What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionGod is one without parts, partners, or peers — unity as the deepest fact about the divine.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
Travels across7 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderJudaism · c. 1000 BCE
Newest holderDave Stevism · 2026 CE
Turns up as15 tenets · 7 figures · 1 story
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 14 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 6 faiths of this family hold it
The Spirit proceeds from the Father — and, says the West, the Son.
One Latin word, filioque, added to a Greek creed. Spain put it in at Toledo in 589, Rome was singing it by 1014, and Constantinople has never accepted it. Formally it is a question about the inner life of God. Practically it was about who is allowed to edit the creed.
⚖ contested within
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God is one, indivisible, and engaged with history.
The Shema is the center: Hear O Israel — the LORD is one. This God acts in time: exodus, exile, return.
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God has no body, and no image of God is possible.
Maimonides made incorporeality the third of thirteen principles, and the Torah's outstretched arm became language stooping to be understood. The commandment is enforced hard enough that a tradition three thousand years old produced almost no religious portraiture.
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God is one person, and the Trinity is a Greek import.
The Father alone is God; Jesus is his son, begotten and not pre-existent as a person; the Holy Spirit is God's power in action. Christadelphians argue this from the text at length and hold that the fourth-century creeds imported a philosophy the apostles would not have recognised.
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God's name is Jehovah, and he is one person.
The divine name restored to the text; Jesus honored as God's first creation, not God himself.
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God is one person, and that person is Jesus Christ.
Swedenborg held that a Trinity of three persons is three gods however carefully worded, and that the trinity is of soul, body and proceeding operation within the one divine human. It is the doctrine that put the New Church permanently outside orthodox Christianity while sounding, to a casual visitor, entirely churchlike.
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Shangdi is the one God, and the idols are demons.
Hong argued that the high God of the ancient Chinese classics and the God of the Bible are the same being, and that China had known him before the temples filled with anything else. Converts proved the point with hammers: smashing images was the entry rite.
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Islam
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
There is no god but God.
Tawhid: absolute unity — no partners, no images, no exceptions. The first half of the shahada.
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Nothing resembles Him.
The Quran gives God a hand, a face, a throne. Ash'ari and Maturidi theologians read those as figures of speech and refuse to picture them; the Athari and later Salafi line affirms them as stated and refuses to ask how. Each side accuses the other of the same error from opposite directions.
⚖ contested within
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God is One, beyond every description.
Tawhid taken to its limit: no attributes, no image, no anthropomorphism survives the Druze insistence on unity.
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T
The One.
Unity so strict that names themselves fall short — what the Epistles say further is for the initiated to know.
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Pantheism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Deus sive Natura — God, or Nature.
One substance, infinite, self-caused, of which every rock and thought is a mode. There is no outside for a creator to stand in.
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T
The one substance.
Not a person, not a mind, not a maker — and therefore not something that can want anything from you. Spinoza still called it God, and meant it.
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Deus sive Natura — God, or Nature.
One substance, infinite, self-caused, of which every rock and thought is a mode. There is no outside for a creator to stand in.
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T
The one substance.
Not a person, not a mind, not a maker — and therefore not something that can want anything from you. Spinoza still called it God, and meant it.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
God is one, beyond form.
Ik Onkar — the opening word of the scripture and the whole theology in a syllable.
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Nanak asleep at the Kaaba.
He was found sleeping with his feet pointing at the shrine, and told to turn them away. Turn them, he said, in any direction where God is not — and the story ends with nobody able to find one.
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The Brahma Kumaris
— one faith of this family holds it
S
Shiva — a point of light that is never born.
The Supreme Soul is incorporeal, has no body and takes no birth. The Brahma Kumaris distinguish this figure from the Hindu deity of the same name deliberately and at length.
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The Religion of Humanity
— one faith of this family holds it
L
Le Grand Etre.
Depicted as a woman holding a child, in an unembarrassed borrowing from Catholic iconography. Comte was explicit that the imitation was the point.
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Transhumanism
— one faith of this family holds it
God is technological.
Not a being who made the world, but one that does not yet exist and is being assembled as intelligence and compassion spread. Worship is participation in the construction work.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
The Spirit proceeds from the Father — and, says the West, the Son.
One Latin word, filioque, added to a Greek creed. Spain put it in at Toledo in 589, Rome was singing it by 1014, and Constantinople has never accepted it. Formally it is a question about the inner life of God. Practically it was about who is allowed to edit the creed.
Go deeper — context →
Nothing resembles Him.
The Quran gives God a hand, a face, a throne. Ash'ari and Maturidi theologians read those as figures of speech and refuse to picture them; the Athari and later Salafi line affirms them as stated and refuses to ask how. Each side accuses the other of the same error from opposite directions.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Whether God's speech was ever made.
If the Quran is God's eternal attribute it was never created; if it was created, God once was without it. The Mu'tazila said created, the caliph al-Ma'mun made that state doctrine in 833, and Ibn Hanbal was flogged for refusing to say it. Sunni orthodoxy settled on uncreated. Twelver theology, which kept Mu'tazili rationalism, generally says originated.
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