Note: This is part two of a series of five posts about God. These were originally written as an RCIA presentation about God the Father. These posts are in an expanded form, and the presentation as given does not necessarily follow the posts exactly. I was constrained in the presentation itself to keep the time to under about 45 minutes or so, and to be somewhat conversational (sine it was their first formal session). Here is the full written transcript, which goes beyond what I did in the presentation. Part 1 is posted here.

My previous post concerning God concluded by saying that not only does He exist, but He also sustains our existence. Not only is He the fullness of Truth, the Perfection of Beauty, and the Highest Good, but He is also the source of all three of these things. Not only did He once create the world, but He continues to create it now. You may be wondering, after all this, Who or What is God? Who is this Creator Who cares enough for us to keep us in existence, and even to occasionally suspend or alter the very laws of the universe which He sustains? I’ve hopefully shed a little light on the subject with some of these apologetics—God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent; God is loving, creative, and eternal; He is perfect and infinite and indivisible. These are all some facts about God, but they don’t necessarily tell us Who or What He is.

Yet, they do reveal quite a bit to us. For one thing, the fact that He not only creates (generates) and sustains, but also loves and thinks (is all-knowing) means that God is not merely an impersonal force, but rather that He is personal. He has personality, meaning that He has a divine will and a divine intellect. We can talk to (pray to) a Person, and the Person can respond; we cannot talk to a force. A Person can demand our loyalty or our love, and can give us His love. We can obey a Person, but a force does not demand obedience—it either does not interact with us or interacts in such a way that we cannot not obey it, as with gravity. And we can have a relationship with a Person.

God is infinite and indivisible, which also means that He is One. The Baltimore Catechism #2 tells us that “there is but one God,” and that there cannot be more than one God “because God, being supreme and infinite, cannot have an equal” (Q. 21-22). Why does God’s supremacy and infiniteness imply that there is only one God? Let me propose an analogy. Suppose that there were two supreme and all-powerful beings. One desire to create an unmovable, unbreakable, impassable wall, and the other desires to create an unstoppable, unbreakable, impassible object which is hurtling towards the wall. Which one wins? If the wall wins, then the second God was not really supreme; if the object wins, then the first God was not really supreme; if either God changes His mind, then He is changeable and thus neither perfect nor supreme. Therefore, there can only be one supreme Being, and thus only one God.

God is love, which also means that He loves. But recall that God does not change; and since He loves us, this means that He loves something other than Himself. The implication of this is that God is not only one person but multiple people. Specifically, we believe that God is a Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These Three Divine Persons are truly distinct from One Another, and yet Each is also God, sharing one divine (Godly) nature. Father Oscar Lukefahr explains this in “We Believe”: A Survey of the Catholic Faith, by making this distinction between “person” and “nature.” He writes,
The phrase “three Persons in one divine nature” expresses a mystery we cannot fully understand. But we can gain some insight into it. The word person refers to “who” we are. The word nature refers to “what” we are. If someone asks us, “Who are you?” we respond with our name…person. If someone asks us, “What are you?” we respond that we are human…our nature. With humans, there is only one person in each human nature. But God is three divine Persons in one divine nature (divine means “of God”).

If I may offer a second analogy, the Trinity may be likened to the Cross of Christ, by which symbol we sign ourselves while invoking the names of the three Persons. There is one cross, but there are three parts of the cross—the head piece which points up, towards “Our Father who art in heaven;” there is the main beam, which points towards the earth where the Son was sent to become Man for our sake; and there are the two arms which open wide to embrace the world, just as the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son to spread the Gospel throughout the earth. Yet we have a single cross, and cannot divide the head piece from the arms from the beam, lest there be no cross.

The cross is moreover a symbol of God’s love for us, which points ultimately to God’s love, period. That is, it points to the perfect and total love which is called agape. God is His Love, we may say, and He is also his Knowledge. To again quote from Fr Lukefahr,
Theologians have tried to offer insight into the Trinity by saying that the Father knows Himself from all eternity, and this Knowledge is the Son. The father and Son love each other with an infinite love, and this Love is the Holy Spirit....God’s knowledge is so limitless that it is a Person, the Son. The love of Father and Son is so limitless that it, too, is a Person, the Holy Spirit.

I hope this is helpful, but it is worth restating that the Trinity is a mystery to us, that we cannot fully understand it. What we can say is that there is one God. We can say that the Father is God, that the Son is God, and that the Holy Spirit is God. And we can say that the Father is not the Son nor the Holy Spirit, that the Son is not the Father nor the Holy Spirit, and that the Holy Spirit is not the Father nor the Son. We can add that the “roles” God—Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier—are shared by all three Persons. We might think of the Father as the Creator—and He is!—but the Son and Holy Spirit are also Creator. Thus, whereas it is natural to ascribe the effects of God’s actions as Creator to the Father, as Redeemer to the Son, and as Sanctifier to the Holy Spirit, the Father is Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, as is the Son, as is the Holy Spirit; and the three Persons of the Trinity are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, not Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.

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Continue on to Part 3: "The Fatherhood of God"

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