The Spirit and One God

Next, the order of the argument and the authority of the faith — in the ordered words and writings of the Lord — urge us, after all this, to believe in the Holy Spirit as well: promised long ago to the church, and given at the times set for it. For he was promised through the prophet Joel, and given by Christ. “In the last days,” says the prophet, “I will pour out of my Spirit on my male servants and my female servants.” And the Lord said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven them; if you hold on to anyone’s, they are held.” This Holy Spirit the Lord Christ calls at one point the Paraclete, and at another declares to be the Spirit of truth. [a]

He is not new in the good news, nor even newly given. It was he himself who brought the charge against the people in the prophets, and who in the apostles opened the appeal to the nations. The people deserved to be accused, because they had held the law in contempt; and the believers among the nations deserve the help of the Spirit’s defense, because they are set on reaching the law of the good news. Certainly there are different kinds of duty in the Spirit, because the times call for a different ordering of business; and yet the one who carries out those duties is not on that account a different Spirit, nor is he someone else when he acts this way. He is one and the same, handing out his duties according to the times, and according to the occasions and the pressures of things. As the apostle Paul says: “Having the same Spirit; as it is written, I believed, and so I spoke — we also believe, and so we speak.”

So it is one and the same Spirit who was in the prophets and in the apostles — except that in the prophets he came at intervals, and in the apostles he was there always; in the prophets not as one always in them, in the apostles as one staying in them for good; in the prophets handed out with restraint, in the apostles poured out in full; in the prophets given sparingly, in the apostles given without stint. He was not yet shown openly before the Lord’s resurrection; he was granted after the resurrection. For, he said, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, so that he may be with you forever — the Spirit of truth.” And, “When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from my Father, the Spirit of truth who comes out from my Father.” And, “If I do not go away, that Advocate will not come to you; but if I go away, I will send him to you.” And, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

And because the Lord was about to leave for the heavens, he had to give the Paraclete to the disciples, so as not to leave them orphans in any degree — which would not do at all — and abandon them with no advocate and no sort of protector. For this is the one who strengthened their hearts and their minds, who marked out the mysteries of the good news, who was the light in them for the things of God. Once they were strengthened, they feared neither prison nor chains for the sake of the Lord’s name; they even trampled underfoot the powers of the world and its tortures, since from then on they were armed and made strong by this same Spirit, holding in themselves the gifts that this same Spirit hands out and assigns to the church, Christ’s bride, as her jewels.

This is the one who sets prophets in the church, trains teachers, directs tongues, gives powers and healings, does wonderful works, supplies the sorting out of spirits, grants the powers of governing, puts counsel in our minds, and orders and arranges whatever other gifts of grace there are — and so makes the Lord’s church, everywhere and in everything, finished and complete.

This is the one who came in the form of a dove when our Lord was baptized and settled on him, living in Christ whole and entire, not cut short in any measure or portion, but distributed and sent out generously in his whole overflow, so that others might receive from him some enjoyment of his gifts. The spring of the entire Holy Spirit stays in Christ, so that streams of gifts and works may be drawn from him, while the Holy Spirit lives in Christ in abundance. Isaiah truly prophesied this: “And the Spirit of wisdom and understanding will rest on him, the Spirit of counsel and strength, the Spirit of knowledge and devotion; and the Spirit of the fear of the Lord will fill him.” He said the very same thing in another place, speaking in the Lord’s own person: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the poor.” David likewise: “That is why God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your companions.” Of him the apostle Paul says: “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.” And, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

He is the one who brings about the second birth by water: a kind of seed of divine generation, a setting apart for a heavenly birth, the pledge of a promised inheritance, and, as it were, a signed bond for eternal salvation. He can make us God’s temple and fit us out to be his house. He asks God to hear us, with groans that cannot be put into words. He fills the office of advocate and carries out the duties of our defense — a tenant given to our bodies, and the one who makes them holy. Working in us for eternity, he can also bring our bodies out at the resurrection of immortality, getting them used to being joined with heavenly power in himself and allied with the divine eternity of the Holy Spirit. For our bodies are trained in him and by him to move on toward immortality, by learning to govern themselves with restraint under his rulings. For this is the one who “desires against the flesh,” because “the flesh fights back against the Spirit.”

This is the one who holds back cravings that cannot be satisfied, controls lusts past all measure, puts out unlawful fires, defeats reckless impulses, drives off drunkenness, checks greed, chases away extravagant feasting, links love together, binds affections tight, puts down factions, sets the rule of truth in order, overcomes heretics, throws out the wicked, and guards the good news. Of him the same apostle says: “We have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God.” Of him he says, exulting: “And I think that I too have the Spirit of God.” Of him he says: “The Spirit of the prophets is subject to the prophets.” Of him he also tells us: “Now the Spirit says plainly that in the last times some will fall away from the faith, giving their attention to misleading spirits and to teachings of demons, who speak lies in hypocrisy, their own conscience seared.”

Settled in this Spirit, no one ever says “Jesus be cursed”; no one has ever denied that Christ is the Son of God, or rejected God the Creator; no one speaks words of his own against the Scriptures; no one lays down other and sacrilegious rulings; no one draws up different laws. Whoever speaks against him “does not have forgiveness — not in this age, and not in the age to come.”

