Religion can only be called a worldview in which there is the thought of God, the idea of ​​God, the recognition of God, the belief in God. If there is no this, there is no religion. We can call such a faith whatever we like: shamanism, fetishism, astrology, magic... But this is no longer a religion, it is a pseudo-religion, a degeneration of religion. Today I would like to talk to you about a fundamental issue for any religion, of course, for Christianity as well – the doctrine of God.

The question of God is not simple. You will have to hear more than once: “Here you, Christians, tell us about God, prove that He exists. And Who is He? Who are you talking about when you say the word “God”?” We’ll talk to you about this today.

I’ll start from very far away, don’t be surprised and be patient for a minute. Plato, a student of Socrates, has this idea: first principles (simple things that have no complexity) cannot be defined. They are impossible to describe. Indeed, we can define complex things through simple ones. And what about simple ones? If a person has never seen the color green, how do we explain to him what it is? There is only one thing left to do - to offer: “Look.” It is impossible to tell what the color green is. Father Pavel Florensky once asked his cook, a very simple, uneducated woman: “What is the sun?” Tempted her. She looked at him in bewilderment: “The sun? Well, look what the sun is.” He was very pleased with this answer. Indeed, there are things that cannot be explained, they can only be seen.

To the question “Who is God?” I have to answer like this. Christianity says that God is O standing Being, the simplest of all that exists. It's simpler than the sun. He is not a reality that we can talk about and through this understand and cognize. It can only be “seen”. Only by “looking” at Him can one recognize Who He is. You don’t know what the sun is - look; you don't know who God is - look. How? – “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8). I repeat, not all things lend themselves to verbal description or definition. We cannot explain to a blind person what light is, or to a deaf person what the sound of the third octave or D of the first is. Of course, there are any number of things that we talk about and explain them quite clearly. But there are many who go beyond the boundaries of conceptual expression. They can only be known through direct And Denial

Do you know what was called theology in pre-Christian Greco-Roman literature and who was called a theologian? Theology meant stories about the gods, their adventures and deeds. And the authors of these stories were called theologians: Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus. (I won’t say what we find in them.) So much for theology and theologians. Of course, there are interesting ideas about God among Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other ancient philosophers, but these ideas were not popular.

What is called theology in Christianity? The term "theology" is the Russian translation of the Greek word "theology". In my opinion, this is a very unfortunate translation, because the second part of the word “theology” - “logos” - has about 100 meanings (the first is Theos, or Theos, everyone understands - God). The ancient Greek-Russian dictionary of I. Dvoretsky contains 34 nests of meanings of the word “logos”. Each slot contains several more values. But if we talk about the basic religious and philosophical meaning of this concept, then most correctly, I believe, it corresponds to “knowledge”, “cognition”, “in And "The translators took the most common meaning - "word", and translated theology with such a vague concept as theology. But in essence, theology should be translated as knowledge of God, knowledge of God, knowledge of God. At the same time, knowledge, knowledge in Christianity is not meant at all what the pagans were thinking about - not words and reasoning about God, but a special, spiritual experience of direct experience, comprehension of God by a pure, holy person.

The Monk John Climacus formulated this thought very precisely and laconically: “The perfection of purity is the beginning of theology.” Other fathers call this theoria, i.e. contemplation, which occurs in a state of special silence - hesychia (hence hesychasm). The Monk Barsanuphius the Great spoke beautifully about this silence: “Silence is better and more amazing than all stories. Our fathers kissed it and worshiped it, and were glorified by it.” You see how ancient, patristic Christianity speaks, or rather spoke, about theology. It is the comprehension of God, which is realized only through the correct Christian life. In theological science this is called the method of spiritually experiential knowledge of God; it gives a Christian the opportunity to truly comprehend Him and through this, understand the true meaning of His Revelation given in the Holy Scriptures.

There are two other methods in theological science, and although they are purely rational, they also have a certain significance for the correct understanding of God. These are apophatic (negative) and cataphatic (positive) methods.

You've probably heard of them. The apophatic method proceeds from the unconditional truth about the fundamental difference of God from all created things and therefore His incomprehensibility and inexpressibility by human concepts. This method essentially prohibits saying anything about God, since any human word about Him will be false. To understand why this is so, pay attention to where all our concepts and words come from, how are they formed? That's how. We see, hear, touch, etc. something and name it accordingly. They saw it and named it. They discovered a planet and named it Pluto, discovered a particle and gave it the name neutron. There are concrete concepts, there are general ones, there are abstract ones, there are categories. Let's not talk about this now. This is how the language is replenished and developed. And since we communicate with each other and convey these names and concepts, we understand each other. We say: table, and we all understand what we are talking about, since all these concepts are formed on the basis of our collective earthly experience. But they all describe real things very, very incompletely, imperfectly, and give only the most general idea of ​​the subject. Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, rightly wrote: “The meanings of all concepts and words formed through the interaction between the world and ourselves cannot be precisely determined... Therefore, through rational thinking alone one can never arrive at absolute truth” ( Heisenberg V. Physics and philosophy. – M., 1963. – P. 67).

It is interesting to compare this thought of a modern scientist and thinker with the statement of a Christian ascetic who lived a thousand years before Heisenberg and did not know any quantum mechanics - St. Simeon the New Theologian. This is what he says: “I... mourned the human race, because, looking for extraordinary evidence, people bring human concepts, and things, and words and think that they depict the Divine nature, that nature, which none of the angels or people could neither see nor name" (Rev. Simeon the New Theologian. Divine hymns. Sergiev Posad, 1917. P. 272). So, you see what all our words mean. If they are imperfect even in relation to earthly things, then they are even more conditional when they relate to the realities of the spiritual world, to God.

Now you understand why the apophatic method is right - because, I repeat, no matter what words we use to define God, all these definitions will be incorrect. They are limited, they are earthly, they are taken from our earthly experience. And God is above all created things. Therefore, if we tried to be absolutely precise and settled on the apophatic method of knowledge, we would simply have to remain silent. But what would faith and religion become then? How we could preach and generally talk about true religion or false. After all, the essence of every religion is the doctrine of God. And if we could not say anything about Him, we would cross out not only religion, but also the very possibility of understanding the meaning of human life.

However, there is another approach to the doctrine of God. Although formally incorrect, it is in reality as correct, if not more so, than the apophatic one. We are talking about the so-called. cataphatic method. This method states: we must talk about God. And they should because this or that understanding of God fundamentally determines human thought, human life and activity. Consider the difference between the following statements: I cannot say anything about God; I say that God is Love; I say that He is hatred? Of course, there is a great difference, for every indication of the properties of God is a guideline, a direction, a norm for our human life.

Even the Apostle Paul writes about the pagans that everything that can be known about God, they could know through looking at the world around them. We are talking about some properties of God, about how you perceive some of the actions of God, this simple Being. And we call these the properties of God. His wisdom, His goodness, His mercy and so on. These are only individual manifestations of the Divine that we can observe on ourselves and on the world around us. God is a simple Being.

Therefore, although all our words are inaccurate, incomplete and imperfect, nevertheless, Divine Revelation for our teaching says quite definitely that God is Love, not hate, Good, not evil, Beauty, not ugliness... Christianity says : “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16). It turns out that the teaching about God-Love is not some kind of uncertainty, abstraction, no, it is the very essence of human life, He is a really existing Ideal. Therefore, “he who does not love his brother remains in death”; therefore, “everyone who hates his brother is a murderer”; therefore, “no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (1 John 3: 14,15). In other words, know, man, if you have hostility towards even one person, you are mistaken and bring yourself harm and suffering. Just think about what a great criterion is given to a person by the positive teaching about God and His properties. By it I can evaluate myself, my behavior, my actions. I know the great truth: what is good and what is evil and, therefore, what will bring me joy, happiness, and what will insidiously destroy me. Is there anything greater and great for a person?! This is the strength and significance of the cataphatic method.

You understand now Why there is a Revelation of God, which is given in human concepts, images, parables, Why Does He, inexplicable and indescribable, tell us about Himself in our harsh words? If He told us in angelic language, we would not understand anything. It would be the same as if someone came in and spoke Sanskrit. We would open our mouths in bewilderment, although it is very possible that he would communicate the greatest truths - we would still remain completely ignorant.

