Who is God? Part 1
The question or who of what God is, is a question we will spend eternity answering. Any thought that we can come to a full understanding of a reality that is by its very nature infinite in this lifetime and with our limited capacity, is nothing short of laughable. We will spend eternity coming to know who God is and, consequently, who it is God is creating us to be.
However, there are some things we can say about God and related questions if for no other reason than that God has revealed them to us. Our faith understands that this revelation comes to its fullness in and through the person of Jesus Christ, whose teaching has been passed down to us in the power of the Holy Spirit through the ministry of those God has appointed as apostles and teachers. What we can say about God is limited but it is true, and it deserves our attention. We do not walk this journey alone.
What this section of the website presents is a series of articles that will begin to situate the 'God question' from the Catholic perspective. As mentioned elsewhere on this website, no attempt is being made to provide a full and complete response to the questions addressed. If you are serious about these questions, you will allow yourself to become increasingly familiar with the Bible, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the documents of the 2nd Vatican Council - at the very least.
Longer responses to the questions that will feature on this website have been divided into parts for ease of reading.
So, let's begin: Believing in God
You have come into existence for one purpose: to provide you with the opportunity to enter into the life that God has in mind for you. For when God looks at you, there are only two things that preoccupy God’s thoughts: 1. A deep and enduring love 2. A desire to help you freely respond to the life God is continually offering you. Everything else is secondary.
But who is this ‘God’ who is at the centre of all that exists? The Apostles Creed (the earliest continuously used statement on the essence of the Christian faith) begins by simply stating:
I believe in God,
the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
These are important words, and they are worth returning to again and again. Yet, it is also important to acknowledge that God is so much more than can be contained in any human words. Even these. As useful as words can be, they are always limited by the way we interpret their meaning, by how we make use of them, and by the inadequacy of language itself. While there are things we can say about God that are indeed ‘true’, we must also understand that we are just at the very beginning of an eternal quest to deepen and develop our understanding of who, or what, God is.
And so we look at these words from the beginning of the Apostles Creed and, understanding them to be true, we wonder what more could be said. Questions are raised. For example: what does it mean for someone to say they 'believe in God’? Are they simply saying ‘God exists’? Yes and no.
One of the ongoing problems we have when debating the existence of God with those who experience themselves as doubting God’s existence is that while we do believe God ‘exists’, we are using that term loosely. That is to say, God does not exist in the same way that we, the trees, the birds, the earth and the universe exist. All these things exist as a result of something else, and there was a time when they did not exist. This is not the case with God. God did not come into existence, and God’s existence is not as the result of anything that hypothetically preceded it.
What's more, we can even say that God does not have existence (in the way we do) but that God is existence. God is not the first being in the order of creation. God is outside creation and is the reason why creation exists. Creation borrows its existence from God.
More in Part 2.