Now we have shown clearly that the original difficulty affects the Muslim even more than the Christian; it affects every believer in a one, conscious God—Creator—every monotheist, in fact. Therefore the Muslim cannot criticize this text in any special way. For whoever believes that God created has involved himself in attributing a sort of becoming to God. For He who had not as yet created, created. He became a creator, in other words. We are bound to use metaphors of time in order to make some difference between creator and created, and avoid attributing eternity to the world.

If the objector falls back upon the idea that creation was always in the mind of God, and that the act of creation merely realized the thought, we reply that this does not in the least lessen the force of our contention; for we simply alter the wording of it and say: He who was a creator potentially became a creator actually. He who was a creator in thought became a creator in deed.

It comes to this: if creation became, that is, passed from non-existence to existence, then the Creator, in virtue of His mere relation to that creation, also became—passed from non-creativeness to creativeness. Thus the Incarnation and the text 'the Word became flesh' only bring you back to the original mystery of God and creation; they add nothing to it, being strictly a development of it.

iii. In asserting Incarnation you have brought God within the limits of space.

The relation of God to space, nay, the very nature of space in itself, is a matter absolutely impossible to determine or imagine. Philosophers have vexed themselves to define space or to conceive of it in itself. Some have said it is merely an abstraction; some that it is merely a necessary condition of our perception, and has its existence in human perception rather than independently, so that apart from that it has no real existence, being, in fact, a 'form' or constituent element of perception. However that may be, we see from this the folly of dogmatizing what God's relation to space is. Does He fill it or is He apart from it? Or would it not be truer to say that in some way He is superior to it? For all that, we are in space, and He is related to us; therefore He must be related to space in some way or other. And who shall define what that way is?

And further, who shall define how God shall demonstrate His relation with space? How shall He use it? By what modes?

(1) We see in the first place that the condescension of God in creation and relation and revelation has inevitably involved His attributing to Himself spatial metaphors. Our very language and thoughts, nay, the language and thoughts of revelation itself, bear witness to this. Is not this a self-limitation on the part of God—to make it appear as though He were spatially connected