So, how does Christianity teach about God? On the one hand, it says that God is Spirit and, as a simple Being, cannot be expressed by any human words and concepts, for any word is, if you like, a distortion. On the other hand, we stand before the fact of God’s Revelation, given to us in the Holy Scriptures and the experience of many saints. That is, God speaks about Himself to man in his language, and although these words are imperfect and incomplete in themselves, they are necessary for man, since they indicate to him what he must do in order to come, at least in part, to saving knowledge , V And God's day. And that knowledge of God is partly possible, the Apostle writes about this: “Now we see through a dark glass, darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, and then I will know, even as I am known” (1 Cor. 13: 12). And the Lord Himself says: “This is eternal life, yes know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent" (John 17: 3). Earthly life is the beginning of this eternal life.

God the Lord condescends to our limited understanding and expresses the truth to us in our words. I think that when we die and are freed from this “conceptual” language, we will look with a smile at our ideas about God, the spiritual world, angels, eternity... which we had, even reading Revelation. Then, on the one hand, we will understand all the wretchedness of these ideas of ours, on the other hand, we will see how good this hidden Revelation of God about Himself, about man, about the world was for us, for it showed us the path, means and direction of saving life. That is, all this has a direct bearing on the spiritual life of a Christian. We are all filled with passions, we are all proud, we are all proud, but there is a huge difference between people. Which? One sees this in himself and fights with himself, but the other does not see it and does not want to see it. It turns out that the positive (cataphatic) teaching about God gives a person the correct criteria, measures with the help of which he can correctly evaluate himself if he really wants to be a believer. Of course, he may hate his brother, calling himself a believer, but then, if his conscience is not yet completely seared and his mind is not completely darkened, he can understand what demonic state he is in.

You know, there are natural and supernatural religions. Natural religions are nothing more than an expression in images and concepts, myths and stories of the immediate, natural human sensation of God. Therefore, such ideas are always either primitively anthropomorphic or intellectually abstract in nature. Here are all kinds of images of gods, filled with all human passions and virtues, here is the divine Nothing, here is the idea of ​​Plato’s Demiurge and Aristotle’s Prime Mover, etc. But all the truths of these religions and religious-philosophical ideas have a pronounced human origin. Supernatural religions are distinguished by the fact that God Himself makes it known about Himself, who He is. And we see what a stunning difference there is between the Christian understanding of God and that which is outside it. At first glance, both here and there have the same or similar words, but the content of these religions is essentially different from each other. How striking this difference is, the Apostle Paul beautifully expressed it when he said: “But we preach Christ crucified, which is a stumbling block to the Jews, but foolishness to the Greeks” (1 Cor. 1:23). Really, All specifically Christian truths are fundamentally different from all previous analogues. This is not only the crucified Christ, but also the teaching about the Triune God, about the Logos and His Incarnation, about the Resurrection, about Salvation, etc. But this needs to be discussed separately. But let’s talk about one of these truths now. There is another unique truth of the Christian teaching about God, which decisively distinguishes Christianity from all other religions, including even the Old Testament religion. We will not find anywhere except Christianity that God is Love and only Love.

Outside of Christianity, we will encounter any ideas about God. At the same time, His highest understanding, to which certain religions and some ancient philosophers came, boiled down to the doctrine of a just Judge, the highest Truth, the most perfect Reason. No one knew that God is Love before Christ. Here's an example. Our Church has a commission for dialogue with Iranian Muslims. At a meeting last summer, the question of the highest virtue and the highest attribute of God was raised. And it was interesting to hear when Muslim theologians, one after another, said that such a property is justice. We answered: “If so, then the most fair is the computer. And don’t you turn to Allah: “Oh, all-merciful and merciful!” They say: “Yes, merciful, but Judge. He judges fairly and in this his mercy is manifested." Why did not the non-Christian consciousness (even if it even called itself Christian) know and do not know that God is precisely Love and nothing more? Because we, people, have been distorted the very concept of love. In human language, love means: forgiveness, absence of punishment, that is, freedom of arbitrariness. This is what “love” means in human terms. We forgive everything to a friend, but we cling to someone who is unpleasant to us. every nonsense. Our concept of love has been distorted, but Christianity returns to us its true understanding.

What is Christian love? “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Love is sacrifice. But sacrifice is not blind. Look at how Christ responded to evil: “Serpents, brood of vipers.” He takes the whip and drives him out of the temple, overturning the benches of those selling in it. I remember one episode from the book of Archbishop Alexander of Tien-Shan, when he was 14–15 years old. He wrote: I took some book and began to look at a picture in it of horses mating. And suddenly my mother saw it. I have never seen such anger in her. She was always very gentle and kind, but here she indignantly snatched this book from my hands. It was the anger of love, which I remember with gratitude all my life."

People do not know what the anger of love is and by love they mean only indulgences. Therefore, if God is Love, then, therefore, do whatever you want. From here it becomes clear why justice has always been and is considered the highest virtue. We see how even in the history of Christianity this highest teaching was gradually belittled and distorted.

The Christian teaching about God-Love was deeply accepted and revealed by the holy fathers. However, this understanding turns out to be psychologically inaccessible to the old man. The most striking example is the Catholic doctrine of salvation. It comes down, in the true words of A.S. Khomyakov, to a continuous litigation between God and man. What kind of relationship is this? Love relationship? No, court. If you have committed a sin, bring appropriate satisfaction to the justice of God, for by sin you have offended the Divine. They don’t even understand that God cannot be offended, because otherwise He turns out to be not an all-blessed Being, but the most suffering Being. If God is continually offended by human sins, continually shudders with anger at sinners, then what kind of bliss is there, what love! This is the judge. Hence the proud doctrine of the merits and even super-due merits of a person, which he supposedly can have before God, was invented. Hence the teaching about the Sacrifice of Christ as a satisfaction to the justice of God, the teaching about purgatory, hence indulgences. All Catholic teaching boils down to the Old Testament doctrine: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” It all flows directly from a deeply distorted understanding of God.

Well, if God is Love, then how can we understand this Love? Are there human sorrows? Yes. Isn't there retribution for human sins? It happens, and what else. We can constantly see this from personal experience and the experience of others. And the Holy Scripture itself speaks of retribution, and so do the holy fathers. What, then, does all this mean, if not that God is Justice? It turns out not. When the facts of human disasters and suffering are assessed as God’s punishment, that is, as God’s vengeance for sins, they make a big mistake. Who punishes a drug addict, who punishes someone who jumps out from the second or third floor and breaks his arms and legs? Who punishes a drunkard? Is it God’s revenge that he becomes broken, mutilated, sick physically and mentally? Of course not. These sufferings are the natural consequences of violating the laws of the external world. Exactly the same thing happens to a person when he violates spiritual laws, which are primary and even more significant in our lives than physical, biological, mental laws, etc. And what does God do? All the commandments of God are a revelation of spiritual laws and a kind of warning to man, just like the laws of the material world. If you want, you can even say this, God begs us people: don’t harm yourself, don’t sin, don’t jump from the fifth floor, go down the stairs; don’t envy, don’t steal, don’t be deceitful, don’t... - you’re crippling yourself with this, for every sin carries its own punishment.

I remember when I was a child, one winter my mother told me that in the cold you shouldn’t touch the iron door handle with your tongue. As soon as my mother turned away, I immediately licked her and there was a great cry. But I remembered that incident well and since then, imagine, I have never repeated this “sin” again. So I understood what God’s commandments are and that God is precisely Love, even when it hurts a lot. It was not my mother who punished me, it was not she who stuck my tongue to the iron handle, but I did not want to recognize the laws and was punished. God “punishes” us in the same way. Our sorrows are not God's vengeance. God remains Love and therefore warns us in advance, says, begs: “Do not do this, for this will certainly be followed by your suffering, your sorrows.”

But the idea that God takes revenge and punishes is a widespread and deeply rooted misconception. And a false idea gives rise to corresponding consequences. How many times, I think, have you heard how people are outraged... by God. They rebel against God: “What, am I the most sinful? Why did God punish me?” Either children are born bad, or something burned out, or things go wrong. All you can hear is: “What, am I the most sinful? Here they are worse than me, and they prosper.” They reach the point of blasphemy, curses, and rejection of God. Where does all this come from? From the perverted, pagan-Jewish understanding of God. They just cannot understand and accept that He does not take revenge on anyone, that He is the greatest Doctor, Who is always ready to help everyone who has sincerely realized their sins and brought heartfelt repentance. He is above our insults. Remember, in the Apocalypse there are wonderful words: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will sup with him, and he with Me” (Rev. 3:20).

