On the Trinity, Book 5

In the previous books, our reply to the mad and blasphemous doctrines of the heretics has led us, with our eyes open, into a difficulty: our readers face an equal danger whether we refute our opponents or refrain from doing so. For while unbelief, with noisy irreverence, was pressing the unity of God upon us, a unity that devout and reasonable faith cannot deny, the scrupulous soul was caught in a dilemma: whether it affirmed or denied the proposition, it ran an equal risk of blasphemy. To human logic it may seem ridiculous and irrational to say that it can be impious both to assert and to deny the same doctrine, since what it is godly to maintain must be godless to dispute; if it serves a good purpose to demolish a statement, it may seem foolish to imagine that good can come from supporting it. But in the presence of God's counsels human logic is fallacy, and it is folly when it tries to contend with the wisdom of heaven; its thoughts are shackled by its limitations, and its philosophy is confined by the weakness of natural reason. It must be foolish in its own eyes before it can be wise before God; that is, it must learn how poor its own faculties are and seek Divine wisdom. It must become wise, not by the standard of human philosophy but by the standard of the philosophy that rises to God, before it can enter into His wisdom and have its eyes opened to the folly of the world. The heretics have cleverly arranged for this folly, which passes for wisdom, to serve as their siege engine. They use the confession of One God, for which they appeal to the witness of the Law and the Gospels in the words, Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is One. They are well aware of the risks involved, whether their assertion is met with contradiction or passed over in silence; and whichever happens, they see an opening to promote their heresy. If sacred truth, pressed with blasphemous intent, is met with silence, that silence is taken as consent, as a confession that because God is One, His Son is not God, and God remains in eternal solitude. If, on the other hand, the heresy in their bold argument is met with contradiction, this opposition is branded a departure from the true Gospel faith, which states the unity of God in precise terms; or else they throw it in the opponent's face that he has fallen into the opposite heresy, which allows only one Person of Father and Son. This is the deadly trick, wearing a look of attractive innocence, that the world's wisdom, which is folly to God, has forged to deceive us in this first article of their faith, which we can neither confess nor deny without risking blasphemy. We walk between dangers on either side; the unity of God may force us to deny the Godhead of His Son, or, if we confess that the Father is God and the Son is God, we may be driven into the heresy of interpreting the unity of Father and Son in the Sabellian sense. So their tactic of insisting on the One God would either shut the Second Person out of the Godhead, or destroy the Unity by admitting Him as a second God, or else make the unity merely nominal. For unity, they would argue, excludes a Second; the existence of a Second destroys unity; and Two cannot be One.

But we have attained this wisdom of God, which is folly to the world, and we intend, through the sound and saving profession of true faith in the Lord, to unmask the snakelike treachery of their teaching; so we have laid out the plan of our work in a way that gives us an advantage for displaying the truth without entangling ourselves in the dangers of heretical assertion. We carefully avoid both extremes: we do not deny that God is One, yet, on the evidence of the Lawgiver who proclaims the unity of God, we set out distinctly the truth that there is God and God. We teach that God is One, but not through any confusion of the Two; we do not tear Him to pieces by preaching a plurality of Gods, nor do we profess a distinction only in name. But we present Him as God and God, postponing the question of the Divine unity for now, for fuller discussion later. For the Gospels tell us that Moses taught the truth when he proclaimed that God is One; and Moses, by proclaiming One God, confirms the lesson of the Gospels, which tell of God and God. So we do not contradict our authorities but base our teaching on them, proving that the revelation of God's unity to Israel gives no warrant for refusing Divinity to the Son of God, since the one who is our authority for asserting that there is One God is also our authority for confessing the Godhead of His Son.

And so the arrangement of our treatise closely follows the order of the objections raised. Since the next article of their blasphemous and dishonest confession is, We confess One true God, this whole second book is devoted to the question of whether the Son of God is true God. For it is clear that the heretics have cleverly devised this arrangement, first naming One God and then One true God, in order to detach the Son from the name and nature of God, since the thought is bound to occur that, if truth is inherent in the One God, it must be strictly confined to Him. And so, since it is beyond doubt that Moses, in proclaiming the unity of God, meant to assert the Divinity of the Son, let us go back to the principal passages that convey his teaching, and ask whether or not he wants us to believe that the Son, Who, as he has taught us, is God, is also true God. Clearly, the truth, or genuineness, of a thing is a question of its nature and its powers. For instance, true wheat is wheat that grows into a head with the beard bristling around it, that is cleaned of the chaff and ground into flour, made into a loaf and eaten as food, and that yields the nature and the uses of bread. So natural powers are the evidence of truth; let us see, by this test, whether He Whom Moses calls God is true God. For now we will put off our discussion of this One God, Who is also true God, for fear that, if I fail to take up their challenge at once and uphold the One True God in the two Persons of Father and Son, eager and anxious souls may be weighed down by dangerous doubts.

And now, since we accept as common ground the fact that God recognizes His Son as God, I ask you: how does the creation of the world disprove our assertion that the Son is true God? There is no doubt that all things are through the Son, for, in the Apostle's words, All things are through Him, and in Him. If all things are through Him, and all were made out of nothing, and none in any other way than through Him, in what element of true Godhead is He lacking, when He possesses both the nature and the power of God? He had the powers of the Divine nature at His disposal, to bring the nonexistent into being and to create as He pleased. For God saw that they were good.

