The Father and the Creator

Now that we have set these points in order, as briefly and as well as we could, the next task — the one we intended from the start — is to answer those who think that the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is a different God from the one who gave Moses the answers of the law and commissioned the prophets, the God of our fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the first article of faith we have to be firmly settled in. Consider, then, the sentence that comes up again and again in the Gospels, attached to everything our Lord and Savior does: “so that what was spoken through this or that prophet might be fulfilled.” Plainly the prophets are the prophets of the God who made the world. From this we draw our conclusion: the one who sent the prophets is himself the one who foretold what was to be said of Christ. And there is no doubt that the Father himself spoke those predictions, and not someone else different from him. Then there is the practice of the Savior and his apostles, who constantly quote examples out of the Old Testament; that shows they grant the ancient writings authority. And when the Savior urges his disciples to be kind, he says, “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect; for he commands his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” Even a slow-witted person can see from that he is setting before his disciples no other God to imitate than the maker of heaven and the giver of the rain. Again, what else can the words he gives people to pray with — “Our Father in heaven” — mean, except that God is to be sought in the better parts of the world, that is, of his creation? And those admirable rules he lays down about oaths — that we ought not to swear “either by heaven, because it is God’s throne, or by the earth, because it is his footstool” — do they not agree perfectly with the prophet’s words, “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool”? And when he drove out of the temple the men selling sheep and cattle and doves, and poured out the money-changers’ tables, and said, “Take these things away, and do not make my Father’s house a house of trade,” he was unquestionably calling his own Father the God for whose name Solomon had raised that magnificent temple. The words, too, “Have you not read what was spoken to Moses by God: I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; he is not a God of the dead but of the living” — these teach us as clearly as anything could that he called the God of the patriarchs the God of the living, because they were holy and were alive; and that this is the same God who had said in the prophets, “I am God, and besides me there is no God.” For the Savior knows that the one written of in the law is the God of Abraham, and that it is the same God who says, “I am God, and besides me there is no God.” If, then, he acknowledges as his own Father a God who does not know that any other God exists above himself — as the heretics suppose — he is absurdly declaring his Father to be someone who does not know of a greater God. But if it is not out of ignorance but out of deceit that this God says there is no other God than himself, then it is a far greater absurdity to confess that the Father is a liar. From all of this the conclusion follows: he knows no other Father than God, the founder and creator of all things. [a]

It would take too long to gather from every passage in the Gospels the proofs that the God of the law and the God of the Gospels are one and the same. Let us touch briefly on the Acts of the Apostles, where Stephen and the other apostles direct their prayers to the God who made heaven and earth and who spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets, calling him the “God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob,” the God who “brought his people out of the land of Egypt.” Language like this unquestionably steers our understanding toward faith in the Creator, and plants an affection for him in those who have learned to think of him this way, in devotion and faith. It matches what the Savior himself said. When he was asked which was the greatest command in the law, he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. And the second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And he added to these, “On these two commands hang all the law and the prophets.” Why, then, does he commend this command above all the rest to the man he was instructing and leading into the work of a disciple? Plainly so that love would be kindled in him toward the God of that law — since it was the law that had said so, in those very words. But suppose, in spite of all this plain evidence, we grant that it is some other unknown God the Savior means when he says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,” and the rest. In that case, if the law and the prophets come, as they claim, from the Creator — that is, from a different God than the one he calls good — how can the sentence he adds be sound reasoning at all: that “on these two commands hang the law and the prophets”? For how can something strange and foreign to God depend on him? And when Paul says, “I thank my God, whom I serve in my spirit, as my forefathers did, with a pure conscience,” he shows clearly that he did not come to some new God, but to Christ. For what other forefathers of Paul can be meant, except the ones he speaks of when he says, “Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I.” And will not the very opening of his letter to the Romans show the same thing plainly to anyone who knows how to read Paul’s letters — that is, which God he preaches? His words are: “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the good news of God, which he had promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and who was declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead — Christ Jesus our Lord,” and so on. Then there is this: “You shall not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treads out the grain. Does God care for oxen? Or does he say it entirely for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this was written: that the one who plows should plow in hope, and the one who threshes should thresh in hope of sharing in the crop.” By this Paul plainly shows that it was God — the God who gave the law — who said, on our account, that is, on account of the apostles, “You shall not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treads out the grain”; and that his care was not for oxen but for the apostles, who were preaching the good news of Christ. Elsewhere too Paul takes up the promises of the law and says, “Honor your father and your mother, which is the first command with a promise attached, so that it may go well with you and your days may be long in the land, the good land, which the Lord your God will give you.” By this he certainly makes it known that the law, and the God of the law, and his promises are all welcome to him. [g]

