Both God and Man

And why, even though we seem to be hurrying on to another branch of the argument, should we pass over that passage in the apostle? “Who, though he was in the form of God, did not think it robbery that he should be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking up the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even to death, the death of the cross. That is why God has also lifted him high above all and given him a name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend — of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth — and every tongue should confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” [a]

“Who, though he was in the form of God,” he says. If Christ had been only a man, he would have been spoken of as in the image of God, not in the form of God; for we know that man was made after the image, or the likeness, of God, and not after his form. Who, then, is that angel who, as we have said, was made in the form of God? But we do not read of the form of God in angels either, except in this one, because he is chief and royal above them all: the Son of God, the Word of God, the imitator of all his Father’s works, in that he himself works just as his Father works. He is — as we have said — in the form of God the Father. And it is reasonable to say that he is in the form of God, since he himself is above all things, holds the divine power over every creature, and is God as well, after the pattern of the Father. Yet he obtained this from his own Father: that he should be both God of all and Lord, and should be begotten and made known from himself as God, in the form of God the Father.

So then, though he was in the form of God, he did not think it robbery that he should be equal with God. For although he remembered that he was God from God the Father, he never compared himself with God the Father or set himself alongside him. He kept in mind that he was from his Father, and that he possesses the very thing he is because the Father gave it to him. That is why, both before he took on flesh and after he took on a body — and after the resurrection itself — he gave the Father complete obedience, and gives it still, as he always has. From this it is proved that he considered it robbery to claim a certain divinity, that is, to make himself equal with God the Father. On the contrary, obedient and subject to the Father’s whole rule and will, he was even content to take on the form of a servant — that is, to become man — and to take on, by being born, the substance of flesh and body that came to him, on the human side, out of the bondage of his forefathers’ sins.

At that moment, too, he emptied himself, in that he did not refuse to take on the frailty that goes with being human. For if he had been born a man only, he would not have been emptied by it: a man who is born is increased, not emptied. In beginning to be what he could not have while he did not exist, as we said, he is not emptied but rather increased and enriched. But if Christ is emptied in being born, in taking the form of a servant, how is he man only? Of a man it could more truly have been said that at his birth he was enriched, not emptied. There is only one account of it: the authority of the divine Word, resting for a while as it takes humanity upon itself, and not exerting its real strength, casts itself down and lays itself aside for the time, while it carries the humanity it has taken up. It empties itself by going down into injuries and insults, by bearing outrages, by meeting with things unworthy of it.

And yet the reward of this humility is there at once, and it is a high one. He has “received a name which is above every name,” and we understand that name to be none other than the name of God. Since it belongs to God alone to be above all things, it follows that the name belonging to that God who is above all things is above every name; and that name, accordingly, belongs to the one who, “though he was in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal with God.” For if Christ were not God, no knee would bend at his name, “of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth”; nor would things visible and invisible — every creature there is — be made subject and placed under a man, when they could remember that they existed before man.

So: Christ is said to be in the form of God; it is shown that for his birth in the flesh he emptied himself; it is stated that he received from the Father the name that is above every name; it is shown that at his name “every knee of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth bends and bows”; and this very thing is said to add to the glory of God the Father. It follows that he is not man only, from the fact that he became obedient to the Father even to death, yes, the death of the cross; but rather, from these higher matters proclaiming the divinity of Christ, Christ Jesus is shown to be Lord and God — which is what the heretics will not have.

At this point let me be allowed to gather arguments from the side of other heretics as well. It is a solid kind of proof that is collected even from an opponent, so that the truth is proved even from truth’s own enemies. For it is so plainly the case that he is declared God in the Scriptures that many heretics, moved by the greatness and the truth of this divinity, have exaggerated his honors beyond all measure and have dared to announce, or to think, that he is not the Son but God the Father himself. That is contrary to the truth of the Scriptures; but it is still a great and telling argument for the divinity of Christ. He is so far God — though as Son of God, born of God — that a great many heretics, as we have said, have taken him for God in such a way as to think that he must be called not the Son but the Father. [f]

So let it be weighed whether he is God or not, since his authority has so worked on some people that, as we said above, they have thought him God the Father himself. They have confessed the divinity in Christ with such force and such overflow — driven to it by the plain divinity in Christ — that they thought the one they read of as the Son must be the Father, because they saw that he was God. Other heretics, again, have so far embraced the plain divinity of Christ as to say that he was without flesh, and to withdraw from him the whole humanity he took up, for fear that by attaching a human birth to him, as they conceived it, they would lessen the power of the divine name in him.

