are attributes of these created things.

They were told, first of all:

“No prophet—peace be upon them—ever expressed the attributes of Allah with the titles ‘the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’ Therefore, when you find in the words of the Messiah, peace be upon him, or any other prophet, mention of believing in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, you have no grounds to say, ‘What they meant by that is the attribute of Allah that is the Word and Knowledge, or His Life.’ They did not intend this meaning by those terms; rather, by ‘the Son’ and ‘the Holy Spirit’ they meant something distinct from Allah, Mighty and Majestic.

What is distinct from Allah is not an attribute of Allah—let alone the Creator—still less can the human being with whom it allegedly unites be a creator. Thus you have erred, layer upon layer: first, by claiming that the Messiah and others intended a divine attribute by ‘the Son’ and ‘the Holy Spirit’; second, by declaring that attribute itself to be the Creator and Lord; and third, by asserting that the attribute unites with a human being—Jesus, called the Messiah—so that he becomes the Creator, Lord of all worlds. You have therefore committed a threefold error in the matter of indwelling, after another threefold error in the doctrine of the Trinity, along with further deviations when you affirmed only three attributes to the exclusion of others and made them independent essences, multiple deities.

Then you said, ‘One God,’ and so you strayed with a triple misguidance in the Trinity and a triple misguidance in the alleged union.

They were told, secondly:

‘If you insist that these are attributes of Allah—just as light, speech, and heat are attributes of the things in which they inhere—then it is impossible for them to inhere in anything else, and it is likewise impossible—’