Christianity
Christian theologian Alister McGrath writes that there are good reasons to suggest that a "personal god" is integral to the Christian outlook, but that one has to understand it is an analogy. "To say that God is like a person is to affirm the divine ability and willingness to relate to others. This does not imply that God is human, or located at a specific point in the universe."
In the case of the Christian belief in the Trinity, whether the Holy Spirit is an impersonal god – that is, a "force...often likened to electricity" by some – or a personal one, is the subject of dispute, with experts in pneumatology debating the matter. Jesus (or God the Son) and God the Father are believed to be, by different groups, two persons or aspects of the same god: Jesus is of the same ousia or substance as God the Father, manifested in three hypostases or persons (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit).
Moreover, the belief in Holy Communion and Last Supper implies an intensely communal understanding of religion which very often goes beyond the boundaries of individuality, in what theologians have called the "mystical body".
Nontrinitarian Christians dispute that Jesus is a "hypostasis" or person of God.
Read more about this topic: Personal God
Famous quotes containing the word christianity:
“The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to the house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“Wherever there are walls I shall inscribe this eternal accusation against Christianity upon them—I can write in letters which make even the blind see ... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty—I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind....”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)