Let us now listen to what the Holy Scripture says about God-Love:

He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45).

For He is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked (Luke 4:39).

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).

When tempted, no one should say: God is tempting me; because God is not tempted by evil and He Himself does not tempt anyone. But everyone is tempted, being drawn away and enticed by his own lust (James 1: 13-14).

That you... may... understand the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Eph. 3:18-19).

How do the holy fathers look at this issue? We will find in them (as well as in the Holy Scriptures) many statements that directly speak of God’s punishments for sins. But what do these punishments mean, what is their nature? I will read to you their explanations of this serious issue.

Rev. Anthony the Great: “God is good and impassive and unchangeable. If anyone, recognizing that it is blessed and true that God does not change, is perplexed, however, how He (being such) rejoices over the good, turns away from the evil, becomes angry at sinners, and when they repent , is merciful to them; then it must be said that God does not rejoice and is not angry: for joy and anger are passions. It is absurd to think that God is good or bad because of human deeds and only does good. but it does not harm anyone, remaining always the same; and when we are good, we enter into communication with God - according to our similarity with Him, and when we become evil, we separate from God - according to our dissimilarity with Him. Living virtuously, we become God's. and by becoming evil, we become rejected from Him; but this does not mean that He is angry with us, but the fact that our sins do not allow God to shine in us, but unite us with demons tormentors. If then through prayers and acts of kindness we gain permission from our sins, this does not mean that we have pleased God and changed Him, but that through such actions and our turning to God, having healed the evil that exists in us, we again become capable of tasting God’s goodness; so to say: God turns away from the wicked is the same as saying: the sun is hidden from those deprived of sight"(Instructions of St. Anthony the Great. Philokalia. Vol. 1. §150).

St. Gregory of Nyssa: "For what It is impious to regard the nature of God as subject to any passion of pleasure or mercy or anger, no one will deny this, even those who are little attentive to the knowledge of the truth of Existence. But although it is said that God rejoices over His servants and is angry with rage at the fallen people, then that He has mercy, and if He has mercy, He also gives generously (Ex. 33:19), but with each of these sayings, I think, the generally accepted word loudly teaches us, that through our properties the providence of God adapts itself to our weakness to those inclined to sin for fear of punishment restrained themselves from evil, previously carried away by sin, did not despair of returning through repentance, looking at mercy..." (St. Gregory of Nyssa. Against Eunomius. Creations. Ch.U1. Book.II.M.1864. P.428-429 ).

St. John Chrysostom: “When you hear the words: “rage and anger” in relation to God, then do not understand anything human by them: these are words of condescension. Divinity is alien to all such things; it is said this way in order to bring the subject closer to the understanding of cruder people" (Conversation on Ps. VI.-2. Creation. T.V. Book 1. St. Petersburg. 1899. P. 49).

St. John Cassian the Roman: God “can neither be upset by insults nor irritated by the iniquities of people...” (Interview – X1. §6).

All this is very important to understand because it has great implications for spiritual life. We are separated from God by our sins, but God never departs from us, no matter how sinful we are. Therefore for us Always the door of saving repentance remains open. It was not by chance, but providentially, that the first to enter heaven was not the righteous man, but the thief. God is always Love.

This understanding of God also stems from the Christian dogma of God, one in essence and threefold in Hypostases - a dogma, again, new, unknown to the world. There is a fatherly expression: whoever has seen the Trinity has seen Love. The dogma of the Trinity reveals to us the prototype of that love, which is the ideal norm of human life and human relationships. Multi-hypostatic humanity, although united by nature, is, however, in its present state not at all united in essence, for sin divides people. The mystery of God the Trinity was revealed to humanity so that it would know that only God-like love can make every person a child of God.

Lecture by Professor A.I. Osipov on basic theology, was read at Sretensky Theological Seminary on October 10, 2000 G.

The answer to the question of what God is depends primarily on the adherents of which religious and philosophical worldviews it will be asked. For adepts (followers) of monotheistic religions, the most widespread of which are Christianity, Islam and Judaism, this is, first of all, the Creator of the world and the personification of the Absolute in all its manifestations. For them, one God is the fundamental principle and beginning of all things in the world. Being eternal and unchanging, He is at the same time beginningless, infinite and comprehensible to the human mind only within the limits that He Himself sets.

What is God in the understanding of the pagans?

Each individual person’s idea of ​​God depends not only on the characteristics of the culture and religion of his people, but to a large extent on personal qualities, among which the key ones are spiritual maturity and level of education. It is not enough to just give yourself an answer to the key question “is there a God”; it is also important to have at least some clear idea of ​​what meaning is put into this concept. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand the ways and forms of His influence on the world.

Adherents of polytheism (polytheism), or, as they are commonly called in Christian theology, pagans, believe in several gods at once, each of which, as a rule, is capable of influencing only one aspect of human life.

In the pre-Christian period in Rus', both the highest gods, which included Perun, Mokosh, Dazhdbog, Svarog, Veles and a number of others, and the patron spirits of the clan were revered. There was also a cult of dead ancestors ─ ancestors. The various rituals performed in their honor were aimed, first of all, at ensuring earthly well-being, bringing success, wealth, many children, and also protecting them from the influence of evil spirits, natural disasters and enemy invasions. Belief in God, or rather, in a whole pantheon of gods, was an important component of their lives for pagans. This approach to the perception of deity was characteristic of almost all peoples of the world at the early stage of their development.

Understanding of God in Orthodoxy

Within the framework of Orthodoxy ─ a religious denomination covering the majority of the inhabitants of Russia ─ God is perceived as an incorporeal and invisible Spirit. On the pages of the Old Testament there is evidence that it is not possible for a person to see God and remain alive. Just as the rays of the sun, warming everything earthly, are capable of blinding those who dare to raise their gaze to the shining disk, so the great holiness of the Divine is inaccessible to human contemplation.

God is omnipotent and omniscient. He knows about everything in the world, and even the most secret thought cannot hide from him. At the same time, the power of the Lord is so limitless that it allows Him to do everything for which His holy will is. God, in the Orthodox understanding, is the creator and exponent of all the good that exists in the world, and therefore, when speaking about him, it is customary to use the expression “all-good.”

God is one in three Persons

The main dogma of Orthodoxy is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. It contains the statement that the one God has three hypostases (persons), bearing the following names: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. They are not connected to each other, but at the same time they are not separate. This seemingly complex combination can be understood using the example of the sun.

Its disk, shining in the sky, as well as the light emitted by it, and the heat that warms the earth, are essentially three independent realities, but at the same time, they are all unmerged and inseparable components of a single celestial body. Like the sun giving warmth, God the Father gives birth to God the Son. Just as light comes from the sun, so God the Holy Spirit comes from God the Father. Thus, prayer to God is always addressed to all His three hypostases at the same time.

Sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross

Another important dogma of Orthodoxy is the doctrine of the sacrifice made on the cross by the Son of God, sent by the Heavenly Father to atone for the original sin once committed by Adam and Eve. Having incarnated into man and united in Himself all his properties, except sin, Jesus Christ, by His death and subsequent resurrection, opened the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven to all adepts (followers) of the Church He created on earth.

According to the Gospel teaching, true faith in God is impossible without the love for one’s neighbor bequeathed by the Savior and without sacrifice. Orthodoxy is a religion of love. The words of Jesus Christ addressed to His disciples: “Love one another, as I have loved you” (John 13:34), became the main commandment, expressing the greatest humanism contained in the teaching given to people by the Son of God.

Search for truth

Having created man in His image and likeness, the Lord endowed him with reason, one of the properties of which is the ability to critically comprehend everything that happens in the world. That is why for many, the path to religious life begins with the question: “Is there a God?”, and the subsequent path to the salvation of the soul largely depends on how convincing the answer to it is received.

Christianity, like any other religion, is based primarily on blind faith in the dogmas that it preaches. However, over the two thousand years that have passed since the events described in the Gospel, inquisitive minds have not stopped searching for evidence of the existence of God. Many church leaders who lived in different eras and belonged to different Christian denominations, such as Malebranche and Anselm of Canterbury, as well as outstanding philosophers Aristotle, Plato, Leibniz and Descartes, devoted their works to this issue that worries people.

