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God & the Trinity
Everything Catholics believe begins with who God is. The Church professes one God in three divine Persons — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — who created the world out of love and calls every person to share his life.
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What is the Holy Trinity?
The Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith: there is one God in three divine Persons — the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. They are not three gods, nor three masks of one person, but one divine nature, fully shared by three really distinct Persons.
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All God & the Trinity questions
What is the Holy Trinity?
The Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith: there is one God in three divine Persons — the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. They are not three gods, nor three masks of one person, but one divine nature, fully shared by three really distinct Persons.
What do Catholics believe? A short summary
Catholics believe in one God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — who created all things; that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, became man, died for our sins and rose from the dead; that the Holy Spirit guides the Church he founded; and that through the sacraments, prayer and love we share God's life now and hope for eternal life with him.
Does the Catholic Church accept evolution?
The Church does not oppose evolution as a scientific theory of how living things developed, and has never required a literal six-day reading of Genesis. What the Church insists on is that God created everything, that creation has purpose, that humanity descends from an original couple in a way that involves a real fall, and that each human soul is created directly by God.
How should I respond to my friend's understanding of God as remote?
Your friend holds the illusion of deism: that God made the world like a watchmaker and then left it to itself. Since your friend grants that God may exist, start there: explain that God revealed himself so we could know him, and came among us as Jesus, who taught us to pray.
How can I refute a colleague's claim that truth is relative?
The claim defeats itself. If all truth is relative, then there is no objective truth, and nothing can ever be stated as fact — including the claim that truth is relative. Taken seriously, that position leads to chaos and makes logical communication impossible.
Can God make square circles? If not, is he not all-powerful?
God can do all things that are possible. He cannot do what is impossible for him — sin, or logical impossibilities like square circles. That is not a limit on his omnipotence; his power simply does not contradict itself.
How can a perfect God coexist with imperfection?
Easily. Anything God creates lacks his perfection, because it is not him. The universe lacking what God has is no threat to God, and God having it is no threat to the universe — which would cease to exist without him.
Is my friend's theory that God created more than one set of first parents heretical?
The theory is polygenism, and Pius XII taught in Humani Generis that the faithful cannot embrace it, since it is not apparent how it could be reconciled with original sin coming from one individual, Adam. As for Cain's wife, Adam and Eve had other children, including daughters.
How did dinosaurs die out if death entered the world only at the Fall?
Scripture is speaking of human death. It nowhere suggests animals were created immortal; only humans have immortal souls. So animals dying before the Fall doesn't conflict with Scripture.
How can I explain the Trinity to a Oneness Pentecostal?
In Matthew 28:19 Jesus explicitly commands baptism in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit — the source of the Trinitarian formula, not a pope's idea. Acts 2:38 isn't giving a liturgical formula but distinguishing Christ's baptism from John's. Early Church practice was thoroughly Trinitarian.
How can we reconcile free will with God's omniscience?
There is nothing to reconcile. Knowing the sun will rise tomorrow doesn't make you cause it. God knows our future free choices, but they remain ours and remain free.
What is the difference between obstinate doubt and ordinary doubt?
Obstinate doubt is voluntary doubt — deliberately refusing to hold as true what God has revealed — and is a grave matter. Involuntary doubt — hesitation, difficulty with objections, anxiety at the faith's obscurity — is not in itself sinful.
What exactly is a soul?
The soul is the spiritual principle of the human being: the subject of consciousness and freedom, which with the body forms one human nature. Each soul is individual and immortal, created directly by God; it is separated from the body at death and will be reunited with it at the resurrection.
How can I love God when I can't see him?
What you know, you can love, as you can love Mother Teresa without having met her. You know far more about God than you realize: a crucifix shows more love than anything else, and everything you know is evidence of his love. You were made for loving him.
Why does the Church use male pronouns for God?
Throughout Scripture God revealed himself in masculine terms. Jesus spoke of his Father and taught us to pray "Our Father," was himself a man, and spoke of the Holy Spirit as "he."
How many children did Adam and Eve have, and whom did their children marry?
