One Thing, Not One Person

Again — whose teaching is it that he announces, the teaching everyone was astonished at? His own, or the Father’s? So too, when they were uncertain among themselves whether he was the Christ — not as being the Father, of course, but as the Son — he says to them: “You are not ignorant of where I am from; and I have not come of myself, but the one who sent me is true, whom you do not know. But I know him, because I am from him.” He did not say, Because I am he myself, and, I have sent my own self. His words are, “He has sent me.” In the same way, when the Pharisees sent men to arrest him, he says: “A little while longer I am with you, and then I go to the one who sent me.” [a]

And when he states that he is not alone, and puts it in these words — “but I and the Father who sent me” — does he not show that there are Two: Two, and yet inseparable? That, in fact, was the whole substance of what he was teaching them, that they were inseparably Two. For after citing the law where it lays down the truth of two men’s testimony, he adds at once: “I am one bearing witness about myself, and the Father, who sent me, is another, and he bears witness about me.” Now if he were one — being at the same time both the Son and the Father — he certainly would not have quoted the authority of the law, which requires the testimony not of one but of two.

So too, when they asked him where his Father was, he answered that they had known neither him nor the Father; and in that answer he plainly told them of Two whom they did not know. Grant that “if they had known him, they would have known the Father also” — that still does not mean he was himself both Father and Son. It means that because the Two are inseparable, it was impossible for either of them to be acknowledged, or to be unknown, without the other. “The one who sent me,” he says, “is true; and I am telling the world the things I have heard from him.” And the narrative goes on to explain openly that “they did not understand that he was speaking to them about the Father” — though they certainly ought to have known that the Father’s words were spoken in the Son, since they had read in Jeremiah, “And the Lord said to me: Look, I have put my words in your mouth”; and again in Isaiah, “The Lord has given me a tongue of learning, so that I would know when to speak a word in season.” In line with that, Christ himself says: “Then you will know that I am he, and that I am saying nothing of my own self; but that I speak as my Father has taught me, because the one who sent me is with me.” This too amounts to a proof that they were Two — undivided, but Two.

So too, when he was rebuking the Jews in his argument with them because they wanted to kill him, he said, “I speak what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have seen with your father”; and, “but now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth I heard from God”; and again, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came out from God and have come here.” They are still not separated by this, even though he declares that he came out from the Father. Some people do seize the opening these words give them to put forward their heresy of a separation. But his coming out from God is like the ray’s coming out from the sun, and the river’s from the spring, and the tree’s from the seed.

Then: “I do not have a demon, but I honor my Father”; and again, “If I honor myself, my honor is nothing. It is my Father who honors me, the one you say is your God — and you have not known him, but I know him. And if I were to say I do not know him, I would be a liar like you; but I know him, and I keep what he says.” But when he goes on to say, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it, and was glad,” he proves that it was not the Father who appeared to Abraham, but the Son.

In the same way, in the case of the man born blind, he states that he must do the works of the Father who sent him; and after he had given the man sight he said to him, “Do you believe in the Son of God?” Then, when the man asked who that was, he went on to reveal himself to him as the Son of God he had just named as the right object of his trust. In a later passage he declares that he is known by the Father and the Father by him, and adds that the Father loved him so entirely that he was laying down his life, because he had received this command from the Father.

When the Jews asked him whether he was the Christ himself — meaning the Christ of God, of course; to this day the Jews do not expect the Father himself, but the Christ of God, since it is nowhere said that the Father will come as the Christ — he said to them, “I am telling you, and you do not believe. The works I am doing in my Father’s name, they are what bear witness about me.” Witness about what? About the very thing they were asking, to be sure — whether he was the Christ of God.

Then again, about his sheep, and about no one being able to pluck them out of his hand, he says, “My Father, who gave them to me, is greater than all” — and immediately adds, “I and my Father are one.”

