I have been reading the stylish and thought-provoking sermons of St John Henry Newman. They start with the Advent Scripture’s exhortation to watch, as in Jesus’s words in Mark’s Gospel: “Watch and pray, for you do not know the hour”, or St Paul’s admonition that it is high time to wake from sleep, to keep vigil.
Newman says that the attitude of watching for Christ characterises the true Christian even more than believing, loving or obeying. This is surprising until one hears more, and realises that for Newman watching is a kind of active, Christ-centred dynamic of a faith which is real. Elsewhere, Newman describes distinctive degrees of assent to faith, and by urging on us the need to watch, he is describing in another way the difference between notional assent, which knows something with the intellect and consents to the truth of the proposition, and real assent, in which one’s whole life is to be changed by living according to the truth expressed in the proposition.
