Before the World Was

If Christ was only a man, how is it that he himself says, “And everyone who believes in me will never die”? Anyone who puts his trust in a man and nothing more is called cursed; but the one who believes in Christ is not cursed — he is told instead that he will never die. So if Christ is man only, as the heretics want him to be, why does the person who believes in him not die forever, when whoever trusts in a man is held to be cursed? Or if such a person is not cursed but is instead, as we read, set to reach everlasting life, then Christ is not man only but God as well — the one in whom a believer both puts down every danger of the curse and comes to the fruit of righteousness. [a]

If Christ was only a man, how does he say that the Paraclete “will take what is mine and declare it”? The Paraclete receives nothing from a man; the Paraclete offers knowledge to man. The Paraclete does not learn what is coming from a man; he instructs man about what is coming. So either the Paraclete did not receive from Christ, as a man, the things he was to declare — since a man could give the Paraclete nothing, being himself the one who ought to receive from the Paraclete — and in that case Christ is both mistaken and misleading us when he says that the Paraclete will receive from him, a man, the things he is to declare; or Christ is not deceiving us, which in fact he is not, and the Paraclete has received from Christ what he declares. But if he has received from Christ what he declares to us, then Christ is greater than the Paraclete, because the Paraclete would not receive from Christ unless he were less than Christ. And the Paraclete’s being less than Christ is itself proof that Christ is God, since it is from Christ that he has received what he declares. The witness to Christ’s divinity here is enormous: within this arrangement the Paraclete is found to be less than Christ and to take from him what he gives to others — whereas if Christ were a man and nothing more, Christ would be the one receiving from the Paraclete what he was to say, and not the Paraclete receiving from Christ what he was to declare.

If Christ was only a man, why did he lay down for us a rule of believing like this one, where he said, “And this is eternal life, that they should know you, the only and true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent”? If he had not wanted himself to be understood as God too, why did he add, “and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” — unless he meant to be received as God as well? If he had not wanted to be understood as God, he would have added, “and the man Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” But he did not add that. Christ did not hand himself over to us as man only; he joined himself to God, wanting us to understand from that joining that he is God as well, which is what he is. So we must believe, according to the rule he set down, in the Lord, the one true God, and then in the one he sent, Jesus Christ — who, as we have said, would never have linked himself with the Father if he had not wanted to be understood as God as well. He would have kept himself separate from the Father if he had not wanted to be understood as God. He would have placed himself among men only, if he had known himself to be only a man; and he would not have linked himself with God, if he had not known himself to be God as well. As it is, he says nothing here about being a man, because no one doubts that he is a man; and he rightly links himself with God, so as to fix the formula of his own divinity for those who would believe.

If Christ was only a man, how does he say, “And now glorify me with the glory I had with you before the world was”? If he had glory with God before the world existed, and kept that glory with the Father, then he existed before the world; he could not have had the glory unless he himself existed first and was able to keep it. No one can hold anything unless he first exists to hold it. But Christ has the glory from before the world was founded; therefore he himself was there before the world was founded. If he were not there before the foundation of the world, he could not have had glory before the foundation of the world, since he would not have existed at all. And a man could not have had glory before the foundation of the world, seeing that man came after the world. Christ did have it — so he was before the world. He was not, then, only a man, since he was there before the world. He is God, because he was before the world and held his glory before the world.

And let no one explain this away by saying that it was only a matter of being marked out beforehand. That is not how the text puts it. Let those who think so add the words themselves — but a woe is pronounced on people who add to what is written, just as on those who take away from it. So what may not be added may not be said. Setting aside, then, this business of being marked out beforehand, since it is not written that way: Christ existed in substance before the foundation of the world. For he is “the Word by whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made.”

