The "Seamless Garment" of Faith

A dear friend once asked me, "can you believe in God and simultaneously deny him?" After much thought, the answer I gave her literally changed the course of my life, as I realized in that moment how hypocritically I had been living. And as I read this homily, written by Fr. Anselm Ramelow, O.P., I was taken back to that moment when I knew that I could no longer believe in God in bits and pieces--I had to accept Him as a whole, or not at all:

(excerpts from "Faith is Necessary for Salvation")

...Faith [in God] is necessary for our healing as well, for our salvation. Without faith, nobody can be saved...

This is described wonderfully [in] the letter to the Hebrews, in the 11^th chapter. There it [says]: without faith it is impossible to please him [God], for anyone who approaches God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. So what we need is at least an implicit faith in God as our redeemer, and the readiness to accept everything he is going to reveal to us...

Faith is an attitude of trust, a trust that is ready to embrace all and everything that the heavenly Father is going to reveal. The patriarchs of the Old Testament had this trust. In our age, however, we sadly see that even those, to whom all of this has now been revealed, are not ready to embrace God’s revelation. Even those who claim to be Christians often claim the right to pick and choose among those things that God has revealed...

I think we need to be very clear that this is not a path that leads us to heaven. Without faith nobody can be saved. But a faith that willfully excludes something that God puts before us to be believed cannot be called faith...

We [know] and yet we do not accept. But that cannot be supernatural faith; it is at the most human credulity. Faith is a grace that cannot be had on our own terms, but only on God’s terms, and that is: as a whole or not at all. Everything else is not faith, but mere human opinion, our own subjective choice, picking and choosing according to our taste...

God’s revelation and all that is taught by the Church in matters of faith and morals, is one seamless garment. Everything hangs together, and you cannot have one without the other...

We can be at peace in knowing that God entrusted this faith to the Church as a whole. She in the meanwhile guards it, keeping it in her profession of faith, even where we do not grasp the whole...

We believe because of God’s authority who witnesses to the truth. He is the one in whom we believe, as well as the one whom we believe. We believe in a God whose witness is truthful, because he reveals to us nothing else but what he himself knows to be true.