The doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation have, understandably, been a stumbling block to most Muslims who have only ever understood God as one in essence and person. While many assume this sort of absolute monotheism is the norm among monotheistic faiths, it actually has not been—modern Judaism and Islam are the only two faiths that emphasize absolute monotheism.
My upcoming series on monotheism is going to address these issues more in depth, but I will touch upon them a bit here and then get into what the Incarnation actually means.
The Trinity:
From all eternity, there has been one God, who is transcendent, immutable, impassible, and utterly beyond. His nature is incomprehensible. The oneness of God is grounded in the Person of the Father. This is where we need to make the distinction between “Essence” and “Person.” Essence is what God is. Persons are who God is. In God, there is a single what, and three whos. We are not saying that God is one Essence in three Essences, or one Person in Three Persons. If we said that, we would be speaking nonsense. We say that there is one Essence and Three Persons. Now, when I say that the oneness of God is grounded in the Person of the Father, this is what I mean. The Father is uncaused. From all eternity (causation isn’t something that just occurs in time), the Father generates His Son and spirates His Spirit. Let me hash that out a bit for you.
When we use the word “generation”, this is another way of saying that the Eternal Son is “begotten.” We do not say that He is begotten in the same way that a human father begets a human son. Rather, we use the word “begotten” to express the eternal relationship which the Father enjoys with the Son. He eternally causes the Son, and He causes Him by generation. Because God is God, and utterly transcendent, we cannot express precisely what it means to “generate” the Son eternally. In the same way, the Father, from all eternity, spirates the Holy Spirit. Another way to express this truth is to say that the Holy Spirit eternally “proceeds” from the Father.
St. Irenaeus calls the Son and the Spirit the two “hands” of God the Father. In this relationship of eternal generation and spiration, the Father communicates His very Nature to the Son and the Spirit. Thus, we say that the Father is the “monarch” of the Trinity because He is the sole eternal cause of the Divine Persons. The Son and the Spirit are causally “less” than the Father. But we worship the Persons equally because we do not worship them because of what they are by cause, but because of what they are by nature. As the Father communicates His very nature to the Eternal Son and Eternal Spirit, they share the same nature and are equally worthy of worship.
An analogy we can use for the Trinity is this: God is like the sun. The fire of the sun is like the Person of the Father. The light radiating from the sun is like the Person of the Son. And the heat radiating from the sun is like the Spirit. Note how this is similar. There has never been a time when the sun has existed and the fire and light haven’t. Nevertheless, even though there is no causal relationship in time, there is still a causal relationship. The fire of the sun still “causes” the light and the heat, even though it does not precede them in time.
Note, then, how common Islamic objections to the Trinity don’t work. Jesus doesn’t pray to Himself in the Gospels because the Son is not the same as the Father. They are one God, because the Son is causally dependent on the Father. If the Father ceased to exist, then the Son would cease to exist. But the Father is not causally dependent on the Son. If the Son ceased to exist, the Father would continue to exist. We do not claim that 1+1+1=1 because there is only one Essence. There are Three Persons who share that Essence.
It’s not a matter of 1+1+1=1 because Essence and Person are in different categories—the Essence/Person distinction is very key. Allow me to explain it again:
Remember: Essence (we can also refer to this as nature) is what God is. Persons are who God is. We worship the Divine Persons because of what they are by nature, not because of their unique personal properties (this sentence is hugely important). And, as St. Basil said, “God is one because the Father is one.” There is one God because there is one font of deity, the Person of the Father, who eternally communicates divine nature to the Son and the Spirit. This paragraph is extremely important, so keep it in mind when reading my response.
We do not add Three Persons together and get an Essence. Rather, the Father, who is by nature God, by generating the Person of the Son and spirating the Person of the Spirit (from all eternity) communicates His very nature to them, so that they all share the same nature. There is one God because there is a single principle of unity in the Trinity.
Now, moving on to historic monotheism: What, historically, constitutes monotheism? To be a monotheist, must you believe that God is only one Person? Islam would say yes, Christianity would say no.
I think the key question to ask is this: what did the ancient Hebrews and Jews (their religion is quite distinct from modern Judaism) believe about God? It is undoubted that Israel was monotheistic, indeed, they may have been the first monotheistic people on Earth. Both Muslims and Christians acknowledge that the God of Abraham is the one true God. Consequently, ancient Hebrew beliefs about God would be a good way of determining the standard for orthodox monotheism. It is widely acknowledged amongst scholars of ancient Judaism (especially Judaism at the time of Jesus), that they conceived of God as one, but also as a multiplicity of Persons. Note, for example, these texts from the Hebrew Prophets:
(Isaiah 48:16) Draw near to me, hear this: from the beginning I have not spoken in secret, from the time it came to be I have been there.” And now the Lord GOD has sent me, and his Spirit.
As you can see, the one speaking has been there “from the beginning”, identifying Him as God. Even as this is true, the speaker (God) declares that the Lord God has sent Him, along with the Spirit of the Lord God. The only coherent way to understand this, I would argue, is the Trinity. Or this passage:
(Zechariah 2:10-11) Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion, for behold, I come and I will dwell in your midst, declares the Lord. And many nations shall join themselves to the Lord in that day, and shall be my people. And I will dwell in your midst, and you shall know that the Lord of hosts has sent me to you.