Statements of Thomas Aquinas

In the 13th century, the outstanding Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) tried to answer the question “what is God” and prove the indisputability of His existence. In his reasoning, he relied on the law of cause and effect, considering God as the cause of everything on earth. He formulated the evidence he derived for the existence of God in five points, which he included in a major work called “Summa Theology.” Briefly, they contain the following statements:

1. Since everything in this world is in motion, there must be something that gave this process the initial impetus. It can only be God.
2. Since nothing in the world can produce itself, but is always a derivative of something, we have to admit the existence of a certain primary source, which became the initial link in the subsequent chain of emergence of more and more new realities. This primary source of everything in the world is God.
3. Each thing can have both real existence and remain in unrealized potential. In other words, it may be born, or it may not. The only force that translates it from potentiality into reality should be recognized as God.
4. Since the degree of perfection of a thing can only be assessed in comparison with something superior to it, it is logical to assume the existence of a certain absolute that stands above everything in the world. Only God can be such a height of perfection.
5. And finally, the existence of God is indicated by the expediency of everything that happens in the world. Since humanity is moving along the path of progress, it means that there must be some force that not only determines the right direction of movement, but also creates the necessary prerequisites for the implementation of this process.

The proof that wasn't there

However, along with religious philosophers who tried to find arguments to substantiate the idea of ​​the existence of God, there were always those who pointed out the impossibility of a scientifically based answer to the question of what God is. Prominent among them is the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).

Contrary to the assertion of Woland, the hero of Bulgakov’s immortal novel “The Master and Margarita,” Kant did not refute the five proofs of the existence of God that he allegedly constructed and did not invent a sixth, this time absolutely irrefutable. On the contrary, all his life he never tired of repeating that in terms of proving the existence of God, no theoretical construction can have any serious scientific justification. At the same time, he considered faith in God useful and even necessary in moral terms, since he recognized the depth and significance of the Christian commandments.

As a result of this approach to the fundamentals of doctrine, the German philosopher was subjected to severe attacks from representatives of the church. It is even known that some of them, in order to express their contempt for the scientist, called his pet dogs after him.

An interesting detail: the legend that Kant, contrary to his views, created the so-called moral proof of the existence of God ─ exactly the one that Woland spoke about on the bench at the Patriarch's Ponds ─ was born by the clerics themselves, who wanted to take revenge on their fierce one in a similar way after death to the enemy.

Religion as the restoration of man's connection with God

At the end of the conversation, it would be appropriate to dwell on the issue of the emergence of religion. By the way, this word itself comes from the Latin verb religare, which means “to reunite.” In this case, we mean restoring the connection with God that was broken as a result of original sin.

Among historians, there are three main points of view regarding the emergence of religion. The first of them is called “religious”. Its supporters are of the opinion that man was created by God and, before his fall, had direct communication with Him. Then it was broken, and now for a person only prayer to God is the only opportunity to turn to his Creator, who reveals Himself through prophets, angels and various miracles.

Religious compromise

The second point of view is “intermediate”. It is a kind of compromise. Relying on modern scientific knowledge and sentiments prevailing in society, its supporters at the same time adhere to the main religious postulate about the creation of the world and man by God. According to them, after the Fall, man completely broke off communication with his Creator and, as a result, was forced to re-look for the path to Him. It is this process that they call religion.

Materialist Point of View

And finally, the third point of view is “evolutionary”. Those who adhere to it insist that religious ideas arise at a certain stage in the development of society and are a consequence of the inability of people to find rational explanations for natural phenomena.

Perceiving them as the rational actions of certain beings more powerful than himself, man created a pantheon of gods in his imagination, attributed to them his own emotions and actions, thereby projecting into his fictional world the features of the society in which he was located. Accordingly, with the development of society, religious ideas became more complex and colored in new ways, progressing from primitive forms to more complex ones.

In different languages, the word “God” is related to different words and concepts, each of which can say something about the properties of God. In ancient times, people tried to find words with which they could express their idea of ​​God, their experience of contact with the Divine.

In Russian and other languages ​​of Slavic origin belonging to the Indo-European group, the word “God”, according to linguists, is related to Sanskrit bhaga, which means “gifter, endower,” which in turn comes from bhagas– “property”, “happiness”. “Wealth” is also related to the word “God”. This expresses the idea of ​​God as the fullness of being, as all-perfection and bliss, which, however, does not remain inside Deities, but poured out on the world, people, and all living things. God bestows, endows us with His fullness, His riches, when we join Him.

Greek word theos, according to Plato, comes from the verb theein, meaning “to run.” “The first of the people who inhabited Hellas worshiped only those gods that many barbarians still worship today: the sun, moon, earth, stars, . And since they saw that all this was always running, making a cycle, it was from this nature of running that they were given the name of gods,” writes Plato. In other words, the ancients saw in nature, its circulation, its purposeful “running”, indications of the existence of some higher intelligent force, which they could not identify with a single God, but represented in the form of many divine forces.

However, Saint Gregory the Theologian, along with this etymology, gives another: the name theos from the verb ethein- “ignite”, “burn”, “blaze”. “For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God,” says the Bible (Deut. 4:24); The Apostle Paul will repeat these words, pointing to God’s ability to destroy and burn up all evil (Heb. 12:29). “God is fire and cold,” write Saints Barsanuphius and John. “God is a fire that warms and ignites hearts and wombs,” says St. Seraphim of Sarov. - So, if we feel the coldness in our hearts, which is from the devil... let us call on the Lord: He will come and warm our hearts with perfect love not only for Him, but also for our neighbor. And from the face of warmth the coldness of the hater of good will flee.”

St. John of Damascus gives another third etymology of the word theos from theaomai– “contemplate”: “For nothing can be hidden from Him, He is an all-seeer. He contemplated everything before it came into being.”

In languages ​​of Germanic origin, the word “God” is English God, German Gott– comes from a verb meaning “to prostrate”, to fall in worship. “People who in early times sought to say something about God,” says Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh on this occasion, “made no attempt to describe Him, outline Him, say what He is like in Himself, but only point out what happens to a person, when suddenly he finds himself face to face with God, when suddenly Divine grace, Divine light shines upon him. All that a person can do then is to fall on his face in sacred horror, worshiping the One who is incomprehensible and at the same time revealed to him in such closeness and in such wondrous radiance.” The Apostle Paul, whom God shone on the way to Damascus, struck by this light, immediately “fell to the ground... in trembling and horror” (Acts 9:4,6).

The name with which God revealed himself to the ancient Jews is Yahweh(Yahweh) means “He who is”, having existence, having being, it comes from the verb hayah– to be, to exist, or rather in the first person of this verb ehieh- "I am". However, this verb has a dynamic meaning: it means not just the fact of existence in itself, but a certain always actual being, a living and active presence. When God says to Moses, “I am who I am” (Ex. 3:14), it means: I live, I am here, I am near you. At the same time, this name emphasizes the superiority of the existence of God over the existence of everything that exists: this is an independent, primary, eternal existence, this is the fullness of being, which is superexistence: “In its meaning, the One who exists supernaturally surpasses the entire totality of existence, being the sole Cause and Creator of all things: matter , essence, existence, being; Existence is the beginning and measure of eternity, the cause of time and the measure of time for everything that exists, and in general the becoming of everything that becomes. From Existence come eternity, essence, existence, time, becoming and becoming, since in Existence all things exist - both changing and unchangeable... God is not just Existence, but Existence, Whom eternally and infinitely contains the totality of all forms of being - both present and future,” writes the author of the treatise “On the Divine Names.”

An ancient tradition says that the Jews in the era after the Babylonian captivity did not pronounce the name Yahweh - Jehovah - out of reverent awe of this name. Only the high priest, once a year, when he entered the Holy of Holies to burn incense, could pronounce this name inside. If a simple person or even wanted to say something about God, he replaced the name Jehovah with other names or said “heaven.” There was also such a tradition: when it was necessary to say “God,” a person fell silent and put his hand to his heart or pointed his hand to the sky, and everyone understood that we were talking about God, but the sacred itself Name was not pronounced. In writing, the Jews designated God with the sacred tetragram (YHWH). The ancient Jews were well aware that in human language there is no such name, word or term that could tell about the essence of God. “The Divine is unnameable,” says St. Gregory the Theologian. - Not only reason shows this, but also... the wisest and most ancient of the Jews. For those who honored the Divinity with special inscriptions and did not tolerate that both the name of God and the names of creatures were written in the same letters... could they ever decide in an absent-minded voice to pronounce the Name of the indestructible and unique nature? Just as no one has ever breathed all the air into himself, so neither the mind has completely contained, nor the voice has embraced God’s essence.” By refraining from pronouncing the name of God, the Jews showed that one can communicate with God not so much through words and descriptions, but through reverent and reverent silence...

