It is very difficult if not impossible to talk about God, to say what God is, or to describe God.
Some people say that all you can say about God is what God isn't. This is sometimes called the 'via negativa' = 'the negative way'. Thus you can say that:
It takes faith to tell us what God is like. Thus faith tells us that God is loving, compassionate, merciful, loves justice,... and so on. But God is always bigger than any way in which we can try to describe him.
In fact some people point out that even to say 'him' or 'her' of God is to limit God to merely human terms. God is neither 'he' nor 'she', but both 'he' and 'she' and more. God is God. And that might seem to be that.
But the Church has also developed over the years a way of talking about God.
And that is the Holy Trinity.
The teaching about the Holy Trinity (also called the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity) is quite clear that there is only one God. But we may talk about the one God in terms of God's having three aspects or faces or (to use an old word) three persons.
These are God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
God is Father in relation to the Son, whom Christians recognise as Jesus the Christ.
Jesus is God in human form who lived an historical life on earth but who came from heaven and returned to heaven. Jesus is the human face of God whom God gave to those who live on earth so that we might have a way of knowing God.
The Holy Spirit (also called The Holy Ghost, or the Paraclete (= the Advocate or the Comforter)) is felt as the power of God at work in the world today, particularly in the Church. The Spirit is sometimes spoken of as the Wind or the Breath of God.
The Christian creeds bear witness to the Church's teaching about the Holy Trinity.
We sometimes speak about the Tri-une God (that is 'three-one') or the Three-in-One. And there is a hymn that we sometimes sing which speaks of the three persons of the Trinity as being 'consubstantial' (that is, being together in substance) and coeternal (that is, being together through time and eternity). But then the ideas of substance and time that are being used here belong to a way of looking at the world which has long since passed from being in daily use.
When you start digging into the teaching about the Holy Trinity it soon all starts getting very complicated.
© J D Yule 2003