Christianity 101

Basic truths about God, man and creation

When I was teaching a class on Milton’s Paradise Lost once, a student asked me who the Devil was. She’d come through a very expensive Western education without ever having been taught the basics of the religion that built Western civilisation. As the West descends further into darkness and disorder, the need for clear and concise summaries of the fundamentals of Christianity will only grow.

So this article is the first of a three-part series explaining the basics of the Creed. It will explain the fundamental truths everyone needs to know about man, God and creation. God willing, this will be clear and concise enough to help some people. As Pascal quipped, if I’d had more time, I’d have made it even shorter.

Why we were created

God created us to glorify Him and to earn eternal happiness with Him in heaven. We’re destined for this because we have spiritual souls directly created by God and can find perfect happiness only in God. This consists in the beatific vision: seeing God in all His goodness and beauty, loving Him and enjoying His presence for eternity.

We don’t have a right to this, but while we’re on earth God gives us the grace to live in such a way that he will reward us with it. To do this, we have to know, love and serve Him in a supernatural way. And this starts with understanding the truths He has revealed to us so that we know our duties to Him:

• God exists

• He rewards the good and punishes the wicked

• The are three Persons in the one God

• The Son of God became man and died for our salvation.

By studying religion, we know God and prepare ourselves to gain heaven. Knowledge about God is the most important kind of knowledge we can have.

To help us do this properly, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, established the Catholic Church to act as His representative in teaching men about God. Christ is Truth Himself so cannot possibly teach error and thereby fail souls. That is why the Catholic Church is infallible when defining matters of faith and morals authoritatively to bind the faithful.

What we know about God

God’s existence can be proven with certainty. Our natural reason tells us that there must be a Necessary Being. The world exists, and causality exists in it. But all things efficiently caused are contingent upon their causes, and the number of finite causes cannot possibly be infinite, so the only sufficient reason and explanation for their existence is a necessary being. The universe didn’t create itself.

And reason can also prove many things about God in addition to His necessity. For example, reason can prove His infinity, unity, simplicity and spirituality. The absolutely infinite perfection of God also entails His divine attributes of Being (eternity, ubiquity, immensity, immutability), Intellect (knowledge and wisdom) and Will (freedom, omnipotence, holiness, goodness, mercy, justice, veracity, fidelity). All this is purely logical.

Thinking about God’s perfections helps us to love Him:

• By thinking of God’s infinite goodness, we are inspired to love Him not just because He is good to us but because He is Himself all-good.

• By thinking of how God is all-present, we remember to avoid sin.

• By thinking of how God is all-knowing, we remember how none of our thoughts or desires is hidden from Him.

• By thinking of His providence, we can have total confidence in Him no matter what trials and temptations we face.

To help us know Him and His perfections more clearly and profoundly, God also gave us divine revelations going beyond what natural reason alone can learn. These are contained in the Bible (the written word of God) and in divine Tradition (the unwritten word of God, handed down orally by those received it from God: the apostles).

Why mystery is necessary

Since God is the Supreme Being, He can’t have an equal. That means polytheism is false. But Revelation tells us that the one God is three distinct Persons. Aristotle and many other philosophers proved God’s existence, but they could not have known this. It is a truth undiscoverable by natural reason.

At the last supper, Jesus Christ mentioned the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity by name: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. They all possess the same divine nature with all its infinite perfections, so they are perfectly equal to each other. This is a mystery because we can’t fully understand it, but that doesn’t mean it’s irrational.

Actually, it’s too rational for our finite minds to grasp. Only God can fully comprehend God. We believe it because God has taught it to us, and He can neither deceive nor be deceived. It would be irrational not to submit to His teaching authority. Even in the natural realm, there are many things we don’t understand fully whose existence we acknowledge. No scientist totally understands gravity or electricity, for example.

The Doxology prayer honours the Most Blessed Trinity: “Glory be to the Father and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” And we profess our faith in this mystery whenever we make the Sign of the Cross.

The reality of good and evil

Except from God, everything was created out of nothingness by His infinite power. The six “days” of creation might have been periods of thousands of years in duration, and our bodies (not our souls) might have evolved. God also keeps everything in existence after creating it. Without His divine conservation, everything in existence would blink into nothingness, just like music stops when the musician stops playing. Creation is not a watch that God wound up then left alone.

Before He created men, God created the angels: another class of intellectual beings but without bodies, unlike man. He endowed them with great perfections, especially profound intelligence. And he wanted them to share His supernatural happiness in heaven by first meriting this privilege by their own free actions.

Led by St. Michael, many were faithful and admitted to heaven. Their leader was St. Michael. But others (roughly a third, according to the Bible) rebelled against God. Their leaders was Lucifer, now called Satan.

St. Thomas Aquinas taught that these rebel angels committed sin in either of two ways:

• by being so satisfied with their natural perfections that they rejected the supernatural happiness to which God called them

• or by desiring to attain to supernatural happiness by their natural powers.

Now cast into hell for eternity, the sinful angels are called devils.

The good angels praise and enjoy God in heaven, and Scripture shows that He uses them to help mankind. Each of us has a guardian angel who accompanies us from birth until death, praying for us, inspiring us with good thoughts and helping to protect us from physical and spiritual danger.

God also allows the devils to tempt us. They can’t know our thoughts, but they can work on our imagination. And sometimes God allows the devil to attack a human being by obsession or possession (from inside the body). The devils can’t force us to commit sin, and struggling against them can help us grow in holiness. The lives of the saints show that God allows great temptations because He will always give us enough grace to resist them. No pressure, no diamond.

Why we suffer

Adam and Eve had many privileges, and God planned for their descendants to share these. But the condition was that Adam had to obey God’s command not to eat the fruit of a particular tree — a test like the one the angels had. Adam disobeyed, losing these privileges for himself all his descendants. Since Adam and Eve had no right to these privileges, there was no injustice in God taking them away. Nor was there any injustice in God withholding them from Adam’s descendants.

As a result, all humans being enter the world without the gifts we would have had if Adam had not sinned. This deprivation of sanctifying grace is called original sin, and it means life involves suffering and death. But we use these penalties of Adam’s transgression as opportunities for practicing virtue.

Our Lord was without original sin because he had no earthly father to transmit it to him. The Catholic Church also teaches that His Blessed Mother, Mary was preserved from original sin when she was conceived because of her great dignity as Mother of God. This is called her Immaculate Conception — not the same thing as the virginal conception of Jesus Christ.

God spoke of the Immaculate Conception when he promised a Redeemer to Adam and Even after they sinned. He told them that the Mother of the Redeemer would be at perpetual enmity with the devil: “I will put enmities between thee (the devil) and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head” (Genesis 3:15). The Immaculate Conception means Mary was never in the grasp of the devil even for an instant.

Part two of this series on the Creed will cover sin and redemption. Part three will cover the Catholic Church.