There are many ways of believing in God, many ways of believing in Jesus Christ. Now, Christ’s gift to mankind, on condition of faith, is eternal life. What is this about, and how can we believe in God and in Jesus Christ to obtain this promise?

1 Eternal life through faith in the name of the Son of God

1.1 What eternal life is: the knowledge of God

In what is perhaps the most important prayer relationship of Jesus Christ to his Father, we have a definition of the very principle of eternal life:

1 When Jesus had said this, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come. Give glory to your Son, so that your Son may give glory to you; 2 because you gave him authority over all flesh, so that he might give eternal life to everyone you gave him. 3 And eternal life is that they may have knowledge of you, the only true God, and of him whom you have sent, Jesus Christ.

Gospel according to John, Chapter 17, verses 1 to 3

Above and beyond the Christian hope of the resurrection of the body to an incorruptible and blessed life, Christ places the very principle of eternal life in the knowledge of God. It was this knowledge that Adam and Eve rejected in Eden, by disobeying the only commandment given to them, by which they had to make a conscious and voluntary choice to affirm their desire to remain in that knowledge. And it was the deprivation of the perpetual life of the body that was the principle of their punishment, when they were driven from the garden, thus being deprived of access to the “tree of life”, lest “they live forever” (Genesis 3:22). Eternal life begins, then, in the mind of man, when he accepts to receive the knowledge that God gives of himself, in other words when he accepts to receive God’s revelation, which, as Karl Barth clearly saw (Dogmatics II), is the very principle of faith (see What is faith? Believing in God’s revelation).

1.2 Eternal life is obtained through faith, receptivity to God’s revelation

Christ says no different in the Gospel according to John, where he makes faith in God the Father and in himself the very principle of eternal life, and therefore of the knowledge of God; for example, when he addresses Nicodemus to teach him about the “new birth” :

13 No one has ascended into heaven but he who came down from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven. 14 And as Moses lifted up the snake in the waste land, so the Son of man must be lifted up, 15 so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. 16 For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

Gospel according to John, Chapter 3, verses 13 to 16

If we put together the teachings of the two preceding texts, we can conclude that through faith we enter into the knowledge of God, which is the principle of eternal life. So the same principles have been at work since the beginning of the world: it is first of all through his spirit that man can live eternally, and this eternal life of the spirit lies in the knowledge of God, whose beginning and principle is faith, that is to say the reception of the revelation that God gives of himself. The perpetual life of the body, offered in Eden as an extension of natural life and offered in Jesus Christ as a supernatural hope beyond natural death, is the bodily expression of eternal life.

2 Different ways of believing

2.1 Believing: receiving and keeping the word of God

What Christ proclaims through his teaching is “the word of God”, that is, teaching that comes from God himself. In the continuation of the text already quoted, Jesus confesses to his Father that his disciples, no doubt the eleven apostles here (twelve minus Judas), received this teaching and kept it:

6 I made your name known to the men you gave me from the middle of the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me; and they kept your word. 7 Now they know that everything you gave me came from you. 8 For I gave them the words you gave me; and they received them, and they really knew that I came out of you, and they believed that you sent me.

Gospel according to John, Chapter 17, verses 6 to 8

The vocabulary used echoes the interpretation of the famous “parable of the sower”, which details the different possible ways of reacting to hearing the seed that is this word of God, and whose most explicit version is found in the Gospel according to Luke :

4 When a great crowd had gathered and people had come to him from various towns, he spoke this parable: 5 “A sower went out to sow his seed. As he was sowing, some of the seed fell by the wayside, and was trodden under foot, and the birds of the air ate it. 6 Some of it fell on rock, and when it had sprung up it withered away, because it had no moisture. 7 Some of it fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. 8 Some of it fell on good soil, and when it had sprung up it gave fruit a hundredfold. When Jesus had said these things, he said with a loud voice, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Gospel according to Luke, Chapter 8, verses 4 to 8

The sower’s seed falls in four possible places, each different from the other, and thus undergoes four different fates:

1. Some falls “by the wayside” and is destroyed, trampled underfoot and eaten by the birds
2. Some falls “on the rock” and rises immediately but dries out due to lack of moisture
3. Some falls “among the thorns” and cannot survive, suffocated
4. Some falls into good soil, and grows and bears fruit abundantly.

2.2 True faith is spiritual

Of these four different situations, only the last one corresponds to what the seed is intended to do: produce an abundant and fruitful life; by contrast, it ends up dying in the other three cases. Jesus’ own explanation of this parable is given in response to a request from his disciples, and contains an explicit description of different ways of receiving and believing in God’s word:

11 This is what the parable means: The seed is the word of God. 12 Those who hear are by the wayside; then the devil comes and takes the word from their hearts, lest they believe and be saved. 13 Those who are on the rock are those who, when they get the word, are glad to take it; but they have no roots; they have faith for a time, but give way in time of temptation. 14 Those who have come down among the thorns are those who, hearing the word, go away and let it be choked by cares and wealth and the pleasures of life, and they do not get any fruit which comes to maturity. 15 But those who have fallen into the good soil are those who, having heard the word with an honest and good heart, keep it and bear fruit with perseverance.

