Читать книгу Catholicism For Dummies - Rev. Kenneth Brighenti - Страница 77

Catholics believe that Jesus performed miracles, such as walking on water, expelling demons, rising from the dead Himself and raising the dead (such as Lazarus in Chapter 11 of the Gospel According to John) — and saving all humankind, becoming the Redeemer, Savior, and Messiah. He founded the Catholic Church and instituted, explicitly or implicitly, all seven sacraments. (The seven sacraments are Catholic rituals marking seven stages of spiritual development. See Chapters 8 and 9 for more on the seven sacraments.)

Jesus is the second person of the Holy Trinity — God the Son. And God the Son (Jesus) is as much God as God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.

Although Christians, Jews, and Muslims all believe in one God, Christians believe in a Triune God, one God in three persons — God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit — also known as the Holy Trinity. The mystery of the Holy Trinity is how you can have three divine persons but not three gods. Catholics don’t perceive the Holy Trinity as three gods but as three distinct — but not separate — persons in one God.

The divine mind of Jesus was infinite, because He had the mind of God; the human mind of Jesus was, like the human mind, limited. The human mind could only know so much and only what God the Father wanted it to know. When asked about the time and date of the end of the world, Jesus’s apparent ignorance in Mark 13:32 “of that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father,” is proof that the human intellect of Christ was not privy to all that the divine intellect of Christ knew.

To the Catholic Church, overemphasizing Jesus’s humanity to the exclusion of His divinity is as bad as ignoring or downplaying His humanity to exalt His divinity. To understand the Catholic Church’s stance on Jesus’s divinity even better, check out the doctrine of the Hypostatic Union in the later section “Monophysitism.”