Not Man Only

We have said that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Creator, appeared in the substance of a real body. But we do not want it thought that we have therefore sided with those other heretics who at this point hold that he is man only and man alone, and who want to prove him a bare, solitary man; and we do not want to hand them any ground for an objection. So we do not state the teaching about the substance of his body in a way that makes him only and merely a man. We state it so as to hold, by the joining of the divinity of the Word to that same material body, that according to the Scriptures he was God as well. [a]

For there is a great risk in saying that the Savior of the human race was man only — that the Lord of all and the ruler of the world, to whom all things were handed over and all things granted by his Father, through whom all things were ordained, all things created, all things arranged, the King of all ages and times, the ruler of all the angels, before whom there is no one but the Father, was man only — and in denying him divine authority in all of this. And this contempt of the heretics will fall back on God the Father as well, if God the Father could not beget God the Son.

But no blindness of the heretics is going to lay down the law to the truth. They hold one thing about Christ and not the other; they see one side of him and not the other; and that is no reason for taking away from us what they do not see for the sake of what they do. They treat the weaknesses in him as if they were a man’s weaknesses, but they do not count the powers as if they were a God’s powers. They keep the frailties of the flesh in mind and shut the powers of the divine nature out. Yet if the argument from Christ’s frailties works, and proves him to be man from his frailties, then the argument from the divinity in him, gathered from his powers, works too, and proves him to be God from his works. If his sufferings show human frailty in him, why should his works not assert divine power in him? And if his powers are not allowed to establish him as God, then neither can his sufferings show him to be man. Whichever rule is adopted on the one side will be found to hold on the other as well. There will be a risk that he cannot be shown to be man from his sufferings, if he cannot also be approved as God by his powers.

So we must not lean toward one side and dodge the other, because anyone who shuts out one part of the truth will never hold the whole truth. Scripture announces Christ as God just as much as it announces God himself as man. It has described Jesus Christ as man just as much as it has described Christ the Lord as God. It does not set him out as the Son of God only, but also as the Son of man; and it does not say Son of man only, but is also in the habit of speaking of him as the Son of God. Being of both, he is both — for if he were only the one, he could not be the other. Nature itself has laid it down that a man who comes of man must be believed to be a man; the same nature lays it down that one who is of God must be believed to be God. But if he is not also God when he is of God, then no more is he man, though he be of man. Both teachings would be put at risk, each by way of the other, since giving up belief in the one convicts a man of having lost the other.

So let those who read that Jesus Christ the Son of man is man read also that this same Jesus is called God and the Son of God. As man he is of Abraham; as God he is before Abraham himself. As man he is the Son of David; as God he is proclaimed David’s Lord. As man he was made under the law; as God he is declared Lord of the sabbath. As man he undergoes condemnation; as God he is found to hold all judgment of the living and the dead. As man he is born after the world; as God he is shown to have been before the world. As man he was begotten of the seed of David; as God the world itself is said to have been ordained through him. As man he came after many; as God he was before all. As man he was lower than others; as God he was greater than all. As man he went up into heaven; as God he had first come down from there. As man he goes to the Father; as the Son, in obedience to the Father, he will come down from there again.

So if the imperfections in him prove human frailty, the majesties in him affirm divine power. The risk is that a man will read of both and believe not both but one of the two. Since both are read of in Christ, let both be believed, so that the faith may at last be true by being complete. For if, of the two, one gives way in the faith and the other is taken up for belief — and that one the less important — the rule of truth is thrown into confusion; and that presumption will not confer salvation. Instead of salvation it will bring a great risk of death, from the overthrow of the faith.

Why, then, should we hesitate to say what Scripture does not shrink from declaring? Why should the truth of the faith hesitate where the authority of Scripture has never hesitated? Look — Hosea the prophet says, speaking in the person of the Father: “I will not save them now by bow, or by horses, or by horsemen; but I will save them by the Lord their God.” If God says that he saves by God, and God does not save except through Christ, why should anyone hesitate to call Christ God, when he sees that the Father declares him to be God according to the Scriptures? Yes: if God the Father does not save except by God, then no one can be saved by God the Father unless he has acknowledged Christ to be God, in whom and through whom the Father promises to give him salvation. So it follows that whoever acknowledges him to be God may find salvation in Christ God, and whoever does not acknowledge him to be God loses the salvation he could not have found anywhere but in Christ God. [f]

For in the same way Isaiah says, “Look, a virgin will conceive and bear a son, and you will call his name Immanuel,” which translated means “God with us”; and Christ himself says, “Look, I am with you, even to the end of the age.” So he is “God with us” — and much more than that, he is in us. Christ is with us; therefore it is he whose name is God with us, because he too is with us. Or is he not with us? Then how does he say that he is with us? He is with us, then. And because he is with us, he was called Immanuel, that is, God with us. God, therefore, because he is with us, was called God with us.

The same prophet says: “Be strong, you weakened hands and feeble knees. Take comfort, you who are faint-hearted. Be strong; do not be afraid. Look, our God will render judgment; he himself will come and will save you. 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 plainly.” Since the prophet says that these will be the signs that come to pass at God’s coming, let men either acknowledge that Christ is the Son of God, at whose coming and through whom these wonders of healing were done — or else, beaten by the truth of Christ’s divinity, let them rush into the other heresy, and, refusing to confess Christ to be the Son of God and God, declare him to be the Father. For, bound by the words of the prophets, they can no longer deny that Christ is God.

