OCR GCSE Religious Studies

Christian beliefs about what God is like

Christians believe in one God who made everything and who can be known through the Bible, through Jesus and through experience of prayer and worship. Ten words are used to describe him, and each has a particular meaning and a particular effect on how Christians live.

Several of these pull against one another. A God who is transcendent seems distant, while one who is immanent and personal seems close, and Christians hold both together. A God who is a loving father and also a judge raises the question of how love and justice fit. John 3:16–18 gives one answer: God loved the world so much that he gave his Son, and those who believe are saved from condemnation, so the judgement is real but God's wish is to save.

Emphases in different denominations

All the main denominations accept these ten descriptions, but they give them different weight.

• Roman Catholics place strong emphasis on God as judge, and on the teaching authority of the Church and tradition alongside the Bible, which shapes how they understand God's will.
• Many Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians stress the personal and immanent side of God: a direct, personal relationship with God, the Holy Spirit's presence in worship, and the Bible as the main authority.
• Quakers (the Religious Society of Friends) place most weight on God's immanence, believing that there is "that of God" in every person and that God can be known directly in silence, without a priest.
• Orthodox Christians tend to stress God's transcendence and mystery, which is expressed in the beauty and ritual of the liturgy and in the use of icons.
• Some liberal Christians put more weight on God's love and forgiveness than on judgement, and read the Bible as a human record of encounters with God rather than a set of instructions to follow literally.

These differences come from how each group reads its sources of authority. A Catholic will give weight to Church teaching and tradition, a Protestant tends to appeal to scripture alone, and a Quaker to the inner light, so the same verse can be read in different ways.

The Trinity

The Christian idea of God as a Trinity is that there is one God who exists as three persons: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ) and the Holy Spirit. The three are not three gods, and they are not three roles one God plays in turn. Each is fully God, and each is distinct from the others, yet they share a single divine nature. The word is not in the Bible, but Christians find the idea in it, for instance in the command to baptise in the name of all three persons (Matthew 28:19).

The Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed, the statements of belief used in worship, set out the belief in all three persons.

The three persons

• The Father is the creator, the source of all things and the one to whom Jesus prayed. In the Lord's Prayer he is addressed as "Our Father".
• The Son is Jesus Christ, who was with God from the beginning and became human at the incarnation. Philippians 2:5–8 describes how Christ, though in the form of God, emptied himself and took the form of a servant, humbling himself even to death on a cross.
• The Holy Spirit is God present and active in the world and in believers. In John 14:16–17 Jesus promises that the Father will send another Helper, the Spirit of truth, to be with his followers for ever. The Spirit gives guidance, strength and gifts to the Church.

The Nicene Creed, agreed in the fourth century, says that the Son is "begotten, not made" and of one substance with the Father, which means that the Son was not created and is fully divine. In the Western Church (Roman Catholic and most Protestant churches) the Creed says the Spirit proceeds from the Father "and the Son". The Orthodox Churches reject that addition, which has been a long-standing point of disagreement between East and West.

Why the Trinity matters to Christians

Belief in the Trinity shapes how Christians understand God and what they do.

• It explains how God can be both transcendent (the Father, beyond creation) and immanent (the Son, who lived among people, and the Spirit, who is present now).
• It shows God as a relationship of love, which Christians see as the basis for loving one another. Matthew 5:48 tells them to be perfect as their heavenly Father is perfect.
• It shapes worship, since prayers are commonly addressed to the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit, and services often begin and end with a Trinitarian blessing.

Issues and different attitudes

The Trinity is hard to explain, and Christians have always admitted that it is a mystery. Analogies are used, such as water, ice and steam, or the three leaves of one shamrock, but each fails in some way. Water that is ice, then steam, at different times suggests one God playing three roles in turn, an idea the Church rejected as inaccurate.

Almost all Christians accept the Trinity, but not all do. Unitarian churches hold that God is one person and that Jesus, although a great teacher and the Son of God in a special sense, is not himself God. Christadelphians also reject the Trinity, teaching that Jesus was a human being, the Son of God, but not God, and that the Holy Spirit is God's power and not a separate person. Most other Christians regard the Trinity as essential to Christian belief, and some do not count those who reject it as Christians at all.

Christians also disagree about the sources that support the Trinity. Catholics and Orthodox Christians draw on the creeds and the tradition of the early Church councils as well as scripture, while some Protestants accept the idea because they find it in the Bible and have little regard for the councils as such.

Sources of authority for the nature of God