Basic elements of the Orthodox teaching about God

1) The absolute transcendence of God. “Not a single thing in all created things has or will ever have the slightest connection or affinity with a higher nature.” Orthodoxy preserves this absolute transcendence of God by emphasizing the “path of negation,” or “apophatic” theology. Positive or "cataphatic" theology - the "path of affirmation" - must always be balanced and corrected by the use of negative language. Our positive statements about God - that He is good, wise, just, etc. - are true to the extent to which their meaning extends; however, they fail to adequately describe the inner nature of the deity. These positive statements, says John of Damascus, reveal “not [God’s] nature, but the things around nature.” “The fact that God exists is obvious, but what He is in His essence and nature lies absolutely beyond the limits of our understanding and knowledge.”

2) The absolutely transcendent God is not isolated from the world he created. God is above his creation and beyond creation; but He is also present within creation. As the common Orthodox Church says, God is “omnipresent and fills everything.” In other words, the Orthodox distinguish between the essence of God and His energies, preserving both divine transcendence and divine immanence: the essence of God remains unattainable, but His energies reach us. Divine energies, which are God himself, permeate all creation, and we feel their presence in the form of deifying grace and divine light. Verily, our God is the hidden God; and He is the active God, the God of history, who directly intervenes in specific situations of our lives.

3) God is personal and trinitarian. The Acting God is not only a God of energies, but a personal God. When human beings participate in the divine energies, they feel themselves not at the mercy of some vague and nameless force, but as standing face to face with a personality. And that's not all: God is not just one person limited by his own existence, but a Trinity of Persons - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - each of whom dwells in the other two by the power of the eternal movement of love. God is not just unity, but unity.

Divine names

In the Holy Scriptures there are many names of God, each of which, not being able to describe Him in essence, indicates one or another of His properties. The famous 5th century treatise “On the Divine Names,” attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, is the first Christian systematic presentation of this topic, although before that it was developed by other writers, in particular St. Gregory the Theologian.

Some names assigned to God emphasize His superiority over the visible world, His power, dominion, and royal dignity. Name Lord (Greek) Kyrios) denotes the sovereignty of God not only over his chosen people, but over the entire universe. This also includes the names Lord of hosts, that is, the Lord of armies (heavenly), the Lord of hosts, the Lord of ages, the Lord, the King of glory, the King of kings and the Lord of lords: “Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the splendor , and everything that is in heaven and on earth is Yours; Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom, and You are above all as Sovereign. Both wealth and glory are from Thy presence, and Thou art dominion over all; and in Your hand is strength and might, and in Your power to strengthen everything” (1 Chron. 29:11-12). Name Almighty (Greek) Pantokrator) means that God holds everything in His hand, maintains the Universe and the order in it: “My hand founded the earth, and My right hand stretched out the heavens” (Is. 48:13); God “upholds all things by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3).

The names Holy, Holiness, Holiness, Sanctification, Good, Goodness show that God has in Himself all the fullness of goodness and holiness, and He pours out this goodness on all His creatures, sanctifying their. “Hallowed be Thy name,” we turn to God in the prayer “Our Father.” That is, may Your name be holy not only in heaven, in the spiritual world, but also here on earth: hallowed in us, so that we become holy like You... God is also called Wisdom, Truth, Light, Life: “Wisdom as knowledge of divine and human affairs... Truth as one, and not plural by nature (for the true is unique, but lies are many-sided)... Light as the lightness of souls purified in mind and life, for if ignorance and sin are darkness, then knowledge and life are divine - light..., Life, because it is light, support and fulfillment of all rational nature” (Gregory the Theologian).

The Holy Scripture calls God Salvation, Redemption, Deliverance, Resurrection because only in Him (in Christ) is the salvation of man from sin and eternal death, resurrection to new life, realized.

God is called Truth and Love. The name of Truth emphasizes Divine justice: He is the Judge, punishing for evil and rewarding for good. In any case, this is how the Old Testament perceives God. However, the New Testament Gospel reveals to us that God, being fair and just, surpasses all our ideas of justice: “Do not call God just,” writes St. Isaac the Syrian. – Although David calls Him just and just, the Son revealed to us that He is rather good and gracious... Why does a person call God just when in the chapter about the prodigal son... he reads that at one contrition that the son showed, the father ran and fell on his neck and gave him power over all his wealth?.. Where is the justice of God? Is it because we are sinners, and Christ died for us?.. Where is the reward for our deeds?” The New Testament complements the Old Testament idea of ​​the justice of God with the teaching of His love, which surpasses all justice. “God is love,” says the holy Apostle John the Theologian (1 John 4:18). This is the most sublime definition of God, the truest that can be said about Him. As St. Gregory the Theologian says, this name is “more pleasing to God than any other name.”

The Bible also contains names of God, borrowed from nature and which are not His characteristics, not attempts to define His properties, but, as it were, symbols and analogies that have an auxiliary meaning. God is compared to the sun, star, fire, wind, water, dew, cloud, stone, rock, fragrance. Christ is spoken of as the Shepherd, the Sheep, the Lamb, the Way, the Door, the image of God. All these names are simple and specific, they are borrowed from everyday reality, from everyday life. But their meaning is the same as in the parables of Christ, when under the images of a pearl, a tree, leaven in dough, seeds in a field, we guess something infinitely greater and more significant.

In many texts of the Holy Scriptures, God is spoken of as a humanoid being, that is, as having a face, eyes, ears, arms, shoulders, wings, legs, breath; it is said that God turns or turns away, remembers or forgets, is angry or calms down, is surprised, grieves, hates, walks, hears. This anthropomorphism is based on experience personal encounter with God as a living being. Trying to express this experience, man resorted to earthly words and images. In the biblical language there are almost no abstract concepts that play such an important role in the language of speculative philosophy: when it was necessary to designate a certain period of time, they did not say “epoch” or “period” - they said “hour”, “day”, “year” or “century”; when it was necessary to talk about the material and spiritual world, they did not say “matter” and “spiritual reality,” but “heaven” and “earth.” Biblical language, unlike philosophical language, has extreme concreteness precisely because the experience of the biblical God was the experience of a personal meeting, and not abstract speculative speculation. The ancients felt God next to them - He was their king, their leader, He was present at their meetings. And when David says, “The Lord has heard my prayer” (Ps. 6:10), this does not mean that God did not hear before, but now he has heard: God has always heard, it’s just that man did not feel it before, but now he feels it. And the words “show Your face to Your servant” (Ps. 30:17) are not a request that God, Who was not there before, suddenly appear here, because He is present always and everywhere, but that a person who had not previously noticed God, I was able to see, feel, know, meet Him.

In the Bible, God is repeatedly called the Father, and people are His children: “Only You are our Father, for Abraham does not recognize us, and Israel does not recognize us as theirs; But You, O Lord, are our Father; from all eternity Your name is our Redeemer” (Isa. 63:16). In recent years, there has been increasing talk in the Protestant world that since God is genderless, He should not be called “Father.” Some representatives of so-called feminist theology insist that God is equally Mother, and in the Lord's Prayer they say “Our Father and Mother” instead of “Our Father”, and when translating the Holy Scriptures in those places, where we are talking about God, replace the pronoun “He” with “He-She” (He-She). These absurd distortions of the biblical concept of God arise from a failure to understand the fact that the division into two sexes exists in the human and animal worlds, but not in the Divine being. This is a kind of pseudo-anthropomorphism that has little in common with biblical anthropomorphism. The only thing that is indisputable for us is that, appearing to the people of Israel, God revealed himself with the name Father. It is also obvious that when God became incarnate, He became not a woman, but a man—Jesus Christ.

Properties of God

It is difficult to talk about the properties of One whose very nature is beyond words. Nevertheless, based on the actions of God in the created world, man can make assumptions and inferences regarding the properties of God. According to St. John of Damascus, God is beginningless, infinite, eternal, constant, uncreated, immutable, unchangeable, simple, uncomplicated, incorporeal, invisible, intangible, indescribable, limitless, inaccessible to the mind, immense, incomprehensible, good, righteous, Creator of all things, Almighty, Almighty, All-Seeing, Provider of everything, Lord of everything.