When the Law says, And God said, Let there be a firmament, and then adds, And God made the firmament, it introduces no distinction other than that of Person. It indicates no difference of power or nature, and makes no change of name. Under the single title of God it reveals first the thought of Him Who spoke, and then the action of Him Who created. The narrator's language says nothing to deprive Him of Divine nature and power; in fact, it teaches His true Godhead with great precision. The power to carry out the word of creation belongs only to that Nature for Whom speaking is the same as fulfilling. How then is He Who creates not true God, if He Who commands is true God? If the word spoken was truly Divine, the deed done was truly Divine too. God spoke, and God created; if it was true God Who spoke, then He Who created was true God too, unless, of course, true Godhead was shown to be present in the speech of the One while its absence was displayed in the action of the Other. So in the Son of God we behold the true Divine nature. He is God, He is Creator, He is Son of God, He is omnipotent. It is not merely that He can do whatever He wills, for will always accompanies power; He can also do whatever He is commanded. Absolute power is this: its possessor can carry out as Agent whatever His words as Speaker can express. When an unlimited power of expression is joined to an unlimited power of execution, then this creative power, matching the commanding word, possesses the true nature of God. So the Son of God is not a false God, nor God by adoption, nor God by gift of the name, but true God. Nothing would be gained by stating the arguments raised against His true Godhead. His possession of the name and of the nature of God is conclusive proof. He by Whom all things were made is God. This much the creation of the world tells me about Him. He is God, equal with God in name; true God, equal with true God in power. The might of God is revealed to us in the creative word; the might of God is also shown in the creative act. And now I ask again by what authority, in your confession of Father and Son, you deny the true Divine nature of Him Whose name reveals His power and Whose power proves His right to the Name.

My reader must remember that my silence about the common objections comes from no forgetfulness and no lack of confidence in my case. For that constantly quoted text, The Father is greater than I, and the passages related to it are perfectly familiar to me, and I have my interpretation of them ready, one that makes them witnesses to the true Divine nature of the Son. But it serves my purpose best to keep to the order of their attack in my reply, so that our pious effort may follow closely on the progress of their impious scheme, and when we see them turn aside into godless heresy we may at once wipe out the track of error. To this end we postpone the testimony of the Evangelists and Apostles until the end of our work, and for now we join battle with the blasphemers on the ground of the Law and the Prophets, silencing their crooked argument, built on misinterpretation and deceit, with the very texts they use to try to delude us. The sound way to demonstrate a truth is to expose the fallacy of the objections raised against it; and the deceiver's disgrace is complete if his own lie is turned into evidence for the truth. And indeed, the universal experience of mankind has taught that falsehood and truth are incompatible and cannot be reconciled or made consistent; that by their very nature they belong among those opposites that are eternally hostile to each other and can never combine or agree.

This being so, I ask how anyone can distinguish between a true God and a false one in the words, Let Us make man in Our own image and likeness. The words express a meaning; the meaning is the product of thought; the thought is set in motion by truth. Let us trace the words back to their meaning, learn the thought from the meaning, and from the thought reach the underlying truth. Your question is whether He to Whom the words Let Us make man in Our own image and likeness were spoken was not regarded as true by Him Who spoke them; for they undoubtedly express the feeling and thought of the Speaker. In saying Let Us make, He clearly indicates One Who is in no discord with Himself, no alien or powerless Being, but One endowed with power to do what He speaks of. His own words assure us that this is the sense in which we must understand them to have been spoken.

To assure us still more fully of the true Godhead shown in the nature and work of the Son, He Who expressed His meaning in the words I have quoted shows that His thought was prompted by the true Divinity of Him to Whom He said, In Our own image and likeness. How can He be falsely called God, to Whom the true God says, In Our own image and likeness? Our rules out isolation, and any difference in either purpose or nature. Man is created, taking the words in their strict sense, in Their common image. Now the true and the false can have nothing in common. God, the Speaker, is speaking to God; man is being created in the image of Father and of Son. The Two are One in name and One in nature. Man is made in only one image. The time has not yet come for me to discuss this matter; later I will explain what this image of God the Father and of God the Son is, in which man was created. For now we will keep to the question: was He, or was He not, true God, to Whom the true God said, Let Us make man in Our own image and likeness? Separate, if you can, the true elements from the false in this image common to Both; in your heretical madness, divide the indivisible. For They Two are One, and man is the one copy of Their one image and likeness.

But now let us continue reading this Scripture, to show that the consistency of truth is untouched by these dishonest objections. The next words are, And God made man; in the image of God He made him. The image is held in common; God made man in the image of God. I would ask the one who denies that God's Son is true God: in what God's image does he suppose God made man? He must keep constantly in mind that all things are through the Son; heretical ingenuity must not twist this passage, for its own purposes, into an action of the Father. If, then, man is created through God the Son in the image of God the Father, he is also created in the image of the Son; for all agree that the words In Our image and likeness were spoken to the Son. Thus the Divine words assert His true Godhead as explicitly as the Divine action shows it, so that it is God Who molds man into the image of God, Who reveals Himself as God, and, moreover, as true God. For His joint possession of the Divine image proves Him true God, while His creative action shows Him to be God the Son.

What wild insanity in depraved souls! What blind audacity in reckless blasphemy! You hear of God and God; you hear of Our image. Why suggest that One is true God and One is not? Why distinguish between God by nature and God in name? Why, on the pretext of defending the faith, do you destroy the faith? Why struggle to twist the revelation of One God, One true God, into a denial that God is One and true? I will not yet silence your insane efforts with the clear words of Evangelists and Prophets, in which Father and Son appear not as one Person but as One in nature, and Each as true God. For now the Law alone annihilates you. Does the Law ever speak of One true God, and One not true? Does it ever speak of Either except by the name of God, which is the true expression of Their nature? It speaks of God and God; it speaks also of God as One. In fact, it does more than describe Them this way. It shows Them to be true God and true God by the sure evidence of Their joint image. It begins by speaking of Them by their strict name of God; then it attributes true Godhead to Both in common. For when man, Their creature, is created in the image of Both, sound reason forces the conclusion that Each of Them is true God.

