Christian Beliefs and Values
In the body of Christian beliefs that have been built up over the thousands of years in which Christian values have acted as guiding principles for large masses of religious worshipers and provided a structure for social institutions, a particularly important concept has been provided in the form of Christian beliefs in that of the Trinitarian doctrine, which has helped shape Christian beliefs by setting down a sophisticated apparatus of spiritual belief for the understanding of the relationship between Jesus Christ and God. Though Christian values can be seen by some lights as simply ethical principles that exist in regard to various codes of prohibition and imperatives for behavior, an important foundation for these codes of practices exists in the form of those more abstract Christian beliefs which are of less immediately relevant pertinence to everyday human life but have nonetheless helped to shape the wide spectrum of Christian beliefs.
Though Christian beliefs, as can be attested to by any casual religious historian and scholar, vary widely throughout the many congregations and churches that have arisen over the course of Christian history, the Trinitarian doctrine can been found in almost all of the mainstream traditions of both Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. In fact, the belief in the existence of the Trinity can be seen as acting as a defining element among Christian beliefs, to the extend that it is described by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church as “the central dogma of Christian theology.”
Despite the widespread prevalence among widely disseminated Christian values of the need to adhere to the Christian beliefs of the Trinity, it might be noted by observers of the field of Christian religion that the basic concept of the Christian trinity does not clearly exist in the language of the New Testament as such, though some theologians believe that they can find earlier traces of the concept in the formula for baptism given in the Gospel of Mathew. Among the body of Christian beliefs, the idea that God existed in the form of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost only came into clear and widespread existence by the end of the fourth century, after a widespread series of controversies among theologians that arose in regard to the question of the language that could be acceptably used in regard to the nature of God.
The Christian beliefs which concern the idea of the existence of a Trinity comprising the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are not related only to the language used acceptably by worshipers in speaking of religious ideas but also in the field of visual representations of God, which Christian values, as compared to other faiths in general and in particular the other strains of the Abrahamaic tradition, tend to encourage to be produced and spread throughout the Christian communities of belief. It has been found that artists driven by Christian values tend to represent the Holy Ghost as a dove, the Father as an old man, and the Son as a young man.