Gospel according to Luke, Chapter 8, verses 11 to 15

So the parable means that when people hear the word of God, they can react in different ways:

1. After hearing it, some forget it, the devil taking it away from their hearts: they do not believe and do not attain salvation
2. After hearing it, some receive it with joy, but only believe for a short time and give up in the face of the trial
3. After hearing it, some do not let it bear fruit, and it suffocates in the midst of their preoccupations
4. After hearing it, some receive it honestly, retain it and persevere in it fruitfully.

Only the last attitude characterises what Christ says of his apostles in John 17:6-8: receive the word of God and hold on to it (keep it). Those who received the word “with joy” had an emotional reaction, but had no “root in themselves”, and those who let it suffocate did not persevere until it bore the expected fruit. In contrast, those who receive it “with an honest and good heart” do not react merely psychologically or intellectually, but with their heart, the seat of motivation and spirituality (rather than emotions and feelings) in Scripture. This is how we truly believe in the word of God, when we receive it in a spiritual way, i.e. from the depths of our being, as what it truly is: the revelation of God. Such a reaction does not exclude the psychology of man, but is rooted in his spirit, the dimension of his being that is capable of knowing God and that persists beyond death. It is in this cognitive register that the parallel passage in Matthew’s Gospel is expressed:

He who receives the seed in the good soil is the one who hears the word and understands it; he bears fruit, and one grain yields a hundred, another sixty, another thirty.

Gospel according to Matthew, Chapter 13, verse 23

3 Believing for a time or believing for good

3.1 Knowledge of God comes from persevering faith

The second and fourth postures of man in listening to the word of God, evoked in the parable of the sower, are thus explicitly placed in the field of cognition: believing and understanding. There is in fact no biblical antithesis between ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’, but on the contrary a close interpenetration of the two, which is also the classic philosophical approach to the ‘theory of knowledge’ (or epistemology). Indeed, the introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Epistemology considers that the classic definition of knowledge is the concept of a ‘true and justified belief’. Now, if the person who gives up ‘believes for a time only’, then the person who perseveres believes for good, and his reaction is not simply emotional: it is on this condition that we can truly understand Christ’s teaching, and enter, in our view, into the knowledge of God, which is eternal life. This is not a purely formal knowledge, of the (merely) ‘religious’, ‘catechetical’ or ‘theological’ type, but a knowledge of who God is, and what God’s will is for man, from which all these other forms of knowledge derive. This knowledge, rooted in the heart of the man whom Scripture calls converted, proceeds from the decision to believe, and is therefore founded in the human will, and therefore in reason: it does not remain sterile, but on the contrary engenders a transformation of mentality and life, which the New Testament calls sanctification.

3.2 Saints and professants

We must therefore distinguish, among Christians, between professors, i.e. those who “profess” to believe in Christ, and saints, i.e. those who not only profess to believe in Christ, but believe in such a way as to persevere fruitfully, their religious life being above all spiritual, stemming from a knowledge of God rooted in the heart, and not just in the emotions or the intellect. In fact, when it discusses the various ways of believing, Scripture deals with deep, hidden spiritual reality, whereas on the experiential level, the phenomenological level, we know only very diverse manifestations of the profession of the Christian faith. Now, it is not possible to identify the manifestation of a belief with the spiritual reality of faith in the New Testament: on the one hand, as we have seen, the New Testament warns us that belief can be superficial or artificial, and on the other, we do not have access to a reading of the condition of the human beings we encounter. This also means that it is not possible to judge absolutely the spiritual condition of the Christians with whom we come into contact, particularly in the context of the Church. But this does not rule out forming an opinion, which proceeds from a healthy discernment, as we are warned to do, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount, which articulates the two aspects of the question:

1 Judge not, that ye be not judged. 2 For you will be judged by the judgment you judge, and measured by the measure you measure. 3 Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye and not the beam in your own? 4 Or how can you say to your brother: Let me take a speck out of your eye, you who have a beam in your own? 5 Hypocrite, first take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see how to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. […]

15 Beware of false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. 16 You will be able to recognise them by their fruit. Do you get grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles? 17 Every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree may not give bad fruit, and a bad tree may not give good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 So by their fruit you will be able to recognise them.

Gospel according to Matthew, Chapter 7, verses 1 to 5 and 15 to 20

So it is by faith that we come to know God, and it is a spiritual faith, anchored in the heart of our being, that perseveres to obtain eternal life. This reality is invisible in itself, but it produces a moral fruit that makes it possible to discern it.