God and the Holy Trinity
Understand how the Standards describe who and what God is — one simple, infinite Being subsisting in three coequal persons — and why this knowledge stands at the head of all Christian doctrine.
Having fixed our chief end on glorifying and enjoying God, the Standards turn at once to the God himself. Before sin, salvation, or the Christian life can be rightly grasped, we must know who this God is — and the answer the Catechisms give is at once the simplest and the most inexhaustible in all of theology.
What God is
The Catechisms answer the question "What is God?" not with a definition that contains him, but with a confession that confesses him beyond containing. He is a Spirit, and so without body, parts, or passions; and every perfection ascribed to him — wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, truth — belongs to him infinitely, eternally, and unchangeably. These are not parts assembled into a divine whole but the one undivided being of God considered from different angles.
The Larger Catechism expands the same confession, piling up terms such as all-sufficient, incomprehensible, everywhere present, and most holy, until the very abundance of the language teaches its own lesson: God is known truly but never exhaustively. To say he is infinite in his being is to say that the creature's knowledge of him, however real and saving, always rests upon a mystery it cannot survey.
One only living and true God
Against every form of polytheism, the Standards insist that there is but one only, the living and true God. This is no bare numerical claim but the foundation of worship: because God alone is God, he alone is to be feared, trusted, and adored. The unity of God guards the whole system that follows, for the decree, creation, providence, and redemption are all the works of this one undivided will, never the bargaining of rival powers.
Three persons, one God
Within the unity of the Godhead there are three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — one in substance, equal in power and glory. They are distinguished not by any difference of being, for the divine essence is one and undivided, but by their personal properties: the Father begets, the Son is eternally begotten, and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son. These relations are eternal and unchangeable, belonging to who God is and not merely to what God does.
The Larger Catechism is careful to show that the deity of the Son and the Spirit is no later addition but the plain testimony of Scripture, which ascribes to them the names, attributes, works, and worship proper to God alone. So the doctrine of the Trinity is not a riddle laid upon the simpler truth of God's oneness; it is that very oneness confessed in its fullness, the living God as he has made himself known.
Study the full text, Scripture proofs, and commentary on each:
- Read WSC Q4 alongside WLC Q7 and list what the Larger Catechism adds; ask why a fuller description might be fitting in a catechism meant for teachers.
- On the question pages for WLC Q11, trace the Scripture proofs and notice how they argue for the deity of the Son and the Spirit from names, attributes, works, and worship.
- Compare WSC Q6 with WCF chapter 2, section 3, and consider how the language of personal properties guards both the unity and the distinction within the Godhead.
See how this doctrine is stated across the Reformed confessions side by side.
God and the Holy Trinity →