The God the Church Knows

This God — setting aside the fables and inventions of the heretics — is the God the church knows and worships. The whole of nature, visible and invisible alike, bears witness to him. Angels adore him, the stars marvel at him, the seas bless him, the lands hold him in awe, and everything under the earth looks up to him. The mind of every human being is aware of him, even when it says nothing. At his command all things are set moving: springs gush out, rivers run, waves rise, every creature brings forth its young, the winds are made to blow, rain comes down, seas are stirred up, and everything everywhere pours out its fruitfulness. [a]

He is the one who set apart, for the first human beings he formed, a beautiful garden in the east, meant for a life that would not end. He planted the tree of life, and beside it he set another tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; he gave a command, and he laid down a sentence against sin. He kept Noah, the most righteous of men, safe from the dangers of the flood, because his innocence and his faith deserved it. He took Enoch away. He chose Abraham into the company of his friendship. He protected Isaac. He made Jacob increase. He gave Moses to the people as their leader. He brought the groaning children of Israel out from under the yoke of slavery. He wrote the law. He brought the descendants of our fathers into the land he had promised. He taught the prophets by his Spirit, and through every one of them he promised his Son, Christ; and at the time he had agreed on for giving him, he sent him. Through him he chose to come into our knowledge, and he poured out on us the generous stores of his mercy by giving his Spirit in abundance to the poor and the despised. And because he is generous and kind of his own free will, he did not want this whole globe to wither by turning away from the streams of his grace; so he willed that the apostles, the founders of our family, should be sent by his Son into the whole world, so that the human race might come to know its own Founder, and — if it chose to follow him — might have someone it could now call Father in its prayers instead of God.

And his providence has run its course among people not only one by one, but among whole cities and among nations whose destruction the prophets announced; yes, and through the whole world itself, whose end he has allotted, with all its miseries and devastations and sufferings, on account of unbelief. And in case anyone should think that a providence so tireless does not reach even the very smallest things — “One of two sparrows will not fall without the Father’s will; and even the hairs of your head are all numbered,” says the Lord. His care and providence would not let the clothing of the Israelites wear out, nor even the poorest shoes on their feet give way; nor, in the end, would it let the very garments of the captive young men be burned. And there is a reason for this. If he takes in all things and holds all things together — and all things, the whole of them, are made up of individual things — then his care must reach every individual thing too, since his providence reaches the whole, whatever the whole is.

This is why he is also said to sit above the cherubim: that is, he presides over the whole variety of his works, with the living creatures that hold command over the rest set beneath his throne. A covering of crystal is thrown over everything — that is, the sky covering all things, which at God’s command had been packed into a solid dome out of the flowing material of the waters, so that a hardness strong enough to divide the middle of the waters that once covered the earth might carry on its back, as it were, the weight of the water lying above it, its strength fixed by frost.

And below lie wheels — that is to say, the seasons — by which all the parts of the world are forever rolled onward; such feet are added to them that these things do not stand still forever, but pass on. And all over their limbs they are studded with eyes, for the works of God must be watched with an inspection that never sleeps. And at the heart of these things a fire of glowing coals is in the middle, either because this world of ours is hurrying toward the fiery day of judgment, or because all the works of God are fiery, and are not dark but flourishing. Or else, since these things had come from earthly beginnings and might naturally have been sluggish from the stiffness of their origin, the hot nature of an inward breath was added to them all, so that this nature, mixed into cold bodies, might supply all of them alike with what is needed for life.

This, then, according to David, is God’s chariot. “For the chariot of God,” he says, “is ten thousand times multiplied” — that is, it is countless, endless, immeasurable. For under the yoke of the law of nature given to all things, some are held back as if by a tight rein, while others are urged on with the rein let out. The world — which is that chariot of God, with everything in it — both the angels themselves and the stars guide; and their movements, though they vary, are bound by fixed laws, and we watch them steering within the limits of a time laid down for them. So we too may rightly cry out now with the apostle, as he marvels at the Architect and at his works alike: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” And so on.

The same rule of truth teaches us to believe, after the Father, also in the Son of God, Christ Jesus, the Lord our God — but the Son of that God who is both one and alone, the Founder of all things, as has already been said above. For this Jesus Christ, the Son of this God — I will say it once more — we read of as having been promised in the Old Testament, and we see made known in the New, filling out all the shadows and outlines of the mysteries with the presence of the truth in a body. For both the ancient prophecies and the Gospels bear witness that he is the son of Abraham and the son of David. [j]

Genesis itself looks ahead to him when it says, “To you I will give it, and to your descendants.” He is spoken of when it tells how a man wrestled with Jacob; and he again when it says, “A ruler will not fail from Judah, nor a leader from between his thighs, until he comes to whom it has been promised; and he will be the expectation of the nations.” He is spoken of by Moses when he says, “Choose someone else to send.” He is spoken of by the same man again when he testifies, “God will raise up for you a prophet from among your brothers; listen to him as you would to me.” And it is he Moses means when he says, “You will see your life hanging in doubt night and day, and you will not believe him.”