But since the people who uphold this heresy are in the habit of misleading simple hearts with certain tricks of argument, I think it is worth bringing forward what they usually claim, and showing where the deceit and the falsehood lie. Here is what they say. It is written that “no one has ever seen God.” But the God whom Moses preaches was seen both by Moses himself and by his fathers before him, whereas the God the Savior announces has never been seen at all, by anyone. So let us put a question to them, and to ourselves. The one they acknowledge as God, and claim is a different God from the Creator — do they hold that he is visible or invisible? If they say he is visible, then, besides being caught contradicting the Scripture that says of the Savior, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation,” they will also fall into the absurdity of asserting that God has a body. For nothing can be seen except by means of shape and size and color, and these are properties that belong to bodies. And if God is declared to be a body, he will also turn out to be made of matter, since every body is composed of matter. But if he is composed of matter, and matter is beyond question perishable, then on their showing God can perish. We will put a second question to them. Is matter made, or is it uncreated — that is, not made? If they answer that it is not made, that it is uncreated, we will ask whether one portion of matter is God and the other portion the world. But if they say of matter that it is made, then it follows inevitably that they are confessing that the one they call God was himself made — a result which certainly neither their reasoning nor ours can admit. They will say instead: God is invisible. And what will you do then? If you say he is invisible by nature, then he ought not to be visible to the Savior either. Yet on the contrary, God the Father of Christ is said to be seen, because, he says, “whoever sees the Son sees the Father also.” That would press us very hard, if we did not understand the expression more correctly — of understanding, and not of seeing. For whoever has understood the Son will understand the Father too. In the same way, then, we must suppose that Moses saw God: not looking at him with the eye of the body, but understanding him with the sight of the heart and the perception of the mind, and even then only in part. For it is plain that the one who gave Moses his answers said, “You will not see my face, but my back.” Words like these are of course to be taken in the hidden sense that suits words spoken by God, and the old wives’ tales invented by ignorant people about God’s front and back parts are to be rejected and thrown out. And let no one suppose that we have said anything irreverent in saying that even to the Savior the Father is not visible. Let him weigh the distinction we are using against the heretics. We have explained that seeing and being seen are one thing, and knowing and being known — understanding and being understood — another. Seeing and being seen belong to bodies, and that certainly cannot be applied to the Father, or to the Son, or to the Holy Spirit in their relations with one another. The nature of the Trinity is beyond the reach of sight; it grants the property of seeing one another to those who are in a body, that is, to all other creatures. But to a nature that has no body, and is for the most part mind, no other term fits than knowing and being known — as the Savior himself declares when he says, “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son will reveal him.” It is clear, then, that he did not say, “No one has seen the Father except the Son,” but, “No one knows the Father except the Son.” [l]

And now, because of the expressions that occur in the Old Testament — where God is said to be angry, or to change his mind, or where some other human feeling or passion is described — our opponents think they are furnished with grounds for refuting us, since we maintain that God is altogether beyond being acted upon, and is to be regarded as entirely free from feelings of that kind. So we have to show them that statements of the same sort are found even in the parables of the Gospel. Take the man who planted a vineyard and rented it out to tenant farmers. They killed the servants who were sent to them, and in the end put even the son to death; and the story says that in anger he took the vineyard away from them, handed the wicked tenants over to be destroyed, and turned the vineyard over to others who would give him the fruit in its season. It is the same with those citizens who, when the head of the household had set out to receive a kingdom for himself, sent messengers after him to say, “We will not have this man reign over us.” The head of the household, having obtained the kingdom, came back and in anger ordered them to be put to death in front of him, and burned their city with fire. But when we read of the anger of God, whether in the Old Testament or the New, we do not take such expressions in their plain literal sense. We look for a spiritual meaning in them, so that we may think of God as he deserves to be thought of. And on these points, when we were explaining the verse in the second Psalm, “Then he will speak to them in his anger, and trouble them in his fury,” we showed, as well as our poor ability allowed, how such an expression ought to be understood. [q]