Beginninglessness

The originlessness of God means that He does not have any higher principle or reason for His existence above Him, but He Himself is the cause of everything. He does not need anything extraneous, is free from external coercion and influence:

“Who understood the spirit of the Lord and was His counselor and taught Him? With whom does He consult, and who admonishes Him and instructs Him in the path of righteousness, and teaches Him knowledge, and shows Him the path of wisdom? (Isa. 40:13-14)

Infinity

Infinity and limitlessness mean that God exists outside the categories of space, free from any limitation and lack. It cannot be measured, It cannot be compared or compared with anyone or anything. God is eternal, that is, he exists outside the categories of time, for Him there is no past, present or future: “I am the same, I am the first and I am the last,” says God in the Old Testament (Is. 48:10); ”

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, says the Lord, who is and who was and who is to come,” we read from John the Theologian (Rev. 1:8).

Having no beginning or end in time, God appears uncreated- no one created Him: “Before Me there was no God and after Me there will not be” (Is. 43:10).

Immutability

God has constancy, immutability and immutability in the sense that “with Him there is no variation or shadow of turning” (James 1:17), He is always true to Himself: “God is not a man, that He should lie, and not a son of man, that He must change” (Num. 23:19). In His being, actions, properties, He always remains the same.

Indivisibility

God is simple and uncomplicated, that is, he is not divided into parts and does not consist of parts. The Trinity of Persons in God, which will be discussed in the next chapter, is not a division of the single Divine nature into parts: the nature of God remains indivisible. The concept of the perfection of the Divine excludes the possibility of dividing God into parts, since any partial existence is not perfection. What does the essence of simple nature mean? - asks Saint Gregory the Theologian. And, trying to answer this question, he says that the mind, if it wants to explore the infinite God, finds neither the beginning nor the end, because the infinite extends beyond the beginning and the end and is not contained between them; and when the mind rushes up or down, trying to find some limits or boundaries to its ideas about God, it does not find them. The absence of any boundaries, divisions and limits is simplicity in God.

Incorporeality

God is called incorporeal because He is not a material substance and does not have a body, but is spiritual in nature. “God is Spirit,” says Christ to the Samaritan woman (John 4:24).

“The Lord is the Spirit,” repeats the Apostle Paul, “and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17).

God is free from all materiality: He is not somewhere, is not nowhere, is not everywhere. When talking about everywhere-the presence of God, then this is again an attempt to express the subjective experience of man who, Where whatever he is, everywhere meets God: “Where shall I go from Thy Spirit, and where shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend to heaven - You are there; If I go down to the underworld, you will be there too. If I take the wings of the morning and move to the edge of the sea, there Your hand will lead me, and Your right hand will hold me” (Ps. 139:7-10). But subjectively, a person can feel God everywhere, or he may not feel Him anywhere - at the same time, God Himself remains completely outside the category of “somewhere”, outside the category of “place”.

Incomprehensibility

God is invisible, intangible, indescribable, incomprehensible, immense, inaccessible. No matter how much we try to explore God, no matter how much we talk about His names and properties, He still remains elusive to the mind, because it surpasses all our thoughts. “It is difficult to understand God, but it is impossible to express it,” writes Plato. Saint Gregory the Theologian, polemicizing with the Hellenic sage, says: “It is impossible to say, and even more impossible to understand.” Saint Basil the Great says: “I know that God exists. But what His essence is - I consider this beyond understanding. So how can I be saved? Through faith. And he is content with the knowledge that God exists (and not that He is)… The consciousness of the incomprehensibility of God is knowledge of His essence.” God is invisible - “no one has ever seen Him” (John 1:18) in the sense that no one could comprehend His essence, embrace Him with their sight, perception, or mind. A person can join God, become involved in Him, but he can never understand God, because “to understand” means in some sense to exhaust.

Trinity

Christians believe in God the Trinity - Father, son And Holy Spirit. - these are not three gods, but one God in three Persons, that is, in three independent personal (personal) existences. This is the only case where 1 = 3 and 3 = 1. What would be absurd to mathematics and logic is the cornerstone of faith. A Christian joins the mystery of the Trinity not through rational knowledge, but through repentance, that is, a complete change and renewal of the mind, heart, feelings and our entire being (the Greek word for “repentance” is metanoia– literally means “change of mind”). It is impossible to join the Trinity until the mind becomes enlightened and transformed.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not an invention of theologians - it is a revealed truth. At the moment of the Baptism of Jesus Christ, God for the first time clearly reveals Himself to the world as Unity in three Persons:

“When all the people were baptized, and Jesus, having been baptized, prayed, the heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on Him in bodily form like a dove, and there was a voice from heaven, saying: You are My beloved Son, in You I am well pleased” (Luke . 3:21-22).

The voice of the Father is heard from heaven, the Son stands in the waters of the Jordan, the Spirit descends on the Son. Jesus Christ repeatedly spoke about His unity with the Father, that He was sent into the world by the Father, and called Himself His Son (John 6-8). He also promised the disciples to send the Comforter Spirit, who proceeds from the Father (John 14:16-17; 15:26). Sending his disciples to preach, He tells them: “Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). Also in the writings of the apostles it is said about God the Trinity: “Three testify in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these Three are One” (1 John 5:7).

Only after the coming of Christ did God reveal himself to people as the Trinity. The ancient Jews sacredly preserved their faith in one God, and they would not have been able to understand the idea of ​​​​the trinity of the Godhead, because such an idea would have been perceived by them clearly as tritheism. In an era when polytheism reigned supreme in the world, the mystery of the Trinity was hidden from human eyes; it was, as it were, hidden in the deepest core of the truth about the unity of the Divine.

However, already in the Old Testament we find some hints of the plurality of Persons in God. The first verse of the Bible - “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1) - in the Hebrew text contains the word “God” in the plural ( Elohim– lit. “Gods”), while the verb “created” is singular. Before the creation of man, God says, as if consulting with someone: “Let us make man in our image and after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). Who can He consult with if not Himself? WITH ? But man was created not in the image of angels, but “in the image of God” (Gen. 1:27). Ancient Christian interpreters argued that here we are talking about a meeting between the Persons of the Holy Trinity. In the same way, when Adam ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God spoke to Himself: “Behold, Adam has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:22). And at the moment of the construction of the Tower of Babel, the Lord says: “Let us go down and confuse their language, so that one does not understand the speech of the other” (Genesis 11:7).

Some episodes of the Old Testament are considered in the Christian tradition as symbolizing the trinity of the Godhead. The Lord appears to Abraham near the oak grove of Mamre. “He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold three men stood against him. Seeing, he ran towards them from the entrance to the tent and bowed to the ground and said: Master! If I have found favor in Your sight, do not pass by Your servant... but I will bring bread, and you will strengthen your hearts, then go, as you are passing by your servant... And they said to him: Where is Sarah your wife? He answered: here, in the tent. And one of them said: I will be with you again at this same time, and Sarah will have a son” (Gen. 18:2-3, 5, 9-10). Abraham meets Three, but worships One. You = You, pass = go, said = said, 1 = 3...

The prophet Isaiah describes his vision of the Lord, around whom the Seraphim stood, crying out, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.” The Lord says: “Whom should I send? And who will go for Us?” To which the prophet replies: “Here I am, send me” (Is. 6:1-8). Again equality between “Me” and “Us”. In the Old Testament, in addition, there are many prophecies speaking about the equality of the Son of the Messiah and God the Father, for example: “The Lord said to Me: You are My Son, today I have begotten You” (Ps. 2:7) or “The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand... From the womb before the morning star I begot you” (Ps. 109:1, 3).

The cited biblical texts, however, only foretell the mystery of the Trinity, but do not speak about it directly. This mystery remains under a veil, which, according to the Apostle Paul, can only be removed by Christ (cf. 2 Cor. 3:15-16).

The Fullness of Divine Life in the Trinity

To make the doctrine of the Trinity more accessible to understanding, the Fathers sometimes resorted to analogies and comparisons. For example, the Trinity can be compared to the sun: when we say “sun,” we mean the celestial body itself, as well as sunlight and solar heat. Light and heat are independent “hypostases,” but they do not exist in isolation from the sun. But also the sun does not exist without heat and light... Another analogy: water, a source and a stream: one cannot exist without the other... A person has a mind and a word: the mind cannot exist without a soul and a word, otherwise it would be without- stuffy and demon-verbal, but both soul and word cannot be without-smart. In God there is the Father, the Word and the Spirit, and, as the defenders of “consubstantiality” said at the Council of Nicaea, if God the Father ever existed without God the Word, then He was demon-verbal or Not-reasonable.

