Faith Is a Verb
When people hear the word “faith,” they often imagine something purely internal: a belief in God, a set of doctrines accepted, or a personal decision made once and for all. But faith, in the Christian sense, is far more than this. Faith is not only something you think or feel. Faith is something you do. Faith is a verb.
The Catholic tradition has always insisted that faith is living and dynamic, not static. The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it succinctly: “Faith is a personal act—the free response of the human person to the initiative of God who reveals himself” (CCC 166). Notice the emphasis on response. God acts first in grace, but faith is our living answer, our entrustment, our decision to say yes with our whole lives.
This is why Scripture ties faith so closely to action. James famously warns, “Faith without works is dead” (James 2:26). His point is not that we add works to faith in order to earn salvation, but that true faith is never idle. It is alive, and like all living things, it bears fruit. St. Paul makes the same point from another angle when he says, “the only thing that counts is faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6).
Protestant brothers and sisters often emphasize salvation by grace through faith alone. They rightly fear any suggestion that we could “earn” heaven by piling up good deeds. Martin Luther once said, “We are saved by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone.” Even here, there is recognition that genuine faith is active. Where Catholics and Protestants sometimes differ is in how they describe this relationship, but both agree that empty belief without transformation is not the faith Scripture speaks of.
Catholic theology stresses that faith is not merely intellectual assent but trust expressed in action. St. Thomas Aquinas described faith as “an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace” (Summa Theologiae II-II, q.2, a.9). In other words, faith engages the whole person: the mind, the will, and the heart. It is not a one-time decision but a continual entrusting of ourselves to God’s grace.
Think of Kierkegaard’s famous phrase, the “leap of faith.” For him, faith was not about clinging to certainty but about making an existential choice, a leap into trust of the God who calls us. That leap is itself an action. It is the bridge between belief and obedience, between words and life.
St. Augustine, reflecting on faith and works, said it this way: “He who created you without you will not justify you without you.” God’s grace comes first, always, but we are called to cooperate with it. Faith is the first movement of that cooperation. It is not passive, like sitting back and watching the story unfold. It is active, like stepping onto the path, walking, stumbling, and rising again with God’s help.
This is why Catholicism views salvation not as a one-time event but as a journey. St. Paul exhorts believers to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you” (Philippians 2:12–13). Salvation is God’s work, but it unfolds in our lives over time, as we respond to grace again and again. If we die still unfinished, God’s love purifies us in what the Church calls purgatory, completing the transformation of faith into perfect love.
So when I say “faith is a verb,” I mean this: faith is not faith plus works. Faith itself is the work of entrusting your life to God. It is stepping out onto the bridge, not just saying the bridge looks strong. It is the leap into God’s arms, not just the thought that He might catch you. It is the ongoing surrender of the heart, the daily decision to love, the slow transformation of a life that becomes more and more Christlike.
As St. John Henry Newman once wrote, “Faith is not a mere conviction of the truth of the Sacred Scriptures… but it is a grace, a spiritual faculty or principle, enabling us to make an act.” Faith is not something you simply possess; it is something you enact, again and again, in trust, obedience, and love.
In the end, salvation is all grace. Nothing we do could ever earn it. But grace is never idle. It calls us, it moves us, it transforms us. Our response to that grace—our faith—is not merely a thought in the mind but the action of the whole person.
Faith is a verb.
