The Christian confessional creed shows that Christians acknowledge
one God and shows how they view the unity of God:
The catholic faith is this, that we venerate one God in a trinity, and the
Trinity in unity. There are three divine persons, the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Spirit, and yet there are not three gods; there is one God.
The Father is a person, the Son another, and the Holy Spirit another,
and yet they have one divinity, equal glory, and coeternal majesty. The
Father, then, is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God; but
just as Christian truth compels us to confess each person individually
as God and Lord, so the catholic religion forbids us to say that there are
three gods or three lords.This is the Christian faith regarding the unity of God. (In the chapter that
discusses the divine Trinity [§§ 163 – 184 ] you will see that the trinity of
God and the unity of God presented in this confession are incompatible.)
[ 2 ] The other nations in the world that possess religion and sound
reason agree that there is one God: all Muslims in their countries; the
Africans in the many countries on their continent; and the Asians as
well, in the many countries on theirs. So too do modern-day Jews. In
the Golden Age, the most ancient people who were religious worshiped
one God, whom they named Jehovah. So did the ancient people in the
following age, up to the time when monarchies were created. In the time
of the monarchies, upper levels of the intellect that had previously been
open, and had been like sanctuaries and temples of worship to the one
God, were increasingly closed off by worldly loves, and then by bodily
loves. The Lord God, in order to unblock those upper levels of the intel-
lect and restore worship of one God, instituted a church among the
descendants of Jacob and set the following precept above all the other
precepts in their religion: “There is to be no other God before my face”
(Exodus 20 : 3 ).
[ 3 ] “Jehovah,” which he named himself anew for the Jews, means the
highest and only Being, and the origin of everything that exists and
occurs in the universe. People in the preclassical period acknowledged
Jove as the highest God (perhaps so named from Jehovah), and deified
many others who made up his court. In the age that followed, however,
sages like Plato and Aristotle admitted that the other [Olympians] were
not gods but different properties, qualities, and attributes of the one
God, called gods because there was divinity in each of them.
§9 god the creator & creation 11