Living at a Higher Level

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Intro to Faith, Hope and Love

Most people think that, as a Christian, if we’re a good enough person then when we die God will let us live in heaven, but we stay just at the level that we’re at now. We remain as we are now, thinking and acting in a human way, it’s just that we won’t have all the crap that goes with it in heaven. Your crap will be cleaned up and my crap will be cleaned up and we’ll be able to live as crap-free humans forever. But we’re just humans.

Almost no one realizes that God is trying to bring us to a totally new level. We call that divinization: where we share in God’s being and activity.

        Now, for this to happen God has to give us an entirely new way of being and acting and it's two-fold. He puts Himself in us and He gives us gifts. He gives us Himself and a new capacity. That capacity comes to us through the theological virtues: Faith, hope, and love.

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A brief description of each theological virtue:

        Faith means belief in what God has revealed to us through Scripture, Tradition and the teaching of the Church. Faith recognizes that God has given us information we couldn’t know on our own (i.e., revelation), and we accept that information as being true. So, by faith we can know things that God knows because he has given us both the information and the capacity to know it.

        Hope is striving for union with the Trinity. With this virtue, we desire God as our ultimate happiness, and we can pursue union with Him before all else.

Hope gives us the capacity to desire what God desires.

        Charity is a share in God’s love, and so makes us capable of loving both God and neighbor selflessly and sacrificially, for their own sake. Charity gives us the capacity to love the way God loves.

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The goal of life is Transforming union with God; Heaven; Divinization

The Bible and the Catechism in paragraph 1023 say that in Heaven we will be like God for ever.

1 John 3:1-2, “Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us, by letting us be called God’s children; and that is what we are…but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is, that when it is revealed we shall be like him…”

We do not go to heaven as mere humans. We go as something more, infinitely more.

Yes, we will go with a human nature but a human nature that has been divinized made like God.

Every person in the state of grace is a potential god or goddess. As C.S. Lewis writes in the Weight of Glory: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption, the kind of thing you meet only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal (passing) But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit— immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

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With the Gifts of Faith, Hope and Love God raises us up to share in his being and activity, so that we can really be sons and daughters of God and we can do what God does. 

How does that happen?

God is infinitely above us, infinitely greater, so how can we get high enough to reach Him and share in His activity?

The answer is that God has to raise us above our natural potential. He elevates us to more than we could naturally be on our own.

Think of a little girl who wants to hug her mother but she is too small to reach up to her mother’s height. If she and her mom are going to embrace, the mom will have to stoop down and pick her up. 

So too, we want to reach God, to embrace him. We want to make God the goal of our knowing and loving but we can’t reach him. So God bends down, lifts us up, that we may then embrace Him.

Likewise, once God raises us to His level we can share in His activity.

Think of a little boy who wants to drive his dad’s car. Obviously he can’t. Only grown-ups can drive cars. But if the dad places his son on his lap and steers the car by sandwiching the little boy’s hands between the steering wheel and his own hands, then it works. The kid can now do what he has no business doing because his father raised his son up to share in his activity.

In both these examples the children are helped by their parents to do something they couldn’t naturally do on their own.

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This transfiguration of our nature and activity requires a supernatural elevation of our being.

The relationship of parent to child must be established between God and humans for the theological virtues to happen.

God became man so that we could be raised to the level of God: share in His being and activity. We become divinized.

This is a remarkable miracle, and most Christians don’t even know it. If you are not totally blown away by this truth then you either don’t get it or take it for granted.

God’s plan is that we are divinized, transfigured and adopted by Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

At Baptism we received sanctifying grace, a share in the life of God Himself, which transforms our being, our relationship with God and our capacity for action by equipping us with the theological virtues. These gifts enable us to exist differently, and have the capacity to act differently, not as children of this world, but as children of God.