Faith After Deconstruction (Part 1)
Why Presence, Not Propositions, is the Heart of Belief
When I wrote last week about the silence after certainty, I was trying to describe a shift I’ve been experiencing since beginning this work of deconstruction. Faith, for me, no longer has as much to do as it once did with having the “right” answers. It doesn’t necessarily mean assenting to every truth claim required by a particular theology or producing the right words on demand to settle a difficult theological question. I’m not saying that I deny any of the articles of the Catholic faith, or that I think creedal formulations are unimportant. I still gladly profess the Nicene Creed and assent to all the dogmas taught by the Catholic Church, but I do find these “propositional” truths are further down the priority list for me than they once were. Faith, as I have come to know it, looks and feels a lot more like presence: God’s presence with us, and our presence with one another, even in those dark and lonely moments when no answers will do.
That earlier reflection was personal and experiential. This one is going to be a bit more technical. I want to take you beneath the surface and explore the underlying shift in my epistemology: why my notion of faith has changed, and how I now understand what it means to “know” anything at all. This will be the first in a series of essays in which I try to reconstruct a more expansive account of faith, one that honors my Catholic formation while also opening space for what I’m discovering in this season of deconstruction. As always, you don’t have to accept my conclusions, and I welcome conversation and critique, but I do hope this work may be useful to some of you on your own journeys.
To begin, it’s worth sketching—as briefly as possible—the Thomistic account of faith which I was taught. Faith is understood in this system as a kind of knowing, an act or habit of the intellect that consists essentially in giving one’s assent to a body of revealed truths.1 The assent of faith is given, not because I have seen or verified those truth claims for myself, but because I trust the authority of God who has revealed them and the Church which has handed them down to me.2
This account of faith has real strengths. It gave me confidence, for example, that faith and reason belong together, that truth can be known and articulated, and that God’s revelation, as mediated by the Church, is both reasonable and true. But in practice, I discovered that this framework also came with a built-in bias: a strong preference for authority and tradition, with a corresponding suspicion of novelty and synthesis. My implicit epistemology was tilted heavily toward conserving what I had received, not integrating new insights. The propositions I assented to functioned less like guideposts and more like walls, closing off whole avenues by which truth might otherwise have disclosed itself to me. As a result, there were simple, self-evident truths that I simply could not integrate into my body of knowledge, because they seemed to conflict with one or more of the “revealed truths” I had already accepted.
Along my journey of deconstruction thus far, I’ve found myself drawn to other frameworks that have helped me stretch and refine my own epistemology. One of the most helpful recently has been the Canadian cognitive scientist Dr. John Vervaeke. In his series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Vervaeke distinguishes between four different kinds of knowing: propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory. He argues that wisdom comes, not just from finding and assenting to all the right propositions, but from integrating each of these diverse ways of knowing, so that we become more attuned to reality as a whole, less self-deceived, and more capable of living well.3
That framework resonates deeply with my experiences in ministry, especially hospital chaplaincy, where the truths that heal are rarely propositions you could write down on a theology exam. It has also given me language and context to better articulate what I’ve come to believe about faith itself.
Briefly, then, in terms I think Vervaeke would approve of: Faith is first of all a stance, an orientation of the whole person in a trustful turning toward God as the inexhaustible source of truth, goodness, and beauty (what the Thomistic tradition would call fides qua). From this stance flows what that tradition calls fides quae, the propositions or content of faith, which I understand as the sum total of our best attempts as a community of believers to name the One we encounter.4
The content of our faith matters, but it’s not the first or most essential part of faith. Rather, I believe our propositional truth claims about the Divine flow from, and must remain accountable to, what we have learned from epistemically prior forms of knowing, and they must be open to revision (at least in their formulation) on the basis of whether they actually help us attune to reality and live more truthfully.
Contact Without Capture
St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, was moderately optimistic about our capacity to know reality. When we know something, according to the Thomistic system, the “form” of the thing becomes present in our intellect. In a real sense, then, if I have apprehended the form of a chair, a table, or a human being, I truly know that thing as it is in itself. On this basis, I can then deduce whether propositional claims about it are true or false. This kind of knowing—where causes are evident and conclusions follow with necessity—is what St. Thomas (and Aristotle) would call science.
