In the Beginning, G-d...

As I was reading through the Rambam's fourth principle, I couldn't help but think again back to what I had been taught growing up in the church. As Christians, we all believed that G-d had made himself into a man. Now, though, I see where the contradictions lie between this piece of central doctrine and what the Rambam says about G-d.

I wrote last week about the disparities between the Christian idea of the trinity and the Rambam's second and third principles; this week, I want to examine this a bit further by incorporating the fourth principle--that G-d is the creator of everything, that nothing existed before Him. This idea is not new to Christianity. It is well known that G-d is the creator of everything. However, if nothing existed before G-d, and if G-d has no beginning, how could he have become a human? Wouldn't that mean that he was created (even if by Himself)? How can this jive with what the Rambam says about G-d creation and timelessness? If G-d had become a human, wouldn't that have meant that He was subject to the confines of time and physicality?

It doesn't seem to me that, if we take into account what the Rambam has written, G-d could have created Himself. In fact, there was no point of creation for G-d. He simply was, and He simply is. (Actually, I think these verbs are too limited to even describe G-d. These verbs denote a sense of time, and G-d does not exist within the confines of time.) If G-d didn't create Himself--was, in fact, never created--it strikes me as unreasonable to claim that G-d created Himself later in the form of a man. Even if we were to assume that G-d in the form of man existed since the dawn of time, this still does not satisfy the second and third principles of Maimonides, the ones that discuss G-d's unity and formlessness.

To Christians, all of this might seem strange and foreign. I don't write these things to provoke anger, but rather to provoke thought. No matter what a person believes, the important thing is that one has come to a conclusion based not on the simple absorption of what one is told, but on a rational, logical, and even sometimes emotional response to investigation. What matters is that one can stand behind his or her beliefs with solid reasons.