The Christian understanding of the nature of God, including the Trinity, omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence, and Christian teaching on human nature, sin and grace.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to explain the Christian understanding of the nature of God, the Trinity and the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence, and Christian teaching on human nature, sin and grace. The dot point pairs a doctrine of God with a doctrine of the human person, and the exam interest lies in the tensions between them: how a perfect God relates to flawed, free creatures.

The Trinity and the attributes

The doctrine of the Trinity was hammered out in the early councils (Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in 381) to hold together the New Testament data that the Father, the Son and the Spirit are each addressed as God while there is only one God. The technical settlement distinguishes one substance (ousia) and three persons (hypostases), differentiated by their eternal relations of origin: the Son is begotten of the Father, the Spirit proceeds. It deliberately rules out two errors: tritheism (treating the three as three gods) and modalism (treating them as one God wearing three temporary masks). The classical attributes then describe the one divine nature. Omnipotence is best understood, following Aquinas, as the power to do anything logically possible, so the inability to make a square circle is no limit, since a square circle is not a possible "thing" at all. Omniscience is complete knowledge of all truths, including the future, which generates the foreknowledge problem below. Benevolence (with omnipotence) generates the problem of evil. These attributes are not free-standing puzzles in the exam: AQA expects you to show how they cohere and where they strain.

The hardest internal tension is between omniscience and human free will. If God infallibly knows now what I will freely do tomorrow, it can seem that I am not free to do otherwise, since God's belief cannot turn out false. The standard Christian reply, from Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy, is that God is timeless: God does not foreknow the future from within time but sees all of history in a single eternal present, as a person on a hilltop sees the whole road at once. On this view God's knowledge does not causally precede or determine my act any more than my watching you act causes your action; logical and causal determination are kept apart. Molinism offers a different route through "middle knowledge" (God knows what any free creature would freely do in any circumstance), while Calvinist compatibilism redefines freedom so it is consistent with divine determination.

Human nature, sin and grace

Christian anthropology begins with a high view and a fallen reality. Humans are made in the image of God (imago Dei) (Genesis 1:27), which Christian thinkers locate in reason, moral agency, and the capacity for relationship with God and others. Yet the tradition also teaches the Fall: in Genesis 3 the first humans misuse their freedom, and Augustine developed from this the doctrine of original sin, the idea that human nature is now disordered and inclined to sin (concupiscence), a condition inherited by all so that no one is born morally neutral. This was forged in the Pelagian controversy: against Pelagius, who held that humans can choose the good and earn salvation by effort, Augustine insisted that the will is bound and that salvation must come from outside the self. Hence the centrality of grace, God's unmerited favour and saving help. Salvation comes not by human merit but by grace, supremely through the death and resurrection of Christ; the Reformers (Luther, Calvin) radicalised this as justification by grace through faith alone. The Catholic tradition, by contrast, holds that grace works with human cooperation. The doctrine of the self therefore answers the doctrine of God: a holy God meets a fallen humanity not on the basis of desert but of gift.