At the opposite end of the spectrum of Thomistic epistemology lies opinion, where the evidence is weak and the intellect gives only a partial or doubtful assent. Faith, as we saw above, stands in between these two. Like opinion, it lacks the evidence that would make its truth claims self-evident to reason, but like science, it produces a firm and unwavering assent, because it is rooted not in human speculation but divine revelation. Faith, then, is a kind of knowing that is both real and certain, even though its truth claims are not evident to us in the way science is.5
At the same time, St. Thomas set a clear limit to human knowing. God, being infinite in essence, is not directly knowable (at least in this life). Whatever we might say about God is true only by analogy.6 Our words and concepts of God can “participate” in truth, but they can never contain or exhaust it. In other words, like a reflection in a mirror, our theological concepts somehow reflect or correspond to the divine reality while falling infinitely short of the Reality itself. Even the most authoritative formulas of faith point beyond themselves to a mystery they can never fully capture.
This is a subtle but crucial insight. The Thomistic doctrine of “analogical predication,” as it is called, safeguards the transcendence of the Divine, while at the same time cultivating in us the intellectual virtue of humility. It reminds us that our knowledge of the Infinite, while real, is always partial. God is greater than we can grasp.
Vervaeke extends this insight from theology to human knowing as a whole. Where St. Thomas drew the boundary at the divine essence, Vervaeke argues that all of reality is inexhaustible, “combinatorially explosive,” and constantly exceeding the categories we try to impose on it.7 Truth, then, is less of a static state than an unfolding disclosure. Our knowledge can be real and trustworthy, but it is never complete. Knowing is, in Vervaeke’s terms, a bit like looking into a kaleidoscope: each twist reveals a new pattern, beautiful and coherent, but never the final reality. However many turns you make, there are always more possibilities waiting to be revealed. In the same way, reality keeps revealing itself in fresh configurations, but no single configuration discloses the whole.
Another analogy might help us here (and make the Thomists happy). When you come to know a friend, you do genuinely know them. You know their appearance, their character, their preferences, their habits. That knowledge is true and reliable, but it never exhausts the mystery of who they are. However well you know them, they can still surprise you. New dimensions of their personality can appear at any moment. You are in genuine contact with the person, but you never capture them fully.
If this is true on the human plane, it is all the more true of God. St. Thomas rightly insists that God can only be spoken of analogically, because the divine essence infinitely exceeds our conceptual grasp. Vervaeke helps us see that this same humility applies to all knowing: the Creator is inexhaustible in himself, and creation—though finite—is inexhaustible from the perspective of our human capacity for knowledge. However much we discover, there is always more to see. Every truth we grasp points beyond itself to the deeper mystery it cannot contain. Our propositions always disclose something real, but never the whole.
I believe that faith is the epistemic stance most appropriate to this condition. It is to inhabit this gap without anxiety, trusting that partial knowledge is still genuine contact, even if it never captures the whole, and that reality will go on revealing itself as we remain open to it. Far from sliding into relativism, this stance allows us to integrate every form of knowing as a path of ongoing attunement to the Real.
The Four Knowings
As we have seen, Vervaeke identifies four primary forms of human knowing: participatory, perspectival, procedural, and propositional. Each represents a different way reality discloses itself to us. None is sufficient on its own, but together, they offer a fuller picture of reality.
Propositional knowing is knowing that something is the case. It’s the kind of knowledge expressed in statements: water boils at 100°C; the square root of nine is three; Jesus of Nazareth was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Propositional knowing deals with facts, concepts, and claims that can be judged true or false.
Procedural knowing is knowing how. It’s embodied skill, the know-how of riding a bike, cooking a meal, or celebrating the liturgy. You don’t really possess procedural knowledge unless you can perform it.
Perspectival knowing is knowing what it’s like to inhabit a situation. It’s the awareness that comes from being located in a context, catching the “feel” of a moment, seeing what matters here and now. A seasoned nurse entering a hospital room knows instantly, before a word is spoken, whether the patient is stable or in distress. That intuitive grasp of salience is perspectival knowing.
Participatory knowing is the deepest. It’s the knowledge that comes through being in relationship and being shaped by it. You don’t just know about your family or your community; you belong to them, and that belonging transforms who you are. This is knowing by communion, by participation, by becoming.
