Let us today, contemplate on some Attributes of Faith - The Complementarity of Faith and Reason: It is not sufficient to be intelligent to be a person of faith, yet intelligence can enhance faith in a believer, thereby making it a more human act and enhancing its commitment towards good acts. That is why we spend a lot of time studying the divine sciences. What is it that we study in our faith journey? What we study is called the object of faith. Our faith must be intelligible. 

The material object of faith is the whole revealed truth in Scripture. The principal material object is God revealing himself in Jesus Christ. It consists of the truths of divine faith, that is, those truths contained formally in the public sources of Revelation. The secondary material object is everything else which pertains to faith by reason of the principal object. The formal object of faith is the divine truth in man, that is, the credibility of God. 

Just as God’s grace builds on human nature, faith presupposes reason. Faith inhabits the intellect of man who believes; whatever he says or does portrays the faith in the intellect. Believers are also thinkers; in believing they think and in thinking, they believe. If faith does no thinking, it is nothing. According to St. Anselm, the task of reason is not to pass judgment on the content of faith, but rather to find meaning, to embrace what faith proposes, to discover explanations which might allow everyone to come to a certain understanding of the content of faith. The intellect assents to revealed truth by the command of the will and by the grace of God. Thus, orthodoxy and orthopraxis must go together. Faith would be insufficient for salvation, if it were defined merely in terms of correct knowledge about God. Faith without works that spring from it is dead (cfr. Jas 2:14). Jesus equally says that “It is not anyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ who will enter the kingdom of Heaven, but the person who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Matt. 7:21). The truth of the Bible can only be authenticated by virtuous living, and this entails consistency between knowledge and action. The truthfulness of the Gospel is proven, therefore, by holiness of life, by service of one’s neighbors, and concern for justice, and by our own being a prayerful, forgiving and loving community.

The possession of knowledge in this regard does not suffice. For instance, the lawyer who provoked Jesus to narrate the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk. 10:25 ff) knew the laws but did not apply them or he applied them in his own way. Then Jesus ended by telling him to go and do the same as had done the Good Samaritan. St. Augustine teaches that if there is no assent there is no faith, for without assent one does not really believe. Faith is nothing if it is not reflected upon. The reward of this reflection is greater light, the light of grace which helps the mind to see beyond the sensible world. It is intrinsic to faith that a believer desires to know better the One in whom he has put his faith, and to understand better what he has revealed; a more penetrating knowledge will in turn call forth a greater faith. Thus, human reason is not negated or degraded by the act of faith but achieves its greatest intellectual heights in the humility with which it acknowledges and accepts God’s definite greatness. It is in this light that Saint Pope John Paul II affirms in Fides et Ratio n. 1 that faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of the truth.