We do not approve of this. We bring it up as an argument to prove that Christ is God, to this extent: that some, by taking away his manhood, have thought him God only, and some have thought him God the Father himself — when reason and the whole proportion of the heavenly Scriptures show Christ to be God, but as the Son of God, and show him to be the Son of man as well, taken up moreover by God, so that he must be believed to be man also. For if he came to man in order to be the mediator between God and men, he had to be with man, and the Word had to be made flesh, so that in his own self he might link earthly things and heavenly things into agreement, joining in himself the pledges of both natures, and uniting God to man and man to God. In this way the Son of God could reasonably be made the Son of man by taking on flesh, and the Son of man be made the Son of God by receiving the Word of God. This deepest and most hidden mystery, appointed before the ages for the salvation of the human race, is found fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ, both God and man, so that the human race might be brought within reach of the enjoyment of eternal salvation.

But the material of that heretical error has arisen, in my judgment, from this: they think there is no distinction between the Son of God and the Son of man. If a distinction were made, Jesus Christ would easily be proved to be both man and God. They will have it that the very same one who is man, the Son of man, appears also as the Son of God — that man, and flesh, and that same frail substance can be called the Son of God himself. So, since no distinction is seen between the Son of man and the Son of God, and the Son of man himself is said to be the Son of God, the same Christ and Son of God is said to be man only. By this they strive to shut out “The Word was made flesh, and lived among us,” and “You will call his name Immanuel, which means, God with us.” [i]

For they put forward what is told in Luke’s Gospel, and out of it they try to establish not what the truth is, but only what they want it to be: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore also that holy thing which is born of you will be called the Son of God.” If, then, they say, the angel of God says to Mary, “that holy thing which is born of you,” the substance of flesh and body is from Mary — and he has stated that this substance, that is, that holy thing which is born of her, is the Son of God. The man himself, they say, and that bodily flesh, the thing that is called holy, is itself the Son of God. So when the Scripture says “that holy thing,” we are to understand by it Christ the man, the Son of man; and when it sets the Son of God before us, we ought to see not man but God.

And yet the divine Scripture easily convicts and lays open the frauds and tricks of the heretics. If it read only this way — “The Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore that holy thing which is born of you will be called the Son of God” — then perhaps we would have had to fight them in another manner, and look for other arguments, and take up other weapons to overcome both their traps and their tricks. But since the Scripture itself, overflowing with heavenly fullness, strips off the slanders of these heretics, we simply rest on what is written and overcome their errors without any hesitation. For it did not say, as we just put it, “Therefore that holy thing which will be born of you”; it added the conjunction, and says, “Therefore also that holy thing which will be born of you.” That makes it plain that the holy thing which is born of her — that is, that substance of flesh and body — is not the Son of God first and foremost, but as a consequence, and in the second place; while first and foremost the Son of God is the Word of God, made flesh by that Spirit of whom the angel says, “The Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”

For he is the rightful Son of God who is from God himself. And he, when he takes up that holy thing and links the Son of man to himself, and draws him and transfers him into himself, by his joining and his mingled association becomes answerable for him and makes him the Son of God, which by nature he was not. So the origin of the name Son of God lies in the Spirit of the Lord, who came down and came here, and there is only the carrying on of the name in the case of the Son of man; and so, as a consequence, he reasonably became the Son of God, although at the origin he is not the Son of God.