What I find compelling about Vervaeke’s epistemology is that it resists reducing knowledge to one dimension. Propositions matter, but they are downstream. They rest on and are guided by deeper levels of knowing that keep them anchored in reality. Participation grounds perspective; perspective shapes practice; practice gives rise to propositions. When all four levels are integrated, our knowledge is more complete, less prone to self-deception, more likely to lead to human flourishing.
Now, if faith is the epistemic stance appropriate to an inexhaustible reality, then we can be certain it does not come into play only at the level of propositional knowing. Rather, faith ought to inform all the ways we come into contact with the Real. Let’s briefly sketch how faith might affect each of our four ways of knowing.
First, at the level of participatory knowing, faith names the disposition of trustful belonging we have simply by virtue of being part of reality. Before we ever form propositions, we are already participants in something greater than ourselves, woven into a web of relationships with nature, culture, and one another. Think of being born into a family, delighting in the love of your parents, finding your place in a community, or being welcomed by a circle of friends. These moments shape our sense of belonging and call forth a basic trust that reality can be lived with. Faith begins here with the recognition that my life is not self-contained, but grounded in something larger that both sustains and calls me out of my self.
Faith at the level of perspectival knowing grows out of this fundamental sense of belonging and shapes how we see reality. To use Vervaekean terms, the stance of faith tunes our salience landscape, such that we notice meaning and value where others might see only randomness or futility.8 A parent discovers hope in a child’s first wobbly step; a grieving friend perceives the endurance of love even amid the pain of loss; a pilgrim looks out at the vast world ahead and sees it charged with significance.
At this level, faith is still less about what we know than how we notice and interpret what is before us. A Christian and a Buddhist may hold very different doctrinal beliefs about what happens after death, but the perspective of faith will disclose similar truths to both: that life has value, that death is not the end, that love and meaning endure. Similarly, a non-theist who walks through grief with trust in the enduring bonds of love, or who perceives wonder and significance in the natural world, is also exercising perspectival faith. The content of their beliefs may differ widely, but the orientation of attention—the ability to perceive meaning and value—is the same.
Faith at the level of procedural knowing takes shape in practice. It has to do with the skills of living out faith in daily life: the rhythms, rituals, and habits that embody a stance of trust. Just as one learns to play an instrument by practicing scales, we learn to live by faith through repeated action. For the Christian, this might mean prayer, forgiveness, service, or liturgical worship. For the Buddhist, it could be meditation or compassion practices. For a non-theist, it may show itself in commitments to honesty, justice, or care for loved ones, patterns of living that embody one’s trust in meaning, value, and connection.
Propositional knowing is where lived, embodied trust finally crystallizes into words. Doctrines, creeds, and philosophical systems give language to what participatory, perspectival, and procedural faith have already disclosed. For Christians, this means professing the Creed; for Buddhists, the Four Noble Truths; for Muslims, the Shahada; for humanists or non-theists, it could be commitments like human rights, scientific principles, or ethical manifestos. These are propositional frameworks that summarize and transmit a vision of what is true and worth living for.
What matters here is not that the content is identical across traditions, but that the act of articulation serves a similar function: giving voice to what has already been lived and perceived. Propositions stabilize and safeguard faith by making it communicable and accountable, yet they are never the origin point of faith. They are its fruit, the attempt to name in words the reality one has already trusted, seen, and practiced.
Assent and the Authority of the Real
If propositions are not the first word of faith, but the last, then the way we understand assent has to change as well. Remember, in Thomistic terms, the act of faith is essentially the intellect giving firm assent to revealed truths on the authority of God. That definition is not wrong, but it can give the impression that faith begins and ends with the propositions themselves. Seen through the lens of the four knowings, however, assent is something deeper than intellectual agreement with a set of claims. It is the seal placed on an entire process of belonging, perceiving, and practicing that has already drawn us into contact with reality.
To say “I believe” is not just to check the box on a doctrinal formula, but to confess in words what I have already experienced and begun to live. This does not weaken the firmness of assent. On the contrary, it helps explain why the assent of faith can be so firm, even without direct evidence. As St. Thomas himself wisely observed, the motive for our assent lies not so much in the adequacy of our formulas as in the reliability of the One who discloses himself through them. Assent, then, is less about holding those propositions firmly in place than about being held in place by the truths they express.
