In Christianity, God is the eternal being that created and preserves the world. Christians believe God to be both transcendent (i.e. , wholly independent of, and removed from, the material universe) and immanent (i.e. , involved in the world). However, the Christian teachings of the immanence and involvement of God, and his love for humanity, exclude the belief that God is of the same substance as the created universe. Early Christian views of God were expressed in the Pauline Epistles and the early (perhaps pre-Pauline) creeds which proclaimed one God and the divinity of Jesus almost in the same breath, as in 1 Corinthians: "to us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things... and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things. " This began to differentiate the Christian views of God from the Jewish teachings of the time. The theology of the attributes and nature of God has been discussed since the earliest days of Christianity, with Irenaeus writing in the 2nd century: "His greatness lacks nothing, but contains all things". In the 8th century, John of Damascus listed eighteen attributes which remain widely accepted. As time passed, theologians developed systematic lists of these attributes, some based on statements in the Bible, others based on theological reasoning. The Kingdom of God is a prominent phrase in the Synoptic Gospels and while there is near unanimous agreement among scholars that it represents a key element of the teachings of Jesus, there is little scholarly agreement on its exact interpretation. Around the year 200, Tertullian formulated a version of the doctrine of the Trinity which clearly affirmed the divinity of Jesus and came close to the later definitive form produced by the Ecumenical Council of 381. The doctrine of the Trinity can be summed up as: "The One God exists in Three Persons and One Substance, as God the Father, God the Son and the Holy Spirit. " Trinitarians, who form the large majority of Christians, hold it as a core tenet of their faith. Nontrinitarian denominations define the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in a number of different ways.
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