But let us travel once more on our journey of instruction over the lessons taught in the holy Law of God. The Angel of God speaks to Hagar; and this same Angel is God. But perhaps His being the Angel of God means that He is not true God. For this title seems to indicate a lower nature; where the name points to a difference in kind, people think true equality must be absent. The last book has already exposed how hollow this objection is; the title of Angel tells us about His office, not His nature. I have prophetic evidence for this explanation: Who makes His angels spirits, and His ministers a flaming fire. That flaming fire is His ministers; that spirit that comes is His angels. These figures show the nature and the power of His messengers, or angels, and of His ministers. This spirit is an angel of God, that flaming fire a minister of God. Their nature suits them for the function of messenger or minister. So the Law, or rather God through the Law, wishing to indicate God the Son as a Person, yet as bearing the same name as the Father, calls Him the Angel, that is, the Messenger, of God. The title Messenger proves that He has an office of His own; when He is called God, that proves His nature is truly Divine. But this sequence, first Angel, then God, belongs to the order of revelation, not to Himself. For we confess Them as Father and Son in the strictest sense, in such equality that the Only-begotten Son, by virtue of His birth, possesses true Divinity from the Unbegotten Father. This revelation of Them as Sender and Sent is only another way of saying Father and Son; it does not contradict the true Divine nature of the Son or cancel His possession of the Godhead as His birthright. For no one can doubt that the Son, through His birth, shares innately in the nature of His Author, in such a way that from the One there comes into being an indivisible Unity, because One is from One.

Faith burns with passionate ardor; the burden of silence is unbearable, and my thoughts urgently demand expression. Already in the preceding book I departed from the intended method of my demonstration. I was denouncing the blasphemous sense in which the heretics speak of One God, and explaining the passages in which Moses speaks of God and God. I rushed ahead with a hasty, though devout, zeal to the true sense in which we hold the unity of God. And now again, absorbed in pursuing another inquiry, I have let myself wander off course, and while I was working on the true Divinity of the Son, the ardor of my soul has hurried me on, before the time, to make the confession of true God as Father and as Son. But our own faith must wait for its proper place in the treatise. This preliminary statement of it has been made as a safeguard for the reader; later it will be developed and explained in such a way as to frustrate the opponent's schemes.

To resume the argument: this title of office indicates no difference of nature, for He Who is the Angel of God is God. The test of His true Godhead will be whether or not His words and acts were those of God. He increases Ishmael into a great people and promises that many nations will bear his name. Is this, I ask, within an angel's power? If not, and this is the power of God, why do you refuse true Divinity to Him Who, by your own admission, has the true power of God? So He possesses the true and perfect powers of the Divine nature. True God, in all the forms in which He reveals Himself for the world's salvation, is not, and never can be, anything other than true God.

Now, first, I ask: what is the meaning of these terms, 'true God' and 'not true God'? If anyone says to me, 'This is fire, but not true fire; water, but not true water,' I can attach no intelligible meaning to his words. What difference in kind can there be between one true specimen of a class and another true specimen of the same class? If a thing is fire, it must be true fire; as long as its nature remains the same, it cannot lose this character of true fire. Take away water's watery nature, and in doing so you destroy it as true water; let it remain water, and it will inevitably still be true water. The only way an object can lose its nature is by losing its existence; if it continues to exist, it must be truly itself. If the Son of God is God, then He is true God; if He is not true God, then He is not God at all in any possible sense. If He does not have the nature, then He has no right to the name; if, on the contrary, the name that indicates the nature is His by inherent right, then He cannot lack that nature in its truest sense.

But perhaps someone will argue that when the Angel of God is called God, He receives the name as a favor, through adoption, and so has a nominal Godhead, not a true one. If He gave us an inadequate revelation of His Divine nature when He was called the Angel of God, judge whether He has not fully shown His true Godhead under the name of a nature lower than the angelic. For a Man spoke to Abraham, and Abraham worshiped Him as God. Pestilent heretic! Abraham confessed Him to be God; you deny it. What hope do you have, in your blasphemy, of the blessings promised to Abraham? He is Father of the Gentiles, but not for you; you cannot go out from your regeneration to join the household of his seed through the blessings given to his faith. You are no son raised up to Abraham from the stones; you are a brood of vipers, an adversary of his belief. You are not the Israel of God, the heir of Abraham, justified by faith; for you have disbelieved God, while Abraham was justified and appointed Father of the Gentiles through the faith in which he worshiped the God Whose word he trusted. It was God Whom that blessed and faithful Patriarch worshiped then; and notice how truly He was God, to Whom, in His own words, all things are possible. Is there anyone but God alone to Whom nothing is impossible? And does He to Whom all things are possible fall short of true Divinity?

I ask further: Who is this God Who overthrew Sodom and Gomorrha? For the Lord rained from the Lord; was it not the true Lord from the true Lord? Do you have any other way to read this Lord, and Lord? Or any other meaning for the terms, except that in Lord, and Lord, their Persons are distinguished? Keep in mind that He Whom you have confessed as Alone true is the same One you have also confessed as Alone the righteous Judge. Now notice that the Lord who rains from the Lord, and does not kill the just with the unjust, and judges the whole earth, is both Lord and righteous Judge, and also rains from the Lord. In the face of all this, I ask you: Which One do you describe as alone the righteous Judge? The Lord rains from the Lord; you will not deny that He Who rains from the Lord is the righteous Judge, for Abraham, the Father of the Gentiles— but not of the unbelieving Gentiles— says this: In no way shall You do this thing, killing the righteous with the wicked, for then the righteous would be like the wicked. In no way shall You, Who judge the earth, carry out this judgment. This God, then, the righteous Judge, is clearly also the true God. Blasphemer! Your own falsehood refutes you. I am not yet bringing forward the witness of the Gospels about God the Judge; the Law has told me that He is the Judge. You must strip the Son of His office as Judge before you can strip Him of His true Divinity. You have solemnly confessed that He Who is the only righteous Judge is also the only true God; your own statements bind you to admit that He Who is the righteous Judge is also true God. This Judge is the Lord, for Whom all things are possible, the One Who promises eternal blessings, the Judge of the righteous and the wicked. He is the God of Abraham, the God Abraham worshiped. Fool and blasphemer that you are, your shameless glibness will have to invent some new fallacy if you are to prove that He is not true God.