What, then, do they answer, when the signs said to be coming at God’s arrival are the very ones that appeared at Christ’s arrival? In what way do they receive Christ as God — for by now they cannot deny that he is God. As God the Father, or as God the Son? If as the Son, why do they deny that the Son of God is God? If as the Father, why do they not go over to the men who are seen to maintain blasphemies of that kind? Unless it is that, in this contest with them about the truth, it is enough for us in the meantime that they should be convinced one way or another and confess Christ to be God — they who had actually wanted to deny that he is God.

He says through Habakkuk the prophet: “God will come from the south, and the Holy One from the dark and dense mountain.” Whom do they want to make the one coming from the south? If they say it is Almighty God the Father, then God the Father comes from a place — a place he is by that very fact shut out of — and he is bounded within the narrow limits of some dwelling. And so, as we have said, men like these give body to the sacrilegious heresy of Sabellius: Christ is believed to be not the Son but the Father, and the same people who insist that he is strictly a bare man end up proving him, in a new way, to be God the Father Almighty.

But if Christ is born in Bethlehem — and that district, by its position, looks toward the southern quarter of the sky — and if this same Christ is called God by the Scriptures, then this God is rightly described as coming from the south, because he was foreseen as about to come from Bethlehem. So let them choose whichever of the two they prefer: that the one who came from the south is the Son, or the Father. For it is said that God is going to come from the south. If the Son, why do they shrink from calling him Christ and God? Scripture says that God will come. If the Father, why do they shrink from being lumped in with the boldness of Sabellius, who says that Christ is the Father? Unless it is that, whether they call him Father or Son, they must back out of their own heresy, however unwillingly, if they are used to saying that Christ is merely man; because when the facts themselves press them, they are on the point of exalting him as God, whether they want to call him Father or want to call him Son.

And so John too, describing the birth of Christ, says: “The Word was made flesh and lived among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Moreover, “his name is called the Word of God,” and not without reason. “My heart has poured out a good word” — and that word he goes on to call by the name of King: “I will tell my works to the King.” For “by him all the works were made, and without him nothing was made.” “Whether,” says the apostle, “they are thrones or dominions, or powers, or mighty ones, things visible and invisible, all things hold together in him.” And this, moreover, is that word which came to his own, and his own did not receive him; for the world was made by him, and the world did not know him. And this Word “was in the beginning with God, and the Word was God.” [l]

Who, then, can doubt it, when the last clause says, “The Word was made flesh and lived among us”? Christ, whose the birth is, and who was made flesh, is man; and because he is the Word of God, who can shrink from declaring without hesitation that he is God — above all when he considers that the Gospel’s own Scripture has bound both of these substances together into one harmony in the birth of Christ? For it is he who “goes out like a bridegroom from his bridal chamber; he rejoiced like a giant to run his course. His going out is from the end of heaven, and his return to the ends of it.” Because, even at the very highest, “no one has gone up into heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven.” Saying this same thing over again, he says: “Father, glorify me with the glory I had with you before the world was.”

And if this Word came down from heaven to the flesh as a bridegroom, so that by taking flesh he might go up there as the Son of man — up to where the Son of God had come down from as the Word — then it follows: by the mutual joining, the flesh wears the Word of God, and the Son of God takes on the frailty of the flesh; and when the flesh, now espoused, goes up to where it had come down from without the flesh, it receives at last that glory which, since he is shown to have had it before the foundation of the world, most plainly proves him to be God. And still, while the world itself is said to have been founded after him, it is found to have been created by him; and by that very divinity in him, by which the world was made, both his glory and his authority are proved.

Furthermore: if it belongs to none but God to know the secrets of the heart, and Christ sees the secrets of the heart; if it belongs to none but God to forgive sins, and this same Christ forgives sins; if it is no man’s lot to come from heaven, and he came down, coming from heaven; if this saying can be true of no man — “I and the Father are one” — and Christ alone spoke it out of the awareness of his own divinity; if, last of all, the apostle Thomas, taught by every proof and every mark of Christ’s divinity, answers Christ, “My Lord and my God”; if besides this the apostle Paul writes in his letters, “whose are the fathers, and from whom Christ came according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever”; and if the same apostle declares that he was appointed “an apostle not by men, nor through a man, but through Jesus Christ,” and insists that he learned the good news not from men and not through a man, but received it from Jesus Christ — then it follows that Christ is God.

On this point, then, one of two things has to be settled. Since it is clear that all things were made by Christ, either he is before all things, because all things were through him, and so he is rightly God; or, because he is man, he comes after all things, and so rightly nothing was made by him. But we cannot say that nothing was made by him, when we see it written that all things were made by him. He does not, therefore, come after all things. That is: he is not man only, who comes after all things, but God also, since God is before all things. For he is before all things, because all things are through him; whereas if he were man only, nothing would be through him. Or if all things were through him, he would not be man only — because if he were only man, all things would not be through him; no, nothing would be through him.

What, then, do they answer? That nothing is through him, so that he is man only? Then how are all things through him? So he is not man only, but God also, since all things are through him. And so we ought reasonably to understand that Christ is not man only, who comes after all things, but God also, since all things were made by him. For how can you say that he is man only, when you also see him in the flesh, unless it is that, when both sides are looked at, both truths are rightly believed?