And so the angel, seeing that arrangement and providing for the order of the mystery, did not run everything together in such a way as to leave no trace of a distinction, but set the distinction up by saying, “Therefore also that holy thing which will be born of you will be called the Son of God.” Otherwise, if he had not weighed out that distribution but had left the matter mixed up in confusion, it really would have given the heretics an opening to declare that the Son of man, insofar as he is man, is the same as the Son of God and man. But as it is, explaining item by item the ordering and the reason of so great a mystery, he plainly set it out when he said, “And that holy thing which will be born of you will be called the Son of God”: the proof that the Son of God came down, and that by taking the Son of man up into himself he consequently made him the Son of God, because the Son of God associated him and joined him to himself. So that, while the Son of man clings in his birth to the Son of God, by that very mingling he holds as pledged and derived what he could not possess of his own nature.

And so by the word of the angel the distinction is made, against what the heretics want, between the Son of God and man; and yet their association is made too, since they are pressed to understand that Christ the Son of man is man, and also to receive the Son of God and man as the Son of God — that is, the Word of God, who is written of as God. And so we acknowledge that Christ Jesus the Lord, connected on both sides, so to speak, is on both sides woven in and grown together and joined in one and the same agreement of both substances, bound to each other by a mutual alliance — man and God, by the truth of the Scripture that declares this very thing.

Therefore, they say, if Christ is not man only but God as well — and Scripture tells us that he died for us and was raised again — then Scripture teaches us to believe that God died. Or, if God does not die, and Christ is said to have died, then Christ will not be God, since God cannot be allowed to have died. If they were ever able to understand, or had understood, what they read, they would never talk in such a dangerous way. But the folly of error is always in a hurry going downhill, and it is nothing new if people who have abandoned the lawful faith go down as far as dangerous conclusions. [n]

For if Scripture set forth that Christ is God only, and that no share of human weakness was mingled into his nature, this tangled argument of theirs might reasonably carry some weight: if Christ is God, and Christ died, then God died. But since Scripture settles it — as we have shown again and again — that he is not only God but man as well, it follows that what is immortal can be held to have remained untouched. For who cannot see that what is divine cannot suffer, although human weakness is open to suffering? So when Christ is understood to be mingled and joined out of what God is and out of what man is — for “the Word was made flesh, and lived in us” — who cannot easily grasp for himself, without any teacher or interpreter, that what died in Christ was not what is God, but that what died in him was what is man?

For consider: the divinity in Christ does not die, and only the substance of the flesh is destroyed. In other men too, who are not flesh only but flesh and soul, it is the flesh alone that suffers the inroads of wasting and death, while the soul is seen to be untouched, beyond the laws of destruction and death. Our Lord himself said this, urging us toward martyrdom and toward contempt for every human power: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” But if the immortal soul cannot be killed or slain in anyone else, though the body and flesh by itself can be slain, then how much more surely could the Word of God and God in Christ not be put to death at all, even though the flesh alone and the body was slain! For if in any man at all the soul has this excellence of immortality, that it cannot be slain, much more does the nobility of the Word of God have this power of not being slain.

For if the power of men fails to slay the sacred power of God, and if the cruelty of man fails to destroy the soul, much more ought it to fail to slay the Word of God. Since the soul itself, which was made by the Word of God, is not killed by men, it will certainly be believed all the more that the Word of God cannot be destroyed. And if the bloody cruelty of men can do no more against men than kill the body, how much more certainly will it have no power against Christ beyond killing the body in the same way. So, since we gather from all this that nothing in Christ was put to death except the human nature, it appears that the Word in him was not drawn down into mortality.

For take Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. By everyone’s admission they were only men, and they are shown to be alive — “for they all,” he says, “live to God.” And death in them does not destroy the soul, though it does dissolve the bodies themselves. Death could exercise its power on the bodies; it could not manage to exercise it on the souls. The one thing in them was mortal, and therefore died; the other in them was immortal, and therefore is understood not to have been put out. That is why they are affirmed and said to live to God. Much rather, then, could death in Christ have power against the material of his body alone, while against the divinity of the Word it could not bring itself to bear. For the power of death is broken when the authority of immortality steps in.