His merciful and mysterious revelations of Himself are in no way inconsistent with His true heavenly nature; and His faithful saints never fail to see through the guise He has taken on so that faith may see Him. The types of the Law foreshadow the mysteries of the Gospel; they enable the Patriarch to see and to believe what the Apostle will later gaze on and proclaim. For, since the Law is the shadow of things to come, the shadow that was seen was a true outline of the reality that cast it. God, Who was indeed to be born as Man in the fullness of time, was seen and believed and worshiped as Man. To meet the Patriarch's eye, He takes on an appearance that foreshadows the future truth. In those early days God was only seen as Man, not born; in due time He was born as well as seen. Growing familiar with the human appearance, which He took on so that people could see Him, was to prepare them for the time when He would truly be born as Man. It was then that the shadow took on substance, the semblance became reality, the vision became life. But God remained unchanged, whether He was seen in the appearance of manhood or born in its reality. The resemblance was perfect between Himself after His birth and Himself as He had been seen in vision. As He was born, so He had appeared; as He had appeared, so He was born. But since the time has not yet come for us to compare the Gospel account with that of the prophet Moses, let us continue on our chosen course through the pages of the Law. Later we shall prove from the Gospels that it was the true Son of God Who was born as Man; for now, we are showing from the Law that it was true God, the Son of God, Who appeared to the Patriarchs in human form. For when One appeared to Abraham as Man, He was worshiped as God and proclaimed as Judge; and when the Lord rained from the Lord, the Law tells us beyond a doubt that the Lord rained from the Lord in order to reveal to us the Father and the Son. Nor can we suppose for a moment that when the Patriarch, with full knowledge, worshiped the Son as God, he was blind to the fact that it was true God Whom he worshiped.

But godless unbelief finds it very hard to grasp the true faith. Their capacity for devotion has never been enlarged by belief, and it is too narrow to receive a full presentation of the truth. So the unbelieving soul cannot grasp the great work God did in being born as Man to accomplish the salvation of mankind; in the work of its own salvation it fails to see the power of God. They think of the labor of His birth, the weakness of infancy, the growth of childhood, the reaching of maturity, the bodily suffering and the Cross with which it ended, and the death on the Cross; and all this hides His true Godhead from their eyes. Yet He had called all these capacities into being for Himself, as additions to His nature; capacities He had not possessed in His true Divine nature. So He acquired them without losing His true Divinity, and did not cease to be God when He became Man, when He, Who is God eternally, became Man at a point in time. They cannot see the true God's power at work in His becoming what He was not before, while never ceasing to be His former Self. And yet our feeble nature would never have been taken up, had He not, by the strength of His own omnipotent nature, come to be what He previously was not, while remaining what He was. What blindness of heresy, what foolish wisdom of the world, that cannot see that the reproach of Christ is the power of God, and the folly of faith the wisdom of God! So in your eyes Christ is not God because He, Who was from eternity, was born; because the Unchangeable grew with the years, the Impassible suffered, the Living died, the Dead lives; because His whole history contradicts the ordinary course of nature! Is all this not simply saying that He, being God, was omnipotent? I am not yet turning your pages, you holy and venerable Gospels, to prove from them that Christ Jesus, amid these changes and sufferings, is God. For the Law is the forerunner of the Gospels, and the Law must teach us that when God clothed Himself in weakness, He did not lose His Godhead. The types of the Law give us convincing assurance of the mysteries of the Gospel faith.

Be with me now in your faithful spirit, holy and blessed Patriarch Jacob, to fight the poisonous hissing of the serpent of unbelief. Prevail once more in your wrestling with the Man, and, being the stronger, once more plead for His blessing. Why pray for what you could demand from your weaker Opponent? Your strong arm has overpowered Him Whose blessing you pray for. Your bodily victory stands in sharp contrast to your soul's humility, your deeds to your thoughts. It is a Man whom you hold powerless in your strong grip; but in your eyes this Man is true God, and God not in name only, but in nature. It is not the blessing of a God by adoption that you claim, but the blessing of the true God. You struggle with a Man, but face to face you see God. What you see with the bodily eye is far different from what you see with the vision of faith. You have felt Him to be a weak Man; but your soul has been saved because it saw God in Him. When you were wrestling you were Jacob; you are Israel now, through faith in the blessing you claimed. According to the flesh, the Man is your inferior, as a type of His passion in the flesh; but you can recognize God in that weak flesh, as a sign of His blessing in the Spirit. The witness of your eyes does not disturb your faith; His weakness does not mislead you into neglecting His blessing. Though He is Man, His humanity does not prevent Him from being God, nor His Godhead from being true God; for, being God, He must indeed be true.

As the Law moves forward it still follows the sequence of the Gospel mystery, whose shadow it is; its types faithfully anticipate the truths the Apostles taught. In the vision of his dream the blessed Jacob saw God; this was the revelation of a mystery, not a bodily appearance. For he was shown the angels descending by the ladder and ascending to heaven, and God resting above the ladder; and the vision, as it was interpreted, foretold that his dream would one day become a revealed truth. The Patriarch's words, The house of God and the gate of heaven, show us the scene of His vision; and then, after a long account of what he did, the narrative goes on: And God said to Jacob, Get up, and go up to the place Bethel, and live there: and make a Sacrifice there to God, Who appeared to you when you fled from the face of Esau. If the faith of the Gospel has access through God the Son to God the Father, and if God can be grasped only through God, then show us in what sense He is not true God, Who demands reverence for God, Who rests above the heavenly ladder. What difference of nature separates the Two, when Both bear the one name that indicates the one nature? It is God Who was seen; and it is also God Who speaks about the God Who was seen. God cannot be grasped except through God, just as God accepts no worship from us except through God. We could not understand that the One must be revered unless the Other had taught us reverence for Him; we could not have known that the One is God unless we had known the Godhead of the Other. The revelation of mysteries keeps to its appointed course; it is by God that we are initiated into the worship of God. And when one name, which speaks of one nature, unites the Father with the Son, how can the Son fall so far below Himself as to be other than true God?

