Topic summary
Christian god
Extracted from the Wikipedia article God in Christianity.
Overview
Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and other Christian theologians have described God with the Latin term ipsum esse, a phrase that translates roughly to "being itself". God's aseity makes the Christian God not "a being" but rather "being itself", and can be explained by phrases such as "that which is with no reliance on anything external for its being" or "the necessary condition for anything to exist at all".