In this video, I correct the modern misunderstanding of faith as based on subjective experience. The traditional (and far better) notion of faith is based on God's external revelation. The act of faith then is an act of the intellect. You are thinking or believing that something is true.
Faith Is An Act Of The Intellect, Not Feelings
This is a very important topic. So many people today have the wrong idea about what faith is.
If you ask most people what their faith is based on, they will say something like it is based on “their heart” or a strong feeling or sentiment.
But the problem is that a lot of people have strong feelings and sentiments about their religion. That doesn’t make them true.
Feeling is not knowledge. Emotions are not a reliable indicator of truth
Pope St. Pius X wrote against this idea in his “Oath Against Modernism”
“I hold most certainly and profess sincerely that faith is not a blind religious feeling bursting forth from the recesses of the subconscious, unformed morally under the pressure of the heart and the impulse of a will, but the true assent of the intellect to the truth received extrinsically, whereby we believe that what has been said, attested, and revealed by the personal God, our Creator and Lord, to be true on account of the authority of God the highest truth.”
The traditional understanding of faith is not an act of emotions, nor is it based on any internal experience.