But analogies of this kind, of course, also cannot explain anything essentially: sunlight, for example, is neither a person nor an independent being. The easiest way would be to explain the mystery of the Trinity, as St. Spyridon of Trimythous, a participant in the Council of Nicaea, did. According to legend, being asked how it could be that Three could simultaneously be One, instead of answering, he picked up a brick and squeezed it. From the clay that softened in the hands of the saint, a flame burst upward, and water flowed down. “Just as in this brick there is fire and water,” said the saint, “so in one God there are three Persons.”

Another version of the same story (or perhaps a story about another similar event) is contained in the acts of the Council of Nicaea. One philosopher argued for a long time with the Fathers of this Council, trying to logically prove that the Son cannot be consubstantial with the Father. Tired of the long debate, everyone was about to leave, when suddenly a certain simple old shepherd (identified with Saint Spyridon) entered the hall and declared that he was ready to argue with the philosopher and refute all his arguments. After which, turning to the philosopher and looking sternly at him, he said: “Listen, philosopher, there is one God, the Creator of heaven and earth, who created everything by the power of the Son and the assistance of the Holy Spirit. This Son of God became incarnate, lived among people, died for us and rose again. Do not labor in vain to look for evidence of what is comprehended only by faith, but answer: do you believe in the Son of God?” Struck by these words, the philosopher could only find something to say: “I believe.” The elder said: “If you believe, then come with me to church and there I will introduce you to this true faith.” The philosopher immediately stood up and followed the elder. As he left, he said to those present: “While they were proving it to me in words, I opposed words to words, but when divine power appeared from the mouth of this old man, words could not resist power, because man cannot resist God.”

God the Trinity is not some kind of frozen existence, it is not peace, immobility, staticity. “I am who I am,” God says to Moses (Ex. 3:14). Existing means existing, living. In God there is fullness of life, and life is movement, appearance, revelation. Some Divine names, as we have seen, have a dynamic character: God is compared to fire (Exodus 24:17), water (Jeremiah 2:13), wind (Genesis 1:2). In the biblical book of Song of Songs, a woman is looking for her lover, who is running away from her. This image is reinterpreted in the Christian tradition (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa) as the soul’s pursuit of God, who is forever running away from it. The soul seeks God, but as soon as it finds it, it loses it again, tries to comprehend Him, but cannot comprehend it, tries to contain Him, but cannot contain Him. He moves with great “speed” and always exceeds our strength and our capabilities. To find and catch up with God means to become Divine yourself. Just as, according to physical laws, if any material body began to move at the speed of light, it would itself turn into light, so the soul: the closer it is to God, the more it is filled with light and becomes luminiferous...

Holy Scripture says that “God is love” (1 John 4:8; 4:16). But there is no love without a loved one. Love presupposes the existence of another. A lonely isolated monad can love only itself: itself-love is not love. The egocentric unit is not a person. Just as a person cannot realize himself as a person-person except through communication with other personalities, so there cannot be a personal existence in God except through love for another personal existence. God the Trinity is the fullness of love, each Person-Hypostasis is turned in love to two other Persons-Hypostases. The persons in the Trinity recognize themselves as “I and You”: “You, Father, are in Me, and I in You,” says Christ to the Father (John 17:21). “All that the Father has is Mine, therefore I said that the Spirit will take of Mine and declare it to you,” says Christ about the Holy Spirit (John 16:14). “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,” so begins the Gospel of John (John 1:1). In Greek and Slavic texts there is a preposition “to”: The word was “to God” ( pros ton Theon). The personal nature of the relationship between the Son (Word) and the Father is emphasized: the Son is not only born from Father, He not only exists with the Father, but He is addressed to the Father. Thus, each Hypostasis in the Trinity is addressed to two other Hypostases.

On the icon of the Most Holy Trinity by St. Andrei Rublev, as well as on others of the same iconographic type, we see three angels sitting at a table on which stands the Chalice - a symbol of the atoning sacrifice of Christ. The plot of the icon is borrowed from the mentioned incident with Abraham (“Hospitality of Abraham” is the name of this iconographic version), and all the Persons of the Trinity are represented facing each other and at the same time to the Chalice. The icon seems to capture that Divine love that reigns within the Trinity and the highest manifestation of which is the redemptive feat of the Son. This, in the words of St. Philaret (Drozdov), “crucifying love of the Father, crucifying love of the Son, triumphant love of the Holy Spirit by the power of the cross.” The sacrifice of God the Son on the cross is also a feat of love between the Father and the Holy Spirit.

God the Creator

One of the main tenets of Christianity is the doctrine of God the Creator, who, in contrast to Plato’s Demiurge, who organizes the cosmos from some primary substance, creates the Universe out of nothing. This is stated in the Old Testament: “Look at heaven and earth, and seeing everything that is in them, know that God created everything out of nothing” (2 Mac. 7:28). Everything that exists came into being thanks to the free will of the Creator: “He spoke and it was done, He commanded and it appeared” (Ps. 32:9).

All three Persons of the Holy Trinity participated in the creation, as was prophetically stated already in the Old Testament: “By the Word of the Lord the heavens were created, and by the Spirit of His mouth was all their power” (Ps. 32:6). The Apostle John speaks about the creative role of God the Word at the beginning of the Gospel: “Through Him all things began to be, and without Him nothing began to be” (John 1:3). The Bible says about the Spirit: “And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters” (Gen. 1:2). The Word and the Spirit, in the figurative expression of Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, are the “two hands” of the Father. This is about with-action, joint creativity of the Three: Their will is one, but each has its own action. “The Father is the original cause of everything that exists,” says St. Basil the Great. “The Son is the creative cause, the Holy Spirit is the perfecting cause, so that by the will of the Father everything exists, by the action of the Son everything is brought into being, by the presence of the Spirit everything is accomplished.” In other words, in creation the Father plays the role of the First Cause of everything, the Son Logos (Word) plays the role of the Demiurge-Creator, and the Holy Spirit completes, that is, brings to perfection, everything created.

It is no coincidence that when speaking about the creative role of the Son, the Fathers of the Church prefer to call Him the Word: It reveals the Father, reveals the Father, and, like any word, It is addressed to someone, in this case to all creation. “No one has ever seen God: the Only Begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has revealed” (John 1:18). The Son revealed the Father to created being; thanks to the Son, the Father’s love was poured out onto created being, and it received life. Already in Philo of Alexandria, the Logos is a mediator between God and creation, and the Christian tradition directly speaks of the creative power of the Logos. In the same sense, the words from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah are interpreted: “My word, which proceeds from my mouth, does not return to me void, but accomplishes what I please, and accomplishes what I sent it for” (Is. 55 :eleven). At the same time, Logos is the plan and law according to which everything was created, the rational basis of things, thanks to which everything has purposefulness, meaningfulness, harmony and perfection.

However, created being is foreign to God; it is not an emanation - an outpouring of the Divine. The divine essence did not undergo any division or change during the creation of the world: it did not mix with creation and did not dissolve in it. God is the Artist, and creation is His picture, in which we can recognize His “brush”, His “hand”, see reflections of His creative mind, but the Artist did not disappear in His picture: He remained Who He was before its creation.

For what reason did God create everything? Patristic theology answers this question: “according to the abundance of love and goodness.” “As soon as the good and most good God was not content with contemplating Himself, but out of an abundance of goodness wanted something to happen that in the future would benefit from His benefits and be involved in His goodness, He brings from non-existence into existence and creates everything,” writes the venerable John of Damascus. In other words, God wanted there to be something else participating in His bliss, participating in His love.

Creation of Man

Man is the crown of creation, the pinnacle of the creative process of the three Persons of the Divine Trinity. Before creating man, They consult with each other: “Let Us make man in Our image and after Our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). The “Eternal Council” of the Three was necessary not only because man is born as a higher being, endowed with reason and will, ruling over the entire visible world, but also because he, being absolutely free and independent of God, will break the commandment and fall from paradise bliss, and the sacrifice of the Son of God on the cross will be needed to open the way for him back to God. Intending to create man, God sees his future destiny, because nothing is hidden from God’s gaze: He sees the future as the present.