Human judgment must not pass sentence on God. Our nature is not such that it can lift itself by its own powers to the contemplation of heavenly things. We must learn from God what we are to think of God; we have no source of knowledge but Him. You may be as carefully trained in secular philosophy as you like; you may have lived a life of righteousness. All this will add to your mental satisfaction, but it will not help you to know God. Moses was adopted as the son of the queen and instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians; moreover, out of loyalty to his race, he had avenged the wrong done to the Hebrew by killing the Egyptian, and yet he did not know the God Who had blessed his fathers. For when he left Egypt for fear that his deed had been discovered, and was living as a shepherd in the land of Midian, he saw a fire in the bush, and the bush was not consumed. It was then that he heard the voice of God, and asked His name, and learned His nature. He could have known none of this except through God Himself. And we, in the same way, must confine ourselves, in whatever we say of God, to the terms in which He has spoken to our understanding about Himself.

It is the Angel of God Who appeared in the fire from the bush; and it is God Who spoke from the bush in the midst of the fire. He is revealed as Angel; that is His office, not His nature. The name that expresses His nature is given to you as God; for the Angel of God is God. But perhaps He is not true God. Is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, not true God, then? For the Angel Who speaks from the bush is their God eternally. And so that you cannot insinuate that the name is His only by adoption, it is the absolute God Who speaks to Moses. These are His words: And the Lord said to Moses, I Am Who I Am; and He said, This is what you shall say to the children of Israel, He Who is has sent me to you. God's discourse began as the speech of the Angel, in order to reveal the mystery of human salvation in the Son. Next He appears as the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, so that we may know the name that is His by nature. Finally, He Who sends Moses to Israel is the God Who is, so that we may be fully assured that He is God in the absolute sense.

What further fictions can the futile folly of insane blasphemy invent? Do you still persist in sowing tares by night among the pure wheat, tares predestined to be burned, when the knowledge of all the Patriarchs contradicts you? What is more, if you believed Moses, you would also believe in God, the Son of God; unless perhaps you deny that it was about Him that Moses spoke. If you mean to deny that, you must listen to the words of God: — For if you had believed Moses, you would have believed Me also, for he wrote about Me. Moses, indeed, will refute you with the whole volume of the Law, ordained through angels, which he received by the hand of the Mediator. Ask whether He Who gave the Law was not true God; for the Mediator was the Giver. And was it not to meet God that Moses led the people out to the Mount? Was it not God Who came down onto the Mount? Or was it perhaps only by a fiction or by adoption, and not by right of nature, that He Who did all this bore the name of God? Notice the blare of the trumpets, the flashing of the torches, the clouds of smoke rolling over the mountain as from a furnace, the terror of man in the presence of God as he becomes aware of his own powerlessness, the confession of the people, when they begged Moses to be their spokesman, that they would die at the voice of God. In your judgment, is He not true God, when the mere dread that He might speak filled Israel with the fear of death? He Whose voice human weakness could not bear? In your eyes is He not God because He addressed you through the weak faculties of a man, so that you might hear and live? Moses went up onto the Mount; in forty days and nights he gained the knowledge of the mysteries of heaven, and set it all in order according to the vision of the truth that was revealed to him there. From his communion with God, Who spoke with him, he received the reflected splendor of that glory on which no one may gaze? His corruptible face was transfigured into the likeness of the unapproachable light of Him with Whom he was staying. To this God he bears witness, about this God he speaks; he summons the angels of God to come and worship Him amid the gladness of the Gentiles, and prays that the blessings that please Him may come down on the head of Joseph. In the face of evidence like this, does anyone dare to say that He has nothing but the name of God, and deny His true Divinity?

This long discussion has, I believe, brought out the truth that no sound argument has ever been cited in favor of a distinction between One Who is true God and One Who is not, in the passages where the Law speaks of God and God, of Lord and Lord. I have proved that these terms rule out any difference between Them in name or in nature, and that we can use the name as a test of the nature, and the nature as a clue to the name. So I have shown that the character, the power, the attributes, the name of God are inherent in Him Whom the Law has called God. I have shown also that the Law, gradually unfolding the Gospel mystery, reveals the Son as a Person by showing God obeying the words of God in the creation of the world, and, in the forming of man, making what is the joint image of God and of God; and again, that in the judgment of the men of Sodom the Lord is Judge from the Lord; and that, in the giving of blessings and the ordaining of the mysteries of the Law, the Angel of God is God. So, in support of the saving confession of God as always revealed in the Persons of Father and of Son, we have shown how the Law teaches the true Godhead by using the strict name of God; for while the Law states clearly that They are Two, it casts no shadow of doubt on the true Godhead of either.

And now the time has come for us to put a stop to that crafty trick of heresy by which they twist the devout and godly teachings of the Law into support for their own godless delusion. They preface their denial of the Son of God with the words, Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is One; and then, because the identity of name would refute their blasphemy, since the Law speaks of God and God, they appeal to the authority of the prophetic words, They shall bless You, the true God, to prove that the name is not used in its true sense. They argue that these words teach that God is One, and that God, the Son of God, has only His name and not His nature; and that therefore we must conclude that the true God is one Person only. But perhaps you imagine, fool, that we will contradict these texts of yours, and so deny that there is one true God. Certainly we do not contradict them with a confession framed in your sense. Our faith receives them, our reason accepts them, our words declare them. We recognize One God, and recognize Him as true God. The name of God holds no dangers for our confession, which proclaims that in the nature of the Son there is the One true God. Learn the meaning of your own words, recognize the One true God, and then you will be able to make a faithful confession of God, One and true. It is the words of our faith that you are turning into the instrument of your blasphemy, keeping the sound and perverting the sense. Disguised in a foolish costume of imaginary wisdom, you destroy the truth under cover of loyalty to it. You confess that God is One and true for the very purpose of denying the truth you confess. Your language claims a reputation for piety on the strength of its impiety, and for truth on the strength of its falsehood. Your preaching of One true God leads up to a denial of Him. For you deny that the Son is true God, though you admit that He is God, but God in name only, not in nature. If His birth is in name, not in nature, then you are justified in denying His true right to the name; but if He is truly born as God, how then can He fail to be true God by virtue of His birth? Deny the fact, and you may deny the consequence; if you admit the fact, how can He be other than Himself? No being can change its own essential nature. I shall speak about His birth shortly; meanwhile I will refute your blasphemous falsehoods about His true Divine nature with the words of the prophets. But I shall take care that in asserting the One true God I give no cover to the Sabellian heresy that the Father is one Person with the Son, and none to the slander against the Son's true Godhead that you derive from the unity of the One true God.