This is the one who bears witness to Christ in the apostles; who shows in the martyrs how steady their faith stays; who keeps up in virgins the remarkable self-control of their sealed chastity; who in others guards the rules of the Lord’s teaching unspoiled and uncontaminated; who destroys heretics, corrects the twisted, condemns unbelievers, exposes frauds; who rebukes the wicked besides, and keeps the church uncorrupted and untouched, in the holiness of a perpetual virginity and truth.

And now, about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, let it be enough to have said this much briefly, and to have set these points down in short compass without drawing them out into a long argument. They could be presented at much greater length and carried on in a far wider debate, since the whole of the Old and the New Testament could be brought forward as evidence that the true faith stands this way. But heretics are forever fighting against the truth, and they are in the habit of dragging out the dispute over the pure tradition and the universal faith, because they have taken offense at Christ — since he too is asserted to be God by the Scriptures, and this is believed by us to be so. So we ought, rightly, and so that every heretical slander may be cleared away from our faith, to argue the point that Christ is God as well, and to argue it in a way that does not go against the truth of Scripture, nor against our own faith either, in which the Scriptures declare, and we hold and believe, that there is one God. [w]

For both the people who say that Jesus Christ is himself God the Father, and the people who would have him be only a man, have drawn the sources and the reasons of their error and perversity from Scripture itself. When they noticed that it is written, “God is one,” they thought they could not hold that except by supposing one of two things: that Christ must be believed to be only a man, or that he must really be God the Father. And they got into the habit of stringing their clever arguments together so as to try to justify their own mistake.

So those who say that Jesus Christ is the Father argue like this. If God is one, and Christ is God, then Christ is the Father, since God is one. If Christ is not the Father, because Christ is God the Son, then it appears that two Gods have been brought in, against the Scriptures. And those who insist that Christ is only a man conclude the other way around. If the Father is one and the Son is another, and the Father is God and Christ is God, then there is not one God; two Gods have been brought in at once, the Father and the Son. And if God is one, it follows that Christ must be a man, so that the Father may properly be the one God. In this way the Lord is, as it were, crucified between two thieves, just as he was placed there before; and from each side he takes the sacrilegious insults of heretics like these.

But neither the Holy Scriptures nor we ourselves handed them the reasons for their ruin and their blindness, if they either will not or cannot see what is plainly written in the middle of the divine documents. For we know, and read, and believe, and hold that God is one — the one who made heaven and earth alike — since we know no other, and never will know any, seeing there is none. “I am God,” he says, “and there is none besides me: righteous, and a Savior.” And in another place: “I am the first and the last, and besides me there is no God who is like me.” And, “Who has measured out the heavens with the span of his hand, and the earth in his fist? Who has hung the mountains on a balance and the woodlands on a scale?” And Hezekiah: “So that all may know that you alone are God.” And the Lord himself: “Why do you ask me about what is good? God alone is good.” And the apostle Paul says: “Who alone has immortality, and lives in light that no one can approach, whom no one has seen or can see.” And in another place: “But a mediator is not a mediator of one; and God is one.”

But while we hold and read and believe this, we ought all the same to pass over no part of the heavenly Scriptures; and so we certainly ought not to throw out those marks of Christ’s divinity that are set down in the Scriptures, or else, by damaging the authority of the Scriptures, we will be held to have damaged the wholeness of our holy faith. So let us believe this as well, since it is entirely trustworthy, that Jesus Christ the Son of God is our Lord and God — because “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” And, “The Word was made flesh and lived among us.” And, “My Lord and my God.” And, “Theirs are the fathers, and from them, according to the flesh, came Christ, who is over all, God blessed forever.”

What are we to say, then? Does Scripture set two Gods in front of us? How then does it say that “God is one”? Or is Christ not God as well? How then is it said to Christ, “My Lord and my God”? So unless we hold all of this with fitting reverence and by lawful argument, we will fairly be thought to have handed the heretics a stumbling block — certainly not through any fault in the heavenly Scriptures, which never deceive anyone, but through the presumption of human error, in which they chose to be heretics.

And first of all we must turn the attack back on the people who take it upon themselves to charge us with saying that there are two Gods. It is written, and they cannot deny it, that “the Lord is one.” What do they think about Christ, then — that he is Lord, or that he is not Lord at all? But they do not doubt for a moment that he is Lord. So if their reasoning is sound, here are two Lords already. How then is it true, as the Scriptures say, that the Lord is one? Christ is also called “the one Teacher.” And yet we read that the apostle Paul is a teacher too. On this showing, then, our teacher is not one, for from all this we conclude that there are two teachers. How then, according to the Scriptures, is “one your Teacher, Christ”? In the Scriptures one is “called good — God”; but in the same Scriptures Christ is also asserted to be good. So there is not, if they conclude rightly, one who is good, but two who are good. How then, according to the faith of Scripture, is only one said to be good?

But if they do not think that the truth that the Lord is one is obstructed in any way by Christ’s also being Lord, or the truth that one is our teacher by Paul’s also being our teacher, or the truth that one is good by Christ’s also being called good — then by that same reasoning let them understand this: that from the fact that God is one, no obstruction arises to the truth that Christ is also declared to be God.