We, Christians, believe in One God - a belief that is held in common with Jews and Muslims. But we qualify it by saying that our God is a Trinitarian God, that is, One God in Three Persons, which the other two religions find difficult.
The central pillar of Christian belief is that Jesus was fully human and fully divine, and that Jesus talked of God as Father and Creator. Jesus recognised how he was to die and hugely cared about the impact this would have on his close followers. So while he was preparing them for his death, he also told them that God would raise him again. Even so, he knew that he only had a few weeks on earth after his resurrection. So he promised them that when he was no longer physically present with them, God would send them a Counsellor, to be with them always. We identify this constant presence of God with us as the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity. Artists over the centuries have painted the Baptism of Jesus with the Father sending the Spirit (in the form of a dove) to be with the Son (as in this picture by Juan Navarrete in 1567).
So we have the concept of the Three Persons of God, interacting with us in different ways. It is a helpful concept, but not an easy one. It is helpful in that when God sent Jesus to live on earth as His fully divine Son, we saw two personalities of God (Father and Son) and that as God’s presence with us now is through the Holy Spirit, we have the third personality of God. The difficulty is of course that it is beyond human experience to think of One God, in three persons.
We believe in, and the Bible describes, the interrelationship of the three personalities of the one God. In fact in the depths of Jewish scriptures also, there are visible threads of the Spirit of God in action alongside God referred to as Spirit, Word, Glory, Law and Wisdom.
While we can think of analogies (from the humble clover leaf to an atom, or its nucleus!), they can only go so far and it is not difficult to see why some people find it baffling.
It is interesting to note that Hindus have a similar insight into God’s nature. Although we don’t often associate Hindus with the worship of One God, it is part of their core beliefs. Furthermore, they also believe in the three aspects of godhead: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva: Creator, Preserver and Destroyer (of evil). They even physically depict God as ‘Thrimurthi’, that is, ‘three figures’.
We should not find it strange that ancient religions, in their quest to understand God better, identified similar traits in his interactions with humanity. The important point to hold on to is that we human beings are limited in what we can understand of an infinite God. As St John of Damascus wrote, “God is unknowable and incomprehensible; the only thing that is knowable and comprehensible about him is that he is unknowable and incomprehensible.”
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