9. 3. As a result, every nation in the whole world that possesses religion and sound reason acknowledges that God exists and that there is one God. From the divine inflow into human souls, discussed just above, it follows that in everyone there is an inner voice saying that God exists and that there is one God. Nevertheless there are people who deny God, people who worship nature as God, people who worship many gods, and people who worship idols as gods. The reason for this is that they have let worldly and bodily perspectives block off the inner reaches of their reason or intellect and obliterate their first childhood idea of God; they have rejected religion from their heart and have put it behind them.

The Christian confessional creed shows that Christians acknowledge one God and shows how they view the unity of God:

The catholic faith is this, that we venerate one God in a trinity, and the Trinity in unity. There are three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and yet there are not three gods; there is one God. The Father is a person, the Son another, and the Holy Spirit another, and yet they have one divinity, equal glory, and coeternal majesty. The Father, then, is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God; but just as Christian truth compels us to confess each person individually as God and Lord, so the catholic religion forbids us to say that there are three gods or three lords.

This is the Christian faith regarding the unity of God. (In the chapter that discusses the divine Trinity [163-184] you will see that the trinity of God and the unity of God presented in this confession are incompatible.)

[2] The other nations in the world that possess religion and sound reason agree that there is one God: all Muslims in their countries; the Africans in the many countries on their continent; and the Asians as well, in the many countries on theirs. So too do modern-day Jews. In the Golden Age, the most ancient people who were religious worshiped one God, whom they named Jehovah. So did the ancient people in the following age, up to the time when monarchies were created. In the time of the monarchies, upper levels of the intellect that had previously been open, and had been like sanctuaries and temples of worship to the one God, were increasingly closed off by worldly loves, and then by bodily loves. The Lord God, in order to unblock those upper levels of the intellect and restore worship of one God, instituted a church among the descendants of Jacob and set the following precept above all the other precepts in their religion: "There is to be no other God before my face" (Exodus 20:3).

[3] "Jehovah," which he named himself anew for the Jews, means the highest and only Being, and the origin of everything that exists and occurs in the universe. People in the preclassical period acknowledged Jove as the highest God (perhaps so named from Jehovah), and deified many others who made up his court. In the age that followed, however, sages like Plato and Aristotle admitted that the other [Olympians] were not gods but different properties, qualities, and attributes of the one God, called gods because there was divinity in each of them.

577. It follows from this that the Lord is constantly active in regenerating us. He is constantly active in saving us, and no one can be saved without being regenerated, as the Lord himself says in John: "Those who are not born again cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3:3, 5-6). Regeneration is therefore the means of being saved; and goodwill and faith are the means of being regenerated.

The notion that we are regenerated as a consequence of simply having the faith that is preached by the church of today - a faith that involves no cooperation on our part - is the height of foolishness.

[2] The kind of action and cooperation just described is visible in action and movement of all types. The interaction between the heart and all its arteries is an example. The heart acts and the arteries use their sheaths and linings to cooperate; this results in circulation. A similar thing happens with the lungs. The air pressure, which depends on the height of the atmosphere above it, acts upon the lungs; the lungs work the ribs, which is immediately followed by the ribs working the lungs. This breathing motion affects every membrane in the body. The meninges of the brain, the pleura, the peritoneum, the diaphragm, and all the other membranes that cover the internal organs and inwardly hold them together, act and react and cooperate in this way, because they are flexible. Together these movements provide for our continued existence.

A similar thing happens in every fiber and nerve and in every muscle. In fact it even occurs in every piece of cartilage. It is well documented that in each of these there is an [initiating] action and then a cooperation.

[3] Such cooperation also exists in all our bodily senses. Just like the motor organs, the sensory organs consist of fibers, membranes, and muscles; but there is no need to describe the cooperation of each one. It is well known that light acts upon the eye, sound upon the ear, odor upon the nose, taste upon the tongue; and that the organs adapt themselves to that input, which results in sensation.

Surely everyone can see from these examples that thought and will could not exist unless there was a similar action and cooperation between life as it inflows and the spiritual organic structure underlying our brain. Life flows from the Lord into that organic structure. Because the organic structure cooperates, it perceives what it is thinking. Likewise it perceives what is under consideration there, what conclusion is formed, and what action it has decided to take. If the life force alone took action but we did not cooperate (seemingly on our own), our ability to think would not exceed a log's. We would have no more thought than a church building does when a minister is preaching; the church can indeed feel the reverberation of sound coming through the double doors as an echo, but it cannot appreciate anything about the sermon. We would be no different if we did not cooperate with the Lord in developing goodwill and faith.