God as First Truth, the Will's Good and Faith's Cause: The Theology of Faith and Newman'sUniversity Sermons

Abstract

In the theology of faith, the nature of faith as a human cognitional state is sometimes treated as a foundational topic, to be analysed prior to theological claims about the God who in fact elicits this faith. The article suggests why this is an inadequate account of the act of belief, likely to lead to distortions in the content of belief, and then uses the example of Newman's argument with Lockean notions of faith to propose a renewal of the theology of faith in attention to divine agency.