Catholic Faith Foundations. David Werning

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      God Revealed

      In his 1999 letter to artists, Saint John Paul II wrote, “Works of art speak of their authors.” One might say the same about God and his work of art: creation. All one has to do is look at the world and the people in it, and one can sense that everything proclaims, “I am wonderfully made” (Ps 139:14).

      The Church has taught consistently for more than 2,000 years that God reveals himself through the book of nature, including human beings. Moreover, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that God’s revelation is communicated gradually. God prepares mankind “to welcome by stages the supernatural Revelation that is to culminate in the person and mission of the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ” (CCC 53). In order to appreciate God’s full revelation in Jesus, one needs to appreciate the stages of revelation that lead to him. The stages can be distinguished through the advents of creation, human beings, and the Jewish people.

      Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

      Glory be to God for dappled things –

      For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

      Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

      Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

      All things counter, original, spare, strange;

      Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

      He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

      Praise him.

       Revelation through Creation

      Saint Paul, in the Letter to the Romans, speaks of the first stage of revelation to those who try to suppress the truth of God’s existence: “For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made” (1:19–20).

      The argument has raged ever since. While the Church states matter-of-factly that by “natural reason man can know God with certainty, on the basis of his works” (CCC 50), self-described atheists posit God’s nonexistence by appealing to the natural order as well. One of the more popular explanations is the speculation that matter has always existed, and at one point, beyond all probability, some of the matter combined in such a way that made life possible. Still, the question of how matter came into existence remains.

      Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict XVI) tried to bring the sides together with a philosophical approach that could be accepted by both believer and non-believer. The argument goes like this: everything that exists ipso facto participates in being. Human beings know that they are not the cause of their own being. They also know that many things made by human hands were first thought and then made out of existing matter. But where did the matter come from? Cardinal Ratzinger said that thought precedes matter. Therefore, some being must have thought matter into existence. Christians (among others) call that being God.¹

      Wisdom 13:1–9

      Foolish by nature were all who were in ignorance of God,

      and who from the good things seen did not succeed in

      knowing the one who is,

      and from studying the works did not discern the artisan;

      Instead either fire, or wind, or the swift air,

      or the circuit of the stars, or the mighty water,

      or the luminaries of heaven, the governors of the

      world, they considered gods.

      Now if out of joy in their beauty they thought them gods,

      let them know how far more excellent is the Lord than these;

      for the original source of beauty fashioned them.

      Or if they were struck by their might and energy,

      let them realize from these things how much more powerful

      is the one who made them.

      For from the greatness and the beauty of created things

      their original author, by analogy, is seen.

      But yet, for these the blame is less;

      For they have gone astray perhaps,

      though they seek God and wish to find him.

      For they search busily among his works,

      but are distracted by what they see, because the things seen