Blasphemy is incompatible with wisdom; where the fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom, is absent, no glimmer of intelligence survives. An example of this can be seen in the heretics' citing of the prophet's words, And they shall bless You, the true God, as evidence against the Godhead of the Son. First, we see here the folly that hampers unbelief, in its misunderstanding or (if it was understood) in its suppression of the earlier part of the prophecy: and again we see it in their fraudulent insertion of that one little word, which is not found in the book itself. This move is as stupid as it is dishonest, since no one would trust them enough to accept their reading without checking it against the prophetic text. For that text does not read: They shall bless You, the true God, but: They shall bless the true God. There is no small difference between You, the true God and The true God. If the You is kept, the second-person pronoun implies that Another is being addressed; if the You is left out, True God, the object of the sentence, is the Speaker.

To make sure that our explanation of the passage is complete and certain, I quote the words in full: Therefore this is what the Lord says: Behold, those who serve Me shall eat, but you shall be hungry; behold, those who serve Me shall drink, but you shall be thirsty; behold, those who serve Me shall rejoice with gladness, but you shall cry out from the sorrow of your heart, and shall wail from anguish of spirit. For you shall leave your name as a rejoicing to My chosen, but the Lord shall kill you. But My servants shall be called by a new name, which shall be blessed on the earth; and they shall bless the true God, and those who swear on the earth shall swear by the true God. There is always a good reason for any departure from the usual ways of speaking, but novelty also becomes an opportunity for misinterpretation. The question here is why, when so many earlier prophecies had been uttered about God, and the name God, alone and without epithet, had sufficed until then to indicate the Divine majesty and nature, the Spirit of prophecy should now foretell through Isaiah that the true God was to be blessed, and that men would swear on earth by the true God. First, we must keep in mind that this discourse was spoken about times to come. Now, I ask, was He Whom people used to bless then, and by Whom they swore, not true God in the mind of the Jews? The Jews, unaware of the typical meaning of their mysteries and therefore ignorant of God the Son, worshiped God simply as God, and not as Father; for if they had worshiped Him as Father, they would have worshiped the Son also. It was God, therefore, Whom they blessed and by Whom they swore. But the prophet testifies that it is true God Who shall be blessed in the future, calling Him true God because the mystery of His Incarnation was to blind the eyes of some to His true Godhead. When falsehood was to be spread abroad, the truth had to be clearly stated. And now let us go through this passage, clause by clause.

Therefore this is what the Lord says: Behold, those who serve Me shall eat, but you shall be hungry; behold, those who serve Me shall drink, but you shall be thirsty. Notice that a single clause contains two different tenses, to teach the truth about two different times: Those who serve Me shall eat. Present piety is rewarded with a future prize, and in the same way present godlessness will suffer the penalty of future thirst and hunger. Then He adds, Behold, those who serve Me shall rejoice with gladness, but you shall cry out from the sorrow of your heart, and shall howl from anguish of spirit. Here again, as before, there is a revelation about the future and about the present. Those who serve now shall rejoice with gladness, while those who do not serve shall remain in crying and howling through sorrow of heart and anguish of spirit. He goes on, For you shall leave your name as a rejoicing to My chosen, but the Lord shall kill you. These words, which concern a future time, are addressed to the carnal Israel, which is taunted with the prospect of having to give up its name to the chosen of God. What is this name? Israel, of course, since the prophecy was addressed to Israel. And now I ask, What is Israel today? The Apostle gives the answer: Those who are in the spirit, not in the letter, those who walk in the Law of Christ, are the Israel of God.

Furthermore, we must reach a conclusion about why the words quoted above, Therefore this is what the Lord says, are followed by But the Lord shall kill you, and about the meaning of the next sentence, But my servants shall be called by a new name, which shall be blessed on earth. There can be no doubt that both Therefore this is what the Lord says, and afterward But the Lord shall kill you, prove that it was the Lord Who both spoke and also intended to kill, Who meant to reward His servants with that new name, Who was well known to have spoken through the prophets, and Who was to be the judge of the righteous and of the wicked. And so the rest of this revelation of the mystery of the Gospel removes all doubt that the Lord is the One Who speaks and the One Who kills. It continues: But My servants shall be called by a new name, which shall be blessed on earth. Here everything is in the future. What, then, is this new name of a religion, a name that shall be blessed on earth? If the name Christian ever received a blessing in past ages, it is not a new name. But if this hallowed name of our devotion to God is new, then this new title of Christian, given to our faith, is the heavenly blessing that is our reward on earth.

And now come words in perfect harmony with the inner assurance of our faith. He says, And they shall bless the true God, and those who swear on earth shall swear by the true God. And indeed those who have received the new name in God's service shall bless God; and moreover the God by Whom they shall swear is the true God. What doubt is there about Who this true God is, by Whom men shall swear and Whom they shall bless, through Whom a new and blessed name shall be given to those who serve Him? Against the blasphemous misrepresentations of heresy, I have on my side the clear and definite evidence of the Church's faith: the witness of the new name which You, Christ, have given, of the blessed title which You have bestowed as a reward for loyal service. It swears that You are true God. Christ, every mouth among those who believe declares that You are God. The faith of all believers swears that You are God; it confesses, proclaims and is inwardly assured that You are true God.