As you can see, it is God who is speaking. God declares that He will “dwell in the midst” of the Israelites. Christians understand this (quite reasonably, I think!) as a prophecy of the Incarnation, where the Eternal God assumed human nature and dwelt on Earth. In this day, God says, many nations (or many Gentiles) will become the people of God. This is interesting given that after the time of Jesus, many Gentiles, who had previously been pagans, confessed the one God of Israel as the true God. And finally, most interestingly, the Lord God says that the Lord God had sent Him. Again this requires multiple Persons in God in order to make sense.
The monotheistic Hebrew Prophets preceded both Muhammad and Christianity. I think, therefore, that it is the good standard of what genuinely constitutes monotheism, and Christianity fits hand in glove with the conception of God presented therein.
Next, the incarnation:
You raise a common objection against the incarnation, one I raised myself as a Muslim: how can God be a man? I have addressed this question before here and in a paper I wrote on Saint Cyril of Alexandria’s Christology that I will quote here:
The Son, the second Person of the Trinity, is one Person and he took on flesh; meaning, the Divine Person, already having a divine nature with divine properties, added to his Person a human nature with human properties and these properties do not exist outside of his Person, for they are not a separate being in and of themselves. These newly acquired properties allow the Divine Person to experience things such as suffering and death in and through them, which means the Logos was able to suffer and die in his human nature, and in doing so has redeemed death and suffering. McGuckin explains it this way:
“[For Cyril] this does not mean…that the sufferings of God are merely a matter of words, as Nestorius would have it. For Cyril it is a dynamic act of the Word of God, a central act of the economy of salvation. The flesh allows the Word of God a new condition of expression. In his divine nature he could not possibly suffer, in his human nature he can.” (McGuckin 203).
Cyril leaves room for a distinction between the two natures, but also makes it clear that these natures are not separate beings apart from the Logos, but that they are properties of the Logos. For if the second person of the Trinity is and always has been one person, taking on human properties merely allows for the Divine Person to participate in a new set of experiences allowed through those properties. So we are safe in saying that the Logos does not suffer in his divinity, for it is not the divine properties that allow for him to suffer, it is the human properties. A somewhat weak analogy would be the property of hair; if I am originally bald but grow my hair out to shoulder length, I have acquired a new property. This new property now allows me to participate in different experiences that I previously was not able to; I can braid, dye, and style my hair now. These are all experiences I as a person am participating in, but am only able to participate in them through the newly acquired property of long hair. One still says that Ioanna the person has braided, dyed, and styled her hair, because I am participating in the experience, and cutting my hair does nothing to my personhood, it merely means I can no longer participate in these certain experiences. As with the Divine Person who takes on human properties, he still participates in the human experience, but only because of his newly acquired properties. Going back to the hair analogy, if the newly acquired property of hair can be equated to the newly acquired human properties of the Logos, one cannot say that the Logos does not suffer, but the human nature suffers, because it would be like saying when Ioanna dyes her hair she does not participate in that experience, only her hair does. This would result in the personification of my hair since my hair is having experiences that my personhood is not participating in, which ultimately makes no sense because my hair in and of itself cannot experience anything—it is merely a property of myself.
Now, this may answer the “how can God become incarnate?” question, but that leaves the other nagging question most Muslims immediately respond with: why would God take on human flesh?
This is a reasonable question since the answer is the heart of the Christian faith. The good news of Christianity is that God came to reconcile the entire creation to Himself, and He does this through the Incarnation. God, being Light and Life itself, brings light and life to all that He touches. It is not as if the flesh God takes on defiles Him, God infuses life into all that He touches—His presence is a purifying and life-giving presence. He cannot be defiled by us, we can only be purified by Him. So when God takes on our nature, he is not defiled, we are brought back into communion with Him. Throughout the history of the Church She has battled many Christological heresies—and not because She insists on the deity of Christ for the mere sake of the deity of Christ, but because the incarnation is crucial to how we are saved. If God did not take on human flesh, humanity cannot be reconciled to God. The Second Person of the Trinity, in taking on my human nature has infused life into it and, in His Person, reconciled the human and the divine. This is why we are adamant about the deity of Christ, for without it there is no hope for the salvation of the world. As my favorite Orthodox theologian has said:
“So the Church struggled against the Gnostics in defense of this same idea of deification as the universal end: ‘God became man that men might become gods’. She affirmed, against the Arians, the dogma of the consubstantial Trinity; for it is the Word, the Logos, who opens to us the way to union with the Godhead; and if the incarnate Word has not the same substance with the Father, if he be not truly God, our deification is impossible. The Church condemned the Nestorians that she might overthrow the middle wall of partition, whereby, in the person of Christ himself, they would have separated God from man. She rose up against the Apollonarians and Monophysites to show that, since the fullness of true human nature has been assumed by the Word, it is our whole humanity that must enter into union with God. She warred with the Monothelites because, apart from the union of the two wills, divine and human, there could be no attaining to deification—‘God created man by his will alone, but He cannot save him without the co-operation of the human will.’ The Church emerged triumphant from the iconoclastic controversy, affirming the possibility of expression through a material medium of the divine realities—symbol and pledge of our sanctification. The main preoccupation, the issue at stake, in the questions which successively arise respecting the Holy Spirit, grace and the Church herself—this last dogmatic question of our own time—is always the possibility, the manner, or the means of our union with God. All the history of Christian dogma unfolds itself about this mystical centre, guarded by different weapons against its many and diverse assailants in the course of successive ages.”
-Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church
I hope this helped, if you have any further questions please do not hesitate to ask.
Blessings,
Ioanna
Islam Meets Orthodoxy 