THE CATHOLIC UNDERSTANDING OF GOD AS A PERSON

Is God a Person? What do mean when we say that God is a Person? Precisely on the eleventh day of January 2010, lives were lost to earthquake in Haiti. Many were injured, majority of them poor children. The question many have asked and are still asking is: Where was God when this phenomenon claimed the lives of poor Haitians? Does God actually care for His creatures? Has He feelings and emotions as quality or is he an impersonal being. The question of the personhood of God had been addressed by Philosophers and theologians alike. For example Deism states that God created the world and abandoned it to fate. Christian theology would subscribe to the fact that God is a personal Being. The task before us is to explain what Christian Theology (precisely Catholic Theology) means when it asserts that God is a person?

The Notion of Person
For us to understand the personhood of God, it may be necessary to state the Christian notion of the person. Etymologically speaking, the word Personality derives from Latin Persona (and also from its Greek convertible Prosopon) meaning mask, disguising. In this context, mask that actors wear to mimic people or to project people’s behaviours. Thus Greeco-Latin culture understand the person as one of those universals existing in the mind, and thus man is interpreted in terms of social status.[1] But Christianity views man beyond the social. Saint Thomas Aquinas’ definition depicts the authentic definition of the human person. The person embraces the totality of the individual being, embracing matter, the substantial form (the soul), the accidental forms, and the act of being (actus essendi)[2]

What Do We Mean When We Say That God Is a Person?
What has to be born in mind is that when we say that God is a person we do not mean that He is an individual human person. “God is not a person because God is not any one thing or being”[3] He is a Trinity of persons. There are three persons in one God: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and these three are of the same substance, equal in power and glory. Each of these three Persons possesses intellect, will, emotion, is self conscious, and has a moral nature[4]. Thus, because God possess these human attributes as enlisted above, we can affirm analogically that God is a person. McBrien affirms this and adds that God embodies even the capacity for relationship[5] This is also a reality of the incarnation of the Son of God:
The son of God …worked with human hands; he thought with a human mind. He acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved. Born of the Virgin Mary, he has truly been made one of us, like to us in all things except sin” (GS 22, 2)
Even in the religious experience of the Hebrews we see relationship of love, compassion, forgiveness, mercy, etc. When we say God is a person, we do not mean that he is like the Deistic God who created the cosmos and abandoned it as a watch manufacturers abandon clock after manufacturing. He is a personal God who participates in the affairs of the universe and orders it.
However, care should be taken to avoid reducing the concept of God as a person to anthropomorphism, whereby we may be tempted to equating God as a human being. That would be limiting God and de-divinizing God.

Conclusion
God is a person and what this means is that the following religious experience is possible and meaningful only through a personal being:
· The idea of an impersonal God would make Christian faith unattainable
· It is unattainable for that would make our religious experience and personal relationship with god impossible.
· If God were not a person, it would be difficult to think of God as intelligent, creative, moral, or loving — and if God were none of those things, how could God be perfect and worthy of worship?

[1] Mondin, Batista, Philosophical Anthropology (India: Theological Publication, 1991), p.243
[2] Ibid, p.248.
[3] McBrien, Richard, Catholicism (New York, Geoffrey Chapman, 1970), p.349.
[4]Pteiffer, Charles et al (Ed), Wycliffe Bible Dictionary(USA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2005), p.1317.
[5] McBrien, p.349.