Yves Congar's vision of faith

How is Christian faith possible in an increasingly secularised world? This is the questionthat troubled the French Dominican Yves Congar from his early years as a theologian and continued to do so throughout his life. The Dominican would admit that there exists today a situation in which the positive affirmations of faith concerning a supernatural order, posited and revealed by God's initiative, risk sinking into insignificance. In view of such a reality concerning a world that has hardly any religion and where many find themselves more and more within a frame of life where there is no religious connotation, Congar demonstrates how to acquire an ardent «desire» to respond to this dilemma tactfully. He manifests an intellectual honesty and curiosity as to why the origin and truth of the Christian faith have been taken for granted and why everything seems to be put into question. Adopting a historical method that incorporates the philosophical, theological and cultural movements of his time, Congar gradually develops a vision of faith that encompasses a thorough reflection on the totality of revelation, that is on its fact and content insofar as it concerns humanity. This research turns its attention to the need to understand the actual situation characterised by a transition from a unitary culture of the medieval Catholic world to a Church in a secu­larised world; it shows that faith is still relevant in the modern world by relating it to culture and proposes faith as the principle of doing theology and as the raison d'être of one's life in terms of a relationship which is oriented towards the Truth. Christian faith, Congar holds, not only matters in a secularised world, but it actually connects the life of God and humanity in history together.