The revival tradition has placed great emphasis on faith becoming personal: not merely something one is born into, but something one actually lives by. Catholic theology, at the same time, places the emphasis on grace as God’s gift in the sacraments. Must these perspectives stand in opposition to each other—or can they illuminate different aspects of the same Christian life?
What Does “Breakthrough” Actually Mean?
In many low-church Christian settings, it has been common to distinguish between the “saved” and the “unsaved”—not merely as theoretical categories, but as descriptions of a concrete, personal relationship. Many people in such environments can point to a particular moment in their lives when they “were saved”: a conscious, experiential moment in which they themselves said yes, often accompanied by a feeling of relief or liberation, sometimes even a date they remember.
What these traditions share is not necessarily a dramatic or datable moment of conversion. Hauge, Rosenius, and Hallesby placed the emphasis differently. But in different ways they all insisted that Christian faith must become personal—that the individual must personally come to faith rather than merely belong to a Christian environment.
Faith Must Become My Own
It is easy to dismiss this as mere theology of feeling, but behind the language lies a genuine theological and existential concern: faith must be my faith, not simply something into which I was born or which I passively inherited.
This does not necessarily mean that human beings bring about their own conversion. In classical Lutheran theology, personal faith itself is also the work of God. Yet the question of personal appropriation remains: Has this faith become my own, or am I merely living on the faith of my parents or my religious environment?
Confirmation – The Same Question, a Different Language
My own confirmation took place in connection with my conversion to Catholicism, and I had no particular spiritual experience associated with the ceremony itself. What remained with me most strongly was the relief of finally belonging to the Church I was actually attending.
Catholic theology does not understand Confirmation as an adult person’s ratification of Baptism. The sacrament completes and strengthens baptismal grace and equips the baptised person in a particular way through the Holy Spirit to bear witness to the faith. A personal profession of faith can be an important part of the preparation and celebration, but the meaning of the sacrament does not depend on the recipient experiencing a particular inner breakthrough.
The Catholic tradition therefore does not place the decisive emphasis on a datable experiential moment. The sacrament is first and foremost God’s action and gift, even though the way grace is received and bears fruit also involves the person’s faith and disposition.
A Real Loss, or Simply a Different Pace?
The question is whether this reflects a deliberate theological priority—that the objective grace given in the sacrament is what is decisive, independently of subjective experience—or whether there is also a pastoral weakness here, something that could be handled better without changing the doctrine itself.
The Catholic Charismatic Renewal is interesting precisely at this point. It has given more room to this kind of experiential language, among other things through what is called “baptism in the Holy Spirit”—a conscious, often datable experience of renewal sought within a fully Catholic and sacramental framework.
In Catholic charismatic understanding, “baptism in the Holy Spirit” is not a new sacrament alongside Baptism and Confirmation, but a personal actualisation or renewed experience of the grace already given. The fact that such a movement has emerged and taken root may suggest that there is a real need for a personal language of experience to which ordinary sacramental and pastoral practice does not always give sufficient room.
My Own Experience: Still on the Way
I cannot point to any comparable moment in my own life. If anything, it has been a gradual process rather than a moment I can date.
And I have to be honest: I still feel at times as though I am waiting for, and longing to experience, something resembling the breakthrough that many others describe. The post I wrote about my spiritual anguish and the relief I found in sacramental life comes closest to something of that kind—but it was precisely that: relief from something, the lifting of a burden, rather than a positive and datable experience of being “saved” in the language in which I grew up.
Perhaps this is itself something worth carrying forward: the Christian life can take very different experiential paths, and the absence of one particular kind of breakthrough does not necessarily mean that something is missing.
Can Catholic Practice Learn Something from the Revival Tradition?
I believe the answer is yes—at least in practice, if not in doctrine. The Catholic Church already possesses everything it needs theologically to take the language of personal experience seriously. The objective grace of Baptism and Confirmation does not exclude that this grace can also be consciously experienced as something that concerns me personally.
But in ordinary sacramental practice, as it is often lived, this language is given relatively little room. Perhaps this is precisely where the revival tradition has something to offer: not a better theology, but a better pastoral habit—the habit of actually asking people, and encouraging them to ask themselves: Has this faith become my own? Do I myself live by it?
And of giving them the space and language to discover the answer, even if that answer comes gradually, or long after the sacrament itself was received.