Does the church literally teach God as Father and Jesus as His Son?

[Christphr]

Or, are they simply our best and trueunderstandings of what’s beyond our finite minds (that it is true but with the understanding that we don’t fully comprehend it’s truth).

 

[Fauken]

You mean a literal father-son relationship? No. It’s just how God described Himself. The Father did not create the Son, and the Father is not the Son. The Father and Son are both eternal, two of the three persons of a single God.

 

[ahs]

Wow, I don’t if it’s just a trend, or there’s something in the water, but this is the 3rd or 4th question I’ve seen this week where I just had to recommend a particular book (one I have not read in quite some time, but REALLY hit on this topic in great depths). “Theology for Beginners” by Frank Sheed. I would imagine he also hits on it in “Theology and Sanity”, but I have only just begun that one.

 

[Vico]

Or, are they simply our best and true understandings of what’s beyond our finite minds (that it is true but with the understanding that we don’t fully comprehend it’s truth).

God is absolutely simple without composition. The relations are the persons and do not import composition. This is correct logic based upon metaphysics.

St. Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Theologiae > Third Part > Question 2. The mode of union of the Word incarnate
Article 2. Whether the union of Incarnate Word took place in the Person?

I answer that, Person has a different meaning from “nature.” For nature, as has been said (Article 1), designates the specific essence which is signified by the definition. And if nothing was found to be added to what belongs to the notion of the species, there would be no need to distinguish the nature from the suppositum of the nature (which is the individual subsisting in this nature), because every individual subsisting in a nature would be altogether one with its nature.

Now in certain subsisting things we happen to find what does not belong to the notion of the species, viz. accidents and individuating principles, which appears chiefly in such as are composed of matter and form. Hence in such as these the nature and the suppositum really differ; not indeed as if they were wholly separate, but because the suppositum includes the nature, and in addition certain other things outside the notion of the species. Hence the suppositum is taken to be a whole which has the nature as its formal part to perfect it; and consequently in such as are composed of matter and form the nature is not predicated of the suppositum, for we do not say that this man is his manhood.

But if there is a thing in which there is nothing outside the species or its nature (as in God), the suppositum and the nature are not really distinct in it, but only in our way of thinking, inasmuch it is called “nature” as it is an essence, and a “suppositum” as it is subsisting. And what is said of a suppositum is to be applied to a person in rational or intellectual creatures; for a person is nothing else than “an individual substance of rational nature,” according to Boethius.

Therefore, whatever adheres to a person is united to it in person, whether it belongs to its nature or not. Hence, if the human nature is not united to God the Word in person, it is nowise united to Him; and thus belief in Incarnation is altogether done away with, and Christian faith wholly overturned. Therefore, inasmuch as the Word has a human nature united to Him, which does not belong to His Divine Nature, it follows that the union took place in the Person of the Word, and not in the nature.

http://www.newadvent.org/summa/4002.htm