Isaiah points to him as well: “A shoot will come out from the root of Jesse, and a flower will grow up from his root.” And the same prophet when he says, “Look, a virgin will conceive and bear a son.” He refers to him when he lists the healings that were to come from him: “Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will hear; then the lame man will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute will speak clearly.” He means him when he sets out the strength of his patience: “His voice will not be heard in the streets; a bruised reed he will not destroy, and the smoldering wick he will not put out.” He means him when he described his good news: “And I will appoint for you an everlasting covenant, the sure mercies of David.” He means him when he foretells that the nations would believe in him: “Look, I have given him as a chief and a commander to the nations. Nations that did not know you will call on you, and peoples that did not know you will run to you for refuge.”

It is the same one he refers to when he cries out about his suffering: “Like a sheep he is led to the slaughter; and like a lamb that is silent before the man who shears it, so in his humility he did not open his mouth.” And him again when he described the blows and the welts of his flogging: “By his bruises we were healed.” Or his lowliness: “And we saw him, and he had no form and no beauty — a man in suffering, one who knows how to bear weakness.” Or that the people would not believe in him: “All day long I have spread out my hands to a people that does not believe.” Or that he would rise again from the dead: “And on that day there will be a root of Jesse, and one who will rise to rule the nations; on him the nations will hope, and his rest will be honor.” Or when he speaks of the time of the resurrection: “We will find him ready, as it were, in the morning.” Or that he would sit at the Father’s right hand: “The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet.” Or when he is set out as the owner of all things: “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession.” Or when he is shown as the Judge of all: “O God, give the King your judgment, and your righteousness to the King’s Son.” I will not pursue the subject any further here. The things announced about Christ are known to all the heretics — but they are better known still to those who hold the truth.

But I remind you of this: Christ was not to be looked for in the Gospel in any other way than as he had been promised beforehand by the Creator in the writings of the Old Testament — all the more since the things that were predicted of him were fulfilled, and the things that were fulfilled had been predicted. With good reason I might say, truly and steadily, to that fanciful something — I do not know what to call it — belonging to those heretics who throw out the authority of the Old Testament — speaking to it as to a Christ made up and painted from old wives’ tales: [q]

“Who are you? Where are you from? Who sent you? Why have you chosen to come now? Why like this? Or how were you able to come at all? Or why did you not go to your own people — unless it is that by coming to another’s you have proved you have none of your own? What business have you with the Creator’s world? What business have you with the Creator’s man? What business have you with the image of a body, when you take away from it the hope of resurrection? Why do you come to another man’s servant, and set out to court another man’s son? Why do you try to take me away from the Lord? Why do you force me to speak against my Father, and to be irreverent toward him? Or what will I gain from you at the resurrection, if I do not receive myself back when I lose my body?

“If you wanted to save, you should have made a man to give salvation to. If you wanted to snatch me out of sin, you should first have granted me not to fall into sin. But what approval from the law do you carry about with you? What witness of the prophetic word do you have? Or what solid good can I promise myself from you, when I see that you have come as a phantom and not in a real body? What business, then, have you with the shape of a body, if you hate a body? No — you will be caught out over your hatred of carrying a real body about, since you were willing to take up even its shape. For you ought to have hated the imitation of a body, if you hated the reality; because if you are something else, you ought to have come as something else, so that you would not be called the Son of the Creator even by having the likeness of flesh and body. And certainly, if you hated being born because you hated ‘the Creator’s marriage,’ you ought to have refused even the likeness of a man who is born by ‘the Creator’s marriage.’”

So we do not acknowledge as Christ the one the heretics have, who — as they say — was in appearance and not in reality; for of the things he did, he could have done nothing real, if he himself was a phantom and not a reality. Nor do we acknowledge one who wore nothing of our body in himself, since “he received nothing from Mary”; nor did he really come to us, since he appeared “as a vision, not in our own substance.” Nor do we acknowledge as Christ the one who chose a body of ether or of star-stuff, as some heretics have imagined. Nor can we see any salvation of ours in him, if in him we do not even recognize what our own body is made of; nor in any other Christ, for that matter, who may have worn some other made-up body of heretical invention.

All such tales as these are refuted both by our Lord’s birth and by his death itself. For John says, “The Word was made flesh, and lived among us” — so that our body should reasonably be in him, since the Word did take on our flesh. And this is why blood ran out from his hands and his feet and from his very side: so that he might be proved to share our body by dying according to the laws by which we come apart. And that he was raised again in the same bodily substance in which he died is proved by the wounds of that very body; and so he showed in his own flesh the laws of our resurrection, in that at his rising he restored the same body he had taken from us.

For a law of resurrection is established in this: that Christ is raised up in the substance of the body, as an example for everyone else. When it is written that “flesh and blood do not inherit the kingdom of God,” it is not the substance of the flesh that is condemned — that was built up by the divine hands so that it should not perish — but only the guilt of the flesh that is rightly rebuked, which by the willing daring of man rebelled against the claims of the divine law. Because in baptism, and in the dissolution of death, the flesh is raised up and returns to salvation, being called back to the condition of innocence when the mortality that came with guilt has been put away.