Ahraz

What exactly would it mean for God to “take on a human body”? 1. Does God spatially indwell in a human body? Christians themselves reject this. It would mean the body is literally a place that physically encompasses God. 2. Does it mean that God is present with the man through His knowledge, power, support or action? Both Muslims and Christians believe this is possible, but none of this makes the man God or vice versa, even if the relation is uniquely close or unlike His relation to anyone else. So what does it mean then? It has to mean that there’s some kind of metaphysical union between the divine and the human, which could be understood in a few ways: 3. Does the divine nature itself become human through transformation or conversion? This again is not what Christians believe. If the divine reality actually changes into humanity, then either something essential to divinity is lost, in which case He is no longer fully God, or nothing essential to divinity is lost, in which case the divine reality itself has not become human. 4. Do the divine and human natures fuse or mix into one combined reality? Again, this is not what Christians believe. If the resulting combination genuinely acquires mortality, weakness or dependence, then the divine nature is no longer what it was. If those remain properties only of the human nature, then no combination happened. 5. Does the divine person remain fully God while also becoming fully human, with the divine and human natures remaining distinct and neither being converted into the other? This is what Christians believe. So what does it mean on this account to say that this person “loses that body through a process called death”? Death is predicated of the person, not the “nature”. A nature is what something is. Human nature is not another individual standing beside the person who can die. If there is one person, then it is that person who dies, is weak, lacks knowledge, suffers, and so on. But those predicates cannot simply be added to the same person alongside their exact opposites. If a person is all-knowing, that itself excludes ignorance in that person. If he knows every truth, he cannot also be ignorant of some truth. If a person is omnipotent, that itself excludes weakness or a lack of power in that person. He cannot both possess all power and lack the power to do something within the scope of that power. If a person possesses necessary and perfect life, that itself excludes the possibility of death. If “this person is dead” is genuinely being predicated of that same person, then it cannot simultaneously be true that “this person cannot die”. So this claim that Islam “limits” God ends up turning back on the incarnation itself because it requires the same divine person to be both unlimited in knowledge, power and life, and yet genuinely ignorant, weak and dead. This literally does the opposite of making God “unlimited”. It makes your account of God both deficient and internally incoherent.