But if God foresaw the fall of Adam in advance, doesn’t this mean that Adam is innocent, since everything happened according to the will of the Creator? Answering this question, St. John of Damascus speaks of the difference between God’s “foreknowledge” and “predestination”: “God knows everything, but does not predetermine everything. For He knows in advance what is in our power, but He does not predetermine it. For He does not want evil to happen, but He does not force good.” God's foreknowledge, therefore, is not a fate that predetermines the fate of man. Adam was not “destined” to sin - the latter depended only on his free will. When we sin, God knows it in advance, but God's foreknowledge in no way absolves us of responsibility for sin. At the same time, God’s mercy is so great that He expresses an initial willingness to sacrifice Himself in order to redeem humanity from the consequences of sin.

God created man “from the dust of the ground,” that is, from matter. Man is, therefore, flesh of the flesh of the earth, from which he is molded by the hands of God. But God also “breathed into him the breath of life, and man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7). Being “earthly,” earthly, a person receives a certain Divine principle, a guarantee of his involvement in Divine existence: “Having created Adam in His image and likeness, God through inspiration put into him grace, enlightenment and the ray of the All-Holy Spirit” (Anastasius Sinaite). The “breath of life” can be understood as the Holy Spirit (both “breath” and “spirit” are referred to by the same term in the Greek Bible pneuma). Man is involved in the Divine by the very act of creation and therefore fundamentally differs from all other living beings: he not only occupies the highest position in the hierarchy of animals, but is a “demigod” for the animal world. The Holy Fathers call man a “mediator” between the visible and invisible worlds, a “mixture” of both worlds. They also call it, following the ancient philosophers, microcosm - a small world, a small cosmos, uniting in itself the entirety of created existence.

Man, according to St. Basil the Great, “had a leadership in the likeness of angels” and “in his life he was like the archangels.” Being, however, the core of the created world, combining the spiritual and physical principles, he in some sense surpassed the angels: wanting to emphasize the greatness of man, St. Gregory the Theologian calls him “created god.” By creating man in His image and likeness, God creates a being called become a god. The man is godman according to its potential.

Skepticism regarding the concept of God

Atheism

The word “atheism” aqews means godlessness; Therefore, an atheist in the proper sense of the word we must call someone who does not believe, does not recognize God, who thinks and says that there is no God and cannot exist. But in our ordinary speech, the word “atheism” is used very often and in very diverse meanings, however, close to each other.

1. We call an atheist a person who completely denies the truth of God's existence.
2. We very often call atheists those in whom we notice a radical perversion of the knowledge of God, a distorted view of the nature of God and His relationship to the world and man in its very essence. Therefore, dualism, pantheism and even deism are sometimes subsumed under atheism.
3. Pagans and people close in their views to them are called atheists.
4. Very often even Protestants and all Protestant sectarians are called atheists for their disrespect for the Mother of God and the saints.
5. If admirers of the true religion and those possessing true knowledge of God call the enemies of the true religion, apostates from it, and those who are not right-thinking, atheists, then there have been cases when, on the contrary, people with exalted and pure concepts of God were accused of atheism by those who themselves had other, false concepts about God, a false religion. Thus, the Greeks in the classical era accused of godlessness those philosophers who recognized the tales of the gods and folk religion as fiction of poets. Socrates, Plato, Anaxagoras were accused of atheism by their Greek contemporaries, despite the fact that they proclaimed the truth of the existence of one God.
6. Finally, atheism often includes skepticism, both absolute and relative. The first, denying absolutely any possibility of knowing anything, of course, thereby denies the possibility of religion. The second, relative, allowing the possibility of only experimental knowledge, denies the possibility of knowing anything from the supersensible world (so-called agnosticism). Obliged by the essence of his worldview about God to assert that He cannot know about anything, he involuntarily somehow internally, albeit tacitly, agrees with those who deny the existence of God.

From the book of the Hieromartyr Archpriest Mikhail Cheltsov “ “

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What is God?

The most powerful, influential and numerous of all the main ones existing today, ahead of Buddhism and Islam, is Christianity. The essence of religion, which breaks down into so-called churches (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and others), as well as many sects, lies in the veneration and worship of one divine being, in other words, the God-man, whose name is Jesus Christ. Christians believe that he is the true son of God, that he is the Messiah, that he was sent to Earth for the salvation of the world and all humanity.

The religion of Christianity originated in distant Palestine in the first century AD. e. Already in the first years of its existence it had many adherents. The main reason for the emergence of Christianity, according to clergy, was the preaching activity of a certain Jesus Christ, who, being essentially a half-god, half-man, came to us in human form in order to bring people the truth, and even scientists do not deny his existence. About the first coming of Christ (the second of the Christian world is just awaiting) four sacred books have been written, which are called the Gospels. The sacred writings written by his apostles (Matthew, John, as well as Mark and Luke, disciples of the other two and Peter) tell about the miraculous birth of the boy Jesus in the glorious city of Bethlehem, about how he grew up, how he began to preach.

The main ideas of his new religious teaching were the following: the belief that he, Jesus, really is the Messiah, that he is the son of God, that there will be his second coming, there will be the end of the world and the resurrection from the dead. With his sermons, he called for loving one's neighbors and helping those in need. His Divine origin was proven by the miracles with which he accompanied his teachings. Many sick people were healed by his word or touch, he raised the dead three times, walked on water, turned it into wine and fed about five thousand people with just two fish and five cakes.

He expelled all merchants from the Jerusalem Temple, thereby showing that dishonest people have no place in holy and noble deeds. Then there was the betrayal of Judas Iscariot, accusations of deliberate blasphemy and brazen encroachment on the royal throne and a death sentence. He died, being crucified on the cross, having taken upon himself torment for all human sins. Three days later, Jesus Christ was resurrected and then ascended to heaven. About the religion Christianity says the following: there are two places, two special spaces that are inaccessible to people during earthly life. and paradise. Hell is a place of terrible torment, located somewhere in the bowels of the earth, and heaven is a place of universal bliss, and only God himself will decide who is sent where.

The religion of Christianity is based on several dogmas. The first is that the Second is that he is trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). The birth of Jesus occurred by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; God became incarnate in the Virgin Mary. Jesus was crucified and then died to atone for human sins, after which he was resurrected. At the end of time Christ will come to judge the world and the dead will rise. Divine and human natures are inextricably united in the image of Jesus Christ.

All religions of the world have certain canons and commandments, but Christianity preaches to love God with all your heart, and also to love your neighbor as yourself. Without loving your neighbor, you cannot love God.

The religion of Christianity has its adherents in almost every country, half of all Christians are concentrated in Europe, including Russia, one quarter in North America, one sixth in South America, and significantly fewer believers in Africa, Australia and

3.612 Someone is inclined to believe that we have 3 Gods: Father, Son and Spirit, united in their feelings, actions, love for man... Someone believes that God is One, but one in three persons. And is it correct to believe that among Muslims Allah is “one” because he is “one in one person”?

So, are there three Gods or one God? Today it seems the whole world does not have a clear answer to this question. No matter what you say, there will always be someone who will reproach you. In the end, man will never be able to understand the real nature of God because he stands far below Him both in knowledge and in the abilities of cognition. And in the universe there are such forms of nature that man has never dreamed of.

Why did the Jews have "One-One" God? Only in contrast to pagan polytheism! What does "One in Three Persons" mean? Is it one playing three roles simultaneously (or alternately)? Is this some kind of “three-faced Janus”?

Or are they still three separate Personalities, acting together and unidirectionally, making up one Deity?

I don't know. And NOBODY knows, no matter how hard people try to assert and impose their knowledge on others.

Jesus Christ and the Father are one;

- Jesus Christ is the true and eternal God, in whom dwelt ALL the fullness of divinity bodily;

- There is a God, this God has a Word (the Son or Jesus Christ), and this Word itself is God, and this Word has eternally lived and dwells “in the bosom” of God;

- The God of the Bible is ONE God(s) (plural).

- Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all called God.

Is it difficult to combine all this? Me too, but this is the truth. And the Bible says that ENOUGH has been revealed to us to understand God (), and we cannot think out or invent anything else beyond what God has revealed to us (1 Cor 4:6).

If someone, knowing all this, was unable to find the right words at the right moment to express his thought, then we should generously forgive this.