I wanna talk about the 100% God/100% Man doctrine that Christianity promotes.
Specifically, I wanna destroy this doctrine.
But I wanna do it from a place of authority, not just go off on a rant.
So how to go about doing this?
Simple, homies.
I’m gonna use the teachings of one of the greatest Jewish sages who ever lived.
His name was Maimonides.
Before passing away in 1204, he wrote a book called the Guide for the Perplexed that people are still chewing on eight hundred years later.
In the Jewish community, they call him the Rambam.
That’s an acronym for Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon.
Take the initials, and you get Rambam.
Now, this was a man who thought long and hard about how you can define God without shrinking Him down to something you can hold in your hand.
He landed on something called negative theology.
Here’s the idea.
You describe God by what He is not.
Not the opposite.
Pay attention because people get this twisted.
Instead of saying God is just…
We say He is NOT unjust.
Instead of saying God is wise…
We say He is NOT unwise.
Sounds like a word game, doesn’t it?
Well, it ain’t.
Here’s why.
Every positive word we’ve got was created by humans to describe humans.
Think of words like wise, just, powerful, good.
You learned every one of those words by watching people.
So when you say God is wise, what you’re actually saying is that God is like the wise people you’ve met, only more so.
You just made Him a bigger version of some human model.
That’s how the entire pagan gentile world thinks.
But when you say God is not ignorant, you’ve said something true.
And you haven’t measured Him against anything.
Ya feeling me here?
The negative doesn’t limit God.
But the positive does.
Hold onto that thought.
Because we’re gonna come back to it…
And systematically destroy the Christian doctrine that tells you a man walking around in first-century Galilee was 100% of the God who made the universe.
Let’s start by looking at what happens when we apply this same line of reasoning to a human being.
It falls freakin’ apart!
For example, I can say you’re wise.
But can I say you’re NOT unwise?
The answer is no.
Because depending on the situation, you can be both.
You are wise in some situations.
But in other situations, you act like a stoned baboon.
Same with being just.
There are times when you’re fair.
And there are times when you’re unfair.
The same goes for being wise, strong, good, or whatever.
Every one of us comes with the opposite already built in.
In fact, God created the universe based on this principle of opposites.
That’s why we have light and darkness, male and female, up and down, good and evil, life and death, and so on.
And that’s the thing, homies.
You’re part of creation.
So you inherently possess the qualities of being good and evil, wise and unwise, fair and unfair, etc.
However, God is not.
He is NOT capable of being unwise, evil, unfair, and so on.
Why?
Because God ain’t part of creation.
He made it.
Being “not unfair” can only apply to God.
It can’t apply to you.
Because there have been times when you’ve been unfair.
Ya feel me here?
As human beings, we are a container of opposites.
God is not.
A human can be knowing at times and not knowing at times.
God can never be unknowing.
Heck, when Yeshua said, “No man knows the day and hour of his return except his Father in heaven”…
That was a statement reinforcing this very point!
Since God is not unknowing, there is no way He cannot know the day and hour of Yeshua’s return.
However, Yeshua, being a man, admitted, “Hey homies, even I don’t know the day and the hour.”
The attribute of omniscience didn’t apply to Yeshua as it did to God…
Because he is NOT God.
That’s right.
I said it.
So don’t get your undies in a bunch, all you trinitarians out there.
Can you now see how God is so radically different than a human being?
It’s because we are creatures composed of opposites.
We can exist and then not exist.
God can only exist.
We can be powerful and weak.
God is only powerful.
There are times when we are good and bad.
God is only good.
Yeshua himself said…
“Why do you call Me good?
No one is good except One— God.“
-Mark 10:18
And no, Yeshua wasn’t including himself in that statement.
We can only be in one place at once.
God can simultaneously be everywhere, anytime.
We can be wise and then act like some serious dumb rear ends at times.
God is always wise.
The bottom line is God is NOT a container of opposites like we human beings are.
God is what He is…
Or as He told Moses from the burning bush…
אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה
Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh
In English, that translates to something like…
“I will be what I will be.”
Or…
“I am what I am.”
The Lord hovered over the deep at Creation.
He rules over all the MALACHIM (angels) in Heaven.
He stood outside of the boundaries of the universe for the birth of every planet and every star.
The Lord stands separate from and is sovereign over His Creation.
That is His fundamental nature.
That cannot be said of any human being who ever existed in history…
Including Yeshua of Nazareth.
He himself declared…
“The Father is greater than I.”
-John 14:28
So to bring this to a close…
Can you now see how ridiculous the 100% God/100% man doctrine is?
The statement itself is absurd at face value.
But it becomes even more absurd when you look at it through the lens of what the Rambam said.
Now you’ve got a strong philosophical (and logical) basis for rejecting such a ridiculous doctrine.
It’s ridiculous because, as I just showed you, God and humans are fundamentally and irreconcilably different.
Humans are containers of opposites.
The Lord is not.
Alrighty, I’ll close with this declaration from the Torah:
“God is not a man,
that he should lie;
neither the son of man,
that he should repent:
hath he said,
and shall he not do it?
or hath he spoken,
and shall he not make it good?”
– Numbers 23:19
Interesting factoid: when I was in Israel, the guide was a descendant of the Rambam.
OK, so negative description isn’t just from the Rambam, it is part of Jewish Logic.
What is that? Jewish Logic is the system of argumentation where we answer a question with a question, and when we want to describe something, we will first tell you everything that it is not before we tell you what it is.
The example of the Rambam you gave shows that, and when we read the letters that Shaul (Paul) wrote, we can see that same form of argumentation, especially in Romans which reads (to those who don’t understand Jewish Logic) like a polemic against the Torah, when it is actually an apologetic FOR the Torah.
Even the “Golden Rule” (which comes from Leviticus 19:18) is given in the opposite order, related in this Talmudic story (Shabbat 31a) regarding the Houses of Shammai and Hillel (who were always at odds with each other over Torah interpretation):
A Gentile man went to the School of Shammai and said he would convert to Judaism if the sage could teach him the entire Torah while the man stood on one foot. Shammai unceremoniously threw the man out.
Then he went to Hillel who said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah: the rest is the explanation of this- go and study it.”
This was, of course, long after Yeshua said the same thing, and he got it from the Torah, but we jews had to say it backwards.
I know I spent some time explaining Jewish Logic, but it is important to know this because you are right about the use of opposite when describing God, which really can’t be done anyway since his existence is on a plane that no mortal mind could ever comprehend.
As for 100% man and 100% God, that means someone is 200%. For God maybe that is possible, but not for us- if Trinitarians say Yeshua was 100% man, then as a human that’s all he could be.
I was told that the Trinity is not saying Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit are the same, but each one is different. Yeshua is God, Adonai is God, and the Holy Spirit is God.
Well, I was never that great in math, but three is three, which is more than one, anyway you look at it, and three gods is not monotheism, it is polytheism.
Even SCOTUS knew that seprerate but equal doesn’t exist in this world: in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that court said seperate but equal (cars on a train, one for whites and one for blacks) was OK.
However, that was overturned by SCOTUS in 1954 with Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which ruled you cannot be seperate and equal at the same time.
God is totally unique- in fact, even his “name” is not a name but a description or title of authority. There are tons of Steves and Richards throughout the world but there is only one Almighty.
You can find Harry and Tom anywhere, but there is only one Elohim (yeah, I know that word is plural, but you get the idea).
It is impossible for a human to be more than 100% of anything, and if Yeshua was 100% man, that was all he could be.
As the old saying goes, you can only fit 5 pounds of something in a 5-pound bag.
So, Rich, I hope this treatise wasn’t too long, but remember: you asked me. 🙂