Adam and Eve had sons and daughters (Genesis 5:4). Since there were no other human beings, brothers and sisters had to marry. St. Augustine explains this was allowed by necessity then, though later forbidden and now abhorred.
How can Allah be the one true God?
"Allah" is simply Arabic for "God," used by Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews as well as Muslims. Though their understanding of God is incomplete, Muslims worship the same God whom Christians and Jews worship.
Will we all be gods one day, as Mormons believe?
No. When Jesus quoted "I said, 'You are gods,'" he referred to Psalm 82:6, where God addresses the mortal judges of Israel, called "gods" because of their high office. The next verse adds that they will die like any mortal.
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God's Love for You
Everyone senses that something is wrong with the human race: we are all sinners, and on our own we cannot break free. But God is love. He sent his Son, who died and rose to save us, and he invites each of us to choose him by repenting, believing, being baptized, and joining the Church Christ founded.
What the Early Church Believed: The Trinity
The doctrine of the Trinity is summed up in Jesus' command to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). The earliest Christian writers understood this exactly as the Church does today: three divine persons who are one God.
What the Early Church Believed: One True God
The first Christians, like the Jews before them, were fiercely monotheistic and would rather die as martyrs than concede that any other gods exist. This comes directly from the Bible, and it contradicts groups such as the Mormons who teach a multitude of gods.
What the Early Church Believed: God Has No Body
Some groups, notably the Mormons and some in the Word Faith movement, say God the Father has a body. Scripture teaches that God is spirit, and the Church Fathers declared that God is an unchangeable, immaterial spirit with a simple nature that has no parts, so he cannot have a body.
What the Early Church Believed: Original Sin
We all sense our brokenness. Scripture traces it to the first sin: through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin (Romans 5:12). We are not personally guilty of Adam's sin, but we are born without sanctifying grace and with a nature inclined to sin. The Fathers recognized this doctrine.
Grace: What It Is and What It Does
Sanctifying grace is supernatural life abiding in the soul, needed for heaven. Actual grace is a passing divine push that moves us to seek and keep sanctifying grace. Mortal sin destroys sanctifying grace, but responding to actual grace restores it. Justification really transforms the soul and is bound up with sanctification.
In Scripture
- Matthew 28:19
- John 1:1-14
- John 14:16-17
- 2 Corinthians 13:13
- John 3:16
- 1 Corinthians 15:3-4
- Genesis 1:1, 27
- Psalm 19:2
- Wisdom 13:5
- Matthew 19:26
- Luke 18:27
- Acts 2:38
- Matthew 6:9-13
- John 14:26
- Genesis 5:4
- Psalm 82:6
- Psalm 82:7
- Matthew 16:18
- 2 Corinthians 13:14
- Hebrews 9:14
- John 10:30
- 1 John 5:7
- John 17:3
- Isaiah 43:10
- Isaiah 44:6
- Deuteronomy 6:13
- Matthew 4:10
- Deuteronomy 6:4
- Genesis 1:26-27
- Psalm 91:4
- John 4:24
- Luke 24:39
- John 1:18
- Romans 5:12
- Romans 8:36
- 2 Corinthians 5:18-19
- Romans 5:17
- Matthew 19:14
- Luke 18:15-16
- Acts 2:38-39
- Titus 3:5
- John 10:10
- John 14:6
- 1 Corinthians 3:12-16
- Galatians 5:19-21
- Ephesians 2:1
- Ephesians 2:5
- Ephesians 4:18
- John 20:21-23
- 1 John 5:16-17
- 1 Corinthians 6:11
- Isaiah 55:11
- Romans 6:7
- Romans 6:1-2
- Romans 6:12-13
- Hebrews 10:14
- Romans 4:3
- Genesis 15:6
- Hebrews 11:8
- Genesis 12:1-4
- James 2:21-23
- Genesis 22:1-18
- 1 Timothy 2:4
- Philippians 2:12-16
Key terms
- Grace
- The free and undeserved help God gives us to respond to his call — above all, a share in God's own life.
- Original Sin
- The fallen state inherited by all humanity from the first sin of Adam and Eve — a deprivation of original holiness, not a personal fault.
- Trinity
- The central Christian mystery of one God in three divine Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.