For even if someone says that he was glorious only in being marked out for it beforehand, and that this marking out happened before the world was founded, then let the order of it be kept — and a good many men were marked out for glory before he was. On those terms Christ will be reckoned less than others, since he is named after them. If this glory was only a matter of being marked out beforehand, then Christ received that marking out last of all: Adam will be seen to have been marked out before him, and Abel, and Enoch, and Noah, and Abraham, and many more. Since with God the order of everything, persons and things alike, is arranged, many will have to be called marked out before Christ was marked out for glory. On those terms Christ turns out to be inferior to other men — when in fact he is found to be better and greater, and older than the angels themselves. So either let all of this be thrown out, so that Christ’s divinity can be destroyed; or, if it cannot be thrown out, let the heretics grant Christ the divinity that is his own.

What if Moses follows this same rule of truth, and at the very start of his sacred writings hands us the principle by which we may learn that all things were created and founded by the Son of God, that is, by the Word of God? He says the same thing that John and the rest say; in fact John and the others are seen to have taken from him what they say. For if John says, “All things were made by him, and without him nothing was made,” the prophet David says as well, “I tell my works to the King.” [k]

Moses brings God on the scene commanding that there be light at the first; that the sky be set in place; that the waters be gathered into one place; that the dry land appear; that the fruit be brought forth according to its seed; that the animals be produced; that lights and stars be set in the sky. He shows that no one else was present with God when these works were commanded into being except the one by whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made. And if this one is the Word of God — “for my heart has poured out a good Word” — then Moses shows that in the beginning the Word was, and that this Word was with the Father, and further that the Word was God, and that all things were made by him. And this “Word was made flesh and lived among us” — that is, Christ the Son of God. Receiving him afterward as man according to the flesh, and seeing him before the foundation of the world as the Word of God, and as God, we have good reason, following what both the Old and the New Testament teach, to believe and hold that Christ Jesus is God as well as man.

What if the same Moses brings God on the scene saying, “Let us make man after our image and likeness,” and a little later, “And God made man; in the image of God he made him, male and female he made them”? If, as we have already shown, it is the Son of God by whom all things were made, then it was certainly the Son of God by whom man too was appointed — man, for whose sake all things were made. When God gives the command that man be made, the one said to make man is God; but it is the Son of God who makes man, that is, the Word of God, “by whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made.” And this Word was made flesh and lived among us. Therefore Christ is God; therefore man was made by Christ, as by the Son of God. But God made man in the image of God; so the one who made man in the image of God is God; therefore Christ is God. And so the witness of the Old Testament about the person of Christ does not waver, held up as it is by what the New Testament shows; nor is the force of the New Testament reduced, since its truth rests on the roots of that same Old Testament. Which means that those who take Christ, the Son of God and man, to be only a man and not God as well set themselves against both Testaments, and corrupt the authority and the truth of both.

What if the same Moses everywhere brings God the Father on the scene as unbounded and without end — not shut inside any place, but himself taking in every place; not one who is in a place, but one in whom every place is, holding all things and enclosing all things, so that properly he can neither come down nor go up, since he himself both contains and fills everything — and yet the same Moses brings God down to look at the tower that the sons of men were building, asking and saying, “Come,” and then, “Let us go down and confuse their languages there, so that no one understands what his neighbor says”? Who do they claim it was who came down to that tower, and asked to visit those men then? God the Father? Then he is shut inside a place — and how does he enclose all things? Or do they say it was an angel coming down with angels, saying “Come,” and then, “Let us go down and confuse their languages there”? Yet in Deuteronomy we see that it was God who said these things — God, in the place where it is written, “When he scattered the children of Adam abroad, he fixed the boundaries of the nations according to the number of the angels of God.” So the Father did not come down, as the subject itself indicates; and it was not an angel who gave these commands, as the fact shows. What is left is that the one who came down must be the one the apostle Paul speaks of: “He who came down is the same one who went up above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things” — that is, the Son of God, the Word of God. But the Word of God was made flesh and lived among us. This must be Christ. Therefore Christ must be declared to be God.