And so this passage of prophecy, taken with its whole context, clearly describes as God both Him Whom we serve for the sake of the new name and Him through Whom the new name is blessed on earth. It tells us Who is blessed as true God, and by Whom people swear as true God. And this is the confession of faith that the Church, in the fullness of time, makes in loyal devotion to Christ her Lord. We can see how exactly the words of prophecy conform to the truth, since they refrain from inserting the pronoun of the second person. If the words had been You, the true God, they might have been interpreted as spoken to another. The true God can refer to no one but the Speaker. The passage, taken by itself, shows Whom it refers to; the preceding words, taken together with it, declare who the Speaker is Who makes this confession of God. They are these: I have appeared openly to those who did not ask for Me, and, I have been found by those who did not seek Me. I said, Here I am, to a nation that did not call on My name. I have spread out My hands all day long to an unbelieving and contradicting people. Could a dishonest attempt to suppress the truth be more completely exposed, or the Speaker be more clearly revealed as true God, than here? Who, I ask, appeared to those who did not ask for Him, and was found by those who did not seek Him? What nation is it that formerly did not call on His name? Who is it that spread out His hands all day long to an unbelieving and contradicting people? Compare with these words that holy and Divine Song of Deuteronomy, in which God, in His anger against those that are no Gods, moves the unbelievers to jealousy against those who are no people and a foolish nation. Conclude for yourself Who it is that makes Himself manifest to those who did not know Him; Who, though one people is His own, becomes the possession of strangers; Who it is that spreads out His hands before an unbelieving and contradicting people, nailing to the cross the written record of the former sentence against us. For the same Spirit in the prophet we are considering continues this way in the course of this one prophecy, which is connected in argument as well as continuous in utterance: But My servants shall be called by a new name, which shall be blessed on earth, and they shall bless the true God, and those who swear on the earth shall swear by the true God.

If heresy, in its folly and wickedness, attempts to entice the simple-minded and uninstructed away from the true belief that these words were spoken about God the Son, by pretending that they are an utterance of God the Father about Himself, it will hear the lie condemned by the Apostle and Teacher of the Gentiles. He interprets all these prophecies as references to the passion of the Lord and to the times of Gospel faith, when he rebukes the unbelief of Israel, which refuses to recognize that the Lord has come in the flesh. His words are: For whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. How shall they call on Him in Whom they have not believed? But how shall they believe in Him of Whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they have been sent? As it is written, How beautiful are the feet of those who proclaim peace, of those who proclaim good things. But not all obey the Gospel. For Esaias says, Lord, who has believed our report? So faith comes by hearing, and hearing through the word. But I say, Have they not heard? Yes, truly, their sound went out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world. But I say, Did Israel not know? First Moses says, I will provoke you to jealousy against those who are no people, and against a foolish nation I will make you angry. Moreover Esaias is bold and says, I appeared to those who do not seek Me, I was found by those who did not ask for Me. But what does He say to Israel? All day long I have stretched out My hands to a people who do not listen. Who are you, who have risen up through the successive heavens, not knowing whether you were in the body or out of the body, and can explain the words of the prophet more faithfully than he? Who are you, who have heard, and may not tell, the ineffable mysteries of the secret things of heaven, and have proclaimed with greater assurance the knowledge God granted you for revelation? Who are you, who have been foreordained to a full share in the Lord's suffering on the Cross, and were first caught up to Paradise, and have drawn nobler teaching from the Scriptures of God than this chosen vessel? If there is such a man, has he been unaware that these are the deeds and words of the true God, proclaimed to us by His own true and chosen Apostle so that we may recognize in Him their Author?

But someone may argue that the Apostle was not inspired by the Spirit of prophecy when he borrowed these prophetic words; that he was only interpreting the words of another man at random, and that although everything the Apostle says of himself no doubt comes to him by revelation from Christ, his knowledge of the words of Isaiah comes only from the book. I answer that at the beginning of the utterance in which it is said that the servants of the true God shall bless Him and swear by Him, we read this adoration by the prophet: From everlasting we have not heard, nor have our eyes seen God except You, and Your works which You will do for those who wait for Your mercy. Isaiah says that he has seen no God but Him. For he really did see the glory of God, and he foretold the mystery of His taking flesh from the Virgin. And if you, in your heresy, do not know that it was God the Only-begotten Whom the prophet saw in that glory, listen to the Evangelist: Esaias said these things when he saw His glory, and spoke of Him. The Apostle, the Evangelist and the Prophet combine to silence your objections. Isaiah did see God; even though it is written, No one has seen God at any time, except the Only-begotten Son Who is in the bosom of the Father; He has declared Him, it was God Whom the prophet saw. He gazed on the Divine glory, and men were filled with envy at the honor granted to his prophetic greatness. For this was the reason the Jews passed sentence of death on him.

So the Only-begotten Son, Who is in the bosom of the Father, has told us of God, Whom no man has seen. Either disprove that the Son has informed us in this way, or else believe Him Who has been seen, Who appeared to those who did not know Him, and became the God of the Gentiles who did not call on Him, and spread out His hands before a contradicting people. And believe this also about Him: that those who serve Him are called by a new name, and that on earth people bless Him and swear by Him as true God. Prophecy tells, the Gospel confirms, the Apostle explains and the Church confesses that He Who was seen is true God; but no one ventures to say that God the Father was seen. And yet the madness of heresy has gone so far that, while they profess to recognize this truth, they really deny it. They deny it through the newfangled and godless device of evading the truth while making a studied show of adhering to it. For when they confess one God, alone true and alone righteous, alone wise, alone unchangeable, alone immortal, alone mighty, they attach to Him a Son different in substance, not born from God to be God, but adopted through creation to be a Son, having the name of God not by nature but as a title received by adoption; and so they inevitably deprive the Son of all the attributes that they heap upon the Father in His solitary majesty.