When propositions are treated as the starting point of faith, assent tends to become brittle. The believer is asked to accept a list of claims up front and guard them at all costs. This posture can provide a sense of clarity and security, but it often leaves little room for growth. When new experiences or insights arise that don’t seem to fit, they are dismissed or repressed for fear of threatening the system. The risk here is a kind of rigidity: a faith that is strong in appearance but fragile in practice, because it rests on the perfection of our propositions rather than the inexhaustibility of the One they point to.
But when propositions are seen as the fruit of prior participation, perception, and practice, our assent takes on a different quality. The act of faith no longer has to be a desperate clinging to particular formulas. It can relax into a confident trust in the Reality already disclosed prior to those formulas, as well as through them. In fact, this stance of faith recognizes that whatever propositional truth claims we believe about the Divine remain accountable to what we have learned from those prior forms of knowing.
None of this means propositions are dispensable. Assent still involves real truth claims about God and the world. This account, however, situates those claims within a larger process of belonging, perceiving, and practicing, rather than isolating them as the starting point of faith. Doctrines still matter deeply, but they are held with due humility, as we remember they point beyond themselves to the mystery they cannot exhaust. They must also remain open to development and revision, not because the reality they point to changes, but because our finite grasp of it can always be refined.
Faith as Presence
Earlier I described faith, in terms Vervaeke might approve, as first and foremost a stance—the trustful turning of the whole person toward God as the inexhaustible source of truth, goodness, and beauty—from which flow our best communal attempts to articulate that reality in words. What I have been sketching throughout the remainder of this essay is how such a stance functions in practice. I have argued that faith is not primarily a matter of assent to propositions, but a way of inhabiting reality, of being present to God, to others, and to the world in a posture that both trusts and attends to the Real.
Thus, at last, we see what it means to say that presence is at the very heart of faith. “Presence,” for me, is more than attentiveness or compassion in the ordinary sense. It is the way the stance of faith is embodied and expressed in everyday life. Presence names the integration of faith at every level—belonging, perception, practice, and confession—all grounded in a trustful orientation toward the inexhaustible Real.
This shift in understanding has implications for every aspect of the Christian life, shaping not only what we profess but also how we pray, how we discern, and how we love. Prayer becomes presence before God with my whole self, an act of entrusting myself to the Source of truth, goodness, and beauty. Discernment is reframed as simply being with God in the midst of choices. I do not have to try to make the perfect decision; I just have to remain open to reality as it continues to disclose itself. Likewise, love is presence with another person in a posture of trust and fidelity, receiving them as an inexhaustible mystery, and trusting that however much I know of them, there will always be more to discover.
Conclusion
In this essay, I have outlined a more expansive account of faith than the one I was taught: not certainty secured by propositions, but a stance of trust that pervades every level of human knowing. Faith begins with our participation in the inexhaustible Real, which then shapes our perception, trains our practices, and finally finds voice in the words we profess. Presence is faith’s truest expression: the way we inhabit reality with God, with others, and with the world in a posture of trust and openness. Doctrines still matter, but they are not the foundation so much as the fruit. They must remain accountable to the lived reality of faith, and they must be held with humility, always remembering that they point beyond themselves to a mystery they cannot exhaust.
That raises an important question, however. If our propositions are secondary, how do we know when they are true? What criteria can guide us as we make, test, and even revise our claims about God, about morality, about the shape of the Christian life?
These are the questions I will take up in the next essay in this series, where I will propose twelve “guardrails” for discernment: practical criteria for holding our truth claims accountable to the reality disclosed by faith across the four ways of knowing.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Does this way of framing faith resonate with your own experience? Where do you find yourself resisting it? What do you find fruitful? Please let me know in the comments. Your reflections and feedback will help me sharpen the next stage of this project.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 1, a. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Bros., 1947).
ST, II-II, q. 2, a. 2.
John Vervaeke, “Ep. 1 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis – Introduction,” YouTube video, Jan 22, 2019.
See Augustine, De Trinitate, XIII, 2, 5.
ST, II-II, q. 4, a. 1.
ST, I, q. 13, a. 5-6.
John Vervaeke, “Ep. 35 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - The Symbol, Sacredness, and the Sacred,” YouTube video, Sep 13, 2019.
John Vervaeke, “Ep. 10 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Consciousness,” YouTube video, Mar 22, 2019.