CHRISTIANITY
Islam
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Judaism
How is the nature of God understood in the religion?
by Kendra Hotz
God
is understood, first of all, to be the one sovereign creator of
all. God alone is infinite and eternal. God stands alone among all
reality as God. Everything else that is real—living things
and inert things, rational beings and the unintelligent, everything
from the angels and human beings, to the animals and plants, to
the planets, minerals and elements—is a creature. All creatures
owe their existence to God whom they were made to glorify. The good
of all creatures, therefore, is found in God to whom they return
in obedience and love.
The
nature of the one, sovereign God who is creator of all is most essentially
love. God is love. God’s nature as
love is communicated to creatures through God’s goodness,
beauty, mercy, and justice. These qualities all
flow into creation because God wills other beings into existence
out of nothingness and endows them with God’s own qualities.
The creation, then, is a finite and imperfect reflection of God’s
infinite and perfect love, goodness, and beauty.
The
gap between what God is infinitely and what creation is in a finite
way has led Christian theologians to the conclusion that our language
about God never perfectly names what and who God is. Our language
is a rough approximation of divine reality. It gestures us toward
God without precisely capturing God’s essence. We use analogies
from the created order to indicate some truths about God, being
careful not to confuse creator and creation. For instance, God is
often referred to as the “rock of salvation,” which
points to God’s steadfast faithfulness without identifying
God with an inert mineral. Likewise, Christians call God “Father”
to indicate God’s loving, parental oversight of humanity,
but do not assert that God is male. In fact, Christians have always
insisted that God is neither male nor female.
The
question of how precise our language can be in gesturing toward
God has led to a debate among theologians about some of the attributes
of God. The majority of theologians throughout Christian history
have held that analogies from creation are always deeply flawed
because they rest in some basic creational assumptions that do not
apply to God. For instance, creatures are governed by time, but
these theologians point out that God is eternal, which means that
God exists outside of time. Likewise they affirm that God is immutable
(changeless), omnipotent (all-powerful), and exists without needs
of any kind.
Many
modern theologians, however, have questioned these classical attributes,
claiming that the analogy between creation and God is much closer
than the tradition has assumed. They claim, for instance, that God
moves through time as creatures do, but never comes to an end. That
is, they claim that God is everlasting, not eternal. These theologians
also believe that God changes and responds through relationships
with creatures and that God does need creatures so that God may
live in loving relationships with others. They also believe that
while God is very powerful, God is not all-powerful, and this means
that God cannot be held responsible for evil in the world. This
debate remains unsettled, with both sides making faithful efforts
to attend to the biblical witness and to human experience.
In
addition to believing that God is one, sovereign, and loving, Christians
also believe that God exists as a Trinity of three persons. Christians
have always insisted that belief in the Trinity does not conflict
with monotheism, but have often had trouble articulating precisely
how this can be. The challenge has been to affirm
that God is really one, but also really three. Some have proposed
that God only appears to us as triune, that Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit are but three names for different ways in which God is revealed
to us. The church rejected this way of thinking about the Trinity
at the first council of Constantinople in 381, the second ecumenical
council.
Instead
the church affirmed that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three
persons who live in a perfect and permanent cooperative bond unlike
any kind of creaturely unity because it exists outside of the limitations
of space and time. A fourth-century theologian named Gregory of
Nyssa explained that because creatures are united to one another
only imperfectly and temporarily, two or more creatures never truly
live as one
But
the three persons of the Trinity always operate in perfect unity,
and this perfection of unified operations ensures that the reality
of being one God is as certain as the reality of being three persons.
The three persons of the one God live a life of love, delight, and
mutuality. Human beings may catch a glimpse of this delightful,
loving triune life of God when they enter into relationships of
love, reciprocity, and hospitality even though such relationships
are always limited by our creaturely condition of being spatial
and temporal.
There
is one important point of disagreement about the nature of the Trinity
between Eastern Orthodox Christians and Christians of the West.
Eastern Christians affirm that the Father is the source of the unity
of the Trinity. The Father begets the Son, and the Holy Spirit proceeds
from the Father. It is important to remember that the acts of begetting
and proceeding are not the same as creating. The Son and Holy Spirit
are not creatures; they are co-equal in godhead with the Father.
Nevertheless, Eastern Christians affirm that
in some mysterious way the Son is begotten, and the Holy Spirit
proceeds.
Western
Christians affirm these same truths except that they believe that
the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Augustine
explained that the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between the Father
and the Son, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the
Son as love. Eastern Christians, however, claim that this way of
thinking about the Trinity reduces the Holy Spirit to an impersonal
force who is not co-equal in divinity with the Father and the Son.
In the West, Christians follow the theology of Augustine and add
the phrase “and the Son” to the Nicene Creed where it
declares that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. The Latin
for this phrase “and the Son” is filioque,
and the disagreement between East and West on this issue is sometimes
known as the filioque controversy.
Copyright
©2006 Kendra Hotz
Kendra
G. Hotz serves as Adjunct Professor of Theology at Memphis
Theological Seminary. She formerly taught at Calvin College. Hotz
is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and coauthor
(with Matthew T. Mathews) of Shaping
the Christian Life: Worship and the Religious Affections
(2006) and coauthor of Transforming
Care: A Christian Vision of Nursing Practice (2005).
Excerpts
from What Do Our Neighbors Believe?: Questions and Answers on
Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Howard Greenstein, Kendra
Hotz, and John Kaltner are used by permission from Westminster John
Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky. The book will be available for
purchase in December 2006.
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