The distorted mind of heresy cannot know and confess the One true God; the sound faith and reason that such a confession requires are incompatible with unbelief. We must confess Father and Son before we can grasp God as One and true. When we have come to know the mysteries of man's salvation, accomplished in us through the power of regeneration to life in the Father and the Son, then we may hope to penetrate the mysteries of the Law and the Prophets. Godless ignorance of the teaching of the Evangelists and Apostles cannot form the thought of One true God. From the teaching of the Evangelists and Apostles we shall present the sound doctrine about Him, in exact agreement with the faith of true believers. We shall present Him in such a way that the Only-begotten, Who is of the substance of the Father, will be known as indivisible and inseparable in nature, not in Person. We shall set forth God as One, because God is from the nature of God. But we shall also base this doctrine of the perfect unity of God on the words of the Prophets, and make them the foundations of the Gospel structure, proving that there is One God, with one Divine nature, from the fact that God the Only-begotten is never classed apart as a second God. For throughout this book of our treatise we have followed the same course as in the one before it; the same methods that proved there that the Son is God have proved here that He is true God. I trust that our explanation of each passage has been so convincing that we have now shown Him to be true God as effectively as we earlier demonstrated His Godhead. The rest of the book will be devoted to proving that He, Who is now recognized as true God, must not be regarded as a second God. Our disproof of the notion of a second God will further establish the unity; and this truth will be shown not to conflict with the personal existence of the Son, while it still maintains the unity of nature in God and God.

The proper method of our inquiry requires that we begin with the man through whom God first manifested Himself to the world, that is, with Moses, by whose mouth God the Only-begotten declared Himself in these words: See, see that I am God, and there is no God besides Me. That godless heresy must not assign these words to God, the unbegotten Father, is clear from the sense of the passage and from the evidence of the Apostle, who, as we have already stated, has taught us to understand this whole discourse as spoken by God the Only-begotten. The Apostle also points out that the words, Rejoice, you nations, with His people, are those of the Son, and in support he further cites this: And there shall be a root of Jesse, and One who shall arise to rule the nations; in Him the nations shall trust. So Moses, by the words Rejoice, you nations, with His people, indicates Him Who said, There is no God besides Me; and the Apostle refers the same words to our Lord Jesus Christ, God the Only-begotten, in Whose rising as a king from the root of Jesse, according to the flesh, the hope of the Gentiles rests. And so we must now consider the meaning of these words, so that we, who know that He spoke them, may determine in what sense He spoke them.

That true and absolute and perfect doctrine which forms our faith is the confession of God from God and God in God, not by any bodily process but by Divine power, not by any transfusion from nature into nature but through the secret and mighty working of the One nature; God from God, not by division or extension or emanation, but by the operation of a nature that brings into existence, by means of birth, a nature One with itself. The facts will receive fuller treatment in the next book, which is to be devoted to an exposition of the teaching of the Evangelists and Apostles; for now we must maintain our assertion and belief from the Law and the Prophets. The nature with which God is born is necessarily the same as the nature of His Source. He cannot come into existence as anything other than God, since His origin is from no one other than God. His nature is the same, not in the sense that the Begetter also was begotten — for then the Unbegotten, having been begotten, would not be Himself — but in the sense that the substance of the Begotten consists in all the elements that are summed up in the substance of the Begetter, Who is His only Origin. So it is due to no external cause that His origin is from the One, and that His existence shares in the Unity; there is no new element in Him, because His life is from the Living; no element is missing, because the Living begot Him to share His own life. Hence, in the generation of the Son, the incorporeal and unchangeable God begets, in accordance with His own nature, God incorporeal and unchangeable; and this perfect birth of incorporeal and unchangeable God from incorporeal and unchangeable God involves, as we see in the light of the revelation of God from God, no diminishing of the Begetter's substance. And so God the Only-begotten bears witness through the holy Moses: See, see that I am God, and there is no God besides Me. For there is no second Divine nature, and so there can be no God besides Him, since He is God, and yet by the powers of His nature God is also in Him. And because He is God and God is in Him, there is no God besides Him; for God, besides Whom there is no other Source of Deity, is in Him, and so there is within Him not only His own existence but also the Author of that existence.

This saving faith that we profess is upheld by the spirit of prophecy, which speaks with one voice through many mouths and never, through long and changing ages, bears an uncertain witness to the truths of revelation. For instance, the words that, as we are told through Moses, were spoken by God the Only-begotten are confirmed for our better instruction by the prophetic spirit, speaking this time through those men of stature — For God is in You, and there is no God besides You. You are God, and we did not know it, God of Israel, the Savior. Let heresy hurl itself with its utmost effort of despair and rage against this declaration of a name and nature inseparably joined, and tear in two, if its furious struggles can, a union perfect in title and in fact. God is in God, and besides Him there is no God. Let heresy, if it can, divide the God within from the God within Whom He is, and classify the members of that mystic union, Each according to His kind. For when He says God is in You, He teaches that the true nature of God the Father is present in God the Son; for we must understand that it is the God Who is that is in Him. And when He adds, And there is no God besides You, He shows that there is no God outside Him, since God's dwelling is within Himself. And the third assertion, You are God and we did not know it, sets out for our instruction what the confession of the devout and believing soul must be. When it has learned the mysteries of the Divine birth, and the name Emmanuel which the angel announced to Joseph, it must cry out, You are God, and we did not know it, God of Israel, the Savior. It must recognize that the Divine nature subsists in Him, since God is in God, and that no other God exists except the true one. For since He is God and God is in Him, the delusion of another God, of any kind, must be given up. This is the message of the prophet Isaiah; he bears witness to the indivisible and inseparable Godhead of Father and Son.

Jeremiah also, a prophet equally inspired, has taught that God the Only-begotten is of one nature with God the Father. His words are: This is our God, and no other shall be compared to Him, Who has found out all the way of knowledge, and has given it to Jacob His servant, and to Israel His beloved. Afterward He was seen on earth, and lived among men. Why try to turn the Son of God into a second God? Learn to recognize and to confess the One True God. No second God is compared to Christ so as to be able to claim to be God. He is God from God by nature and by birth, for the Source of His Godhead is God. And again, He is not a second God, for no other is compared to Him; the truth that is in Him is nothing other than the truth of God. Why, in pretended devotion to the unity of God, link together true and false, counterfeit and genuine, things wholly unlike? The Father is God and the Son is God. God is in God; besides Him there is no God, and no other is compared to Him so as to be God. If you recognize in these Two the Unity, rather than the solitude, of God, you will share the Church's faith, which confesses the Father in the Son. But if, ignorant of the heavenly mystery, you insist that God is One in order to enforce the doctrine of His isolation, then you are a stranger to the knowledge of God, for you deny that God is in God.