessary and good thing, for faith belongs to human animals.

The difficulties begin to arise (and it is part of the dangerous process of eroding our faith) when we pay less attention to doctrine as an expression of our faith in the love of God, and concentrate instead on doctrine simply as an expression of our loyalty to fellow Christians, to the Church.

That is why we have to test and criticize our doctrines — to question both what we are making of them, and what the Church is making of them. Are they degenerating into mere expressions of loyalty? Are they really still about God’s love?

This is a kind of doubting — because it is a kind of questioning — and it is an integral part of faith itself.

It is the kind of questioning that is called theology.”

“There is no salvation apart from faith”—that’s a commitment every Christian is familiar with. And what I’m suggesting (probably all that I’m suggesting) is that this theological non-negotiable becomes much more plausible (if not entirely obvious) once we understand that faith is a kind of knowing (or at least trusting) that you are loved by God. What is salvation, after all, if not union with God? And surely, for such union to be possible, there must be a proper alignment of wills. There must be love. And it’s very hard to have that kind of union if one of the parties doesn’t believe they are loved by the other.

1. All quotes from Fr. McCabe are from his article Doubt Is Not Unbelief found in The McCabe Reader.

2. This is a bit simplistic, to be sure. More properly, faith—according to Aquinas and Dei Filius—is a supernatural habit: a willed assent to truths revealed by God. In fact, even my title is a bit sloppy, since faith is a distinct act of assenting, not reducible to either knowledge or opinion. The qualifications could go on forever, but I’ll refrain. For those interested in how all this plays out in relation to human freedom—especially given that faith is affirmed as a grace from God—see, again, Stump’s Wandering in Darkness.

3. The reader should not confuse this post with a response to the problem of evil (a theodicy, if you like), which aims to show that the horrors of this world are not incompatible with the God of love. For my statements on the problem of evil, see my book, this article, and this article.

4. Newman once said a thousand questions don’t amount to a single doubt, whereas Fr. McCabe seems to suggest that so many doubts do not amount to unbelief.

5. And of course, sometimes the teachings are simply trying to help us understand something about God’s nature as love — which, of course, has inevitable implications for God’s eternally enduring love for us.

6. Which God just is, given divine simplicity.