Here, then, is where they take their stand: too senseless, or rather too blind, to see, first, that this passage points to Two — “I and my Father”; then, that the verb is plural, “are,” which cannot be used of one person only; and last, that the word it ends in is not a personal noun but a thing — unum, “one thing,” not unus, “one person.” If he had said “one person,” he might have given their opinion some help. Unus does indeed mark the singular; but here the subject is still “Two,” and masculine. So he says unum, which is neuter — a word that does not state singleness of number, but oneness of substance: likeness, being joined together, affection on the Father’s part, who loves the Son, and submission on the Son’s, who obeys the Father’s will. When he says “I and my Father are one thing” — unum — he shows that there are Two, whom he sets on an equal footing and joins into one.

That is exactly why he adds, to this very statement, that he had shown them many works from the Father, and that he deserved stoning for none of them. And to stop them thinking he deserved that fate — as though by saying “I and my Father are one” he had claimed to be counted as God himself, that is, as the Father, when he was presenting himself as the Father’s divine Son and not as God himself — he says: “If it is written in your law, I said, You are gods; and if Scripture cannot be broken, do you say of the one whom the Father made holy and sent into the world, He is speaking against God, because he said, I am the Son of God? If I am not doing my Father’s works, do not believe me; but if I am, then even if you will not believe me, believe the works — and know that I am in the Father, and the Father in me.”

So it must be by the works that the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father; and it is by the works that we understand the Father to be one with the Son. All along, then, this is what he was pressing hard toward: that while they are of one power and one substance, they should still be believed to be Two. Otherwise — unless they were believed to be Two — there could be no believing that the Son exists at all.

Again, when Martha, in a later passage, acknowledged him to be the Son of God, she was no more mistaken than Peter and Nathanael had been. And even if she had been mistaken, she would have learned the truth on the spot. For look: when he was about to raise her brother from the dead, the Lord looked up to heaven and, addressing the Father, said — as the Son, naturally — “Father, I thank you that you always hear me. It is because of these crowds standing here that I have spoken to you, so that they may believe that you sent me.” [n]

But in the trouble of his soul, on a later occasion, he said: “What shall I say? Father, save me from this hour — but it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Only, Father, glorify your name.” In that he spoke as the Son. At another time he said, “I have come in my Father’s name.” So the Son’s voice, addressed to the Father, was quite enough by itself. But look: over and above that, the Father answers from heaven, for the purpose of bearing witness to the Son: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.” And so again in that solemn declaration, “I have both glorified, and will glorify again” — how many persons do you make out there, stubborn Praxeas? Are there not as many as there are voices?

You have the Son on earth; you have the Father in heaven. This is not a separation; it is nothing but the divine arrangement. We know, of course, that God is in the depths below and is everywhere — but by power and authority. And we are sure that the Son, who cannot be divided from him, is everywhere with him. Even so, within the arrangement itself, the Father willed that the Son should be held to be on earth and himself in heaven. That is where the Son looked up to, and prayed, and made his request of the Father; that is where he taught us to lift ourselves and pray, “Our Father in heaven,” and the rest — although the Father is in fact present everywhere.

This heaven the Father willed to be his own throne, while he made the Son “a little lower than the angels” by sending him down to the earth — meaning all along to “crown him with glory and honor,” by taking him back to heaven. That is what he now made good to him when he said, “I have both glorified you, and will glorify you again.” The Son makes his request from earth; the Father gives his promise from heaven.

Why, then, do you make liars of both the Father and the Son? If the Father spoke from heaven to the Son while he was himself the Son on earth, or if the Son prayed to the Father while he was himself the Father in heaven — how does it happen that the Son made a request of his own very self by asking it of the Father, since the Son was the Father? Or, the other way round, how is it that the Father made a promise to himself by making it to the Son, since the Father was the Son? Even if we were to hold that they are two separate gods — the charge you are so fond of throwing at us — that would be a more bearable thing to say than to keep up a God as shifting and changeable as yours.

That is why, in the passage before us, the Lord said to the people standing there: “This voice did not come for my sake, but for yours” — so that they too might believe in the Father and in the Son, each separately, in his own name and person and place. “Then Jesus cried out and said, Whoever believes in me does not believe in me, but in the one who sent me” — because it is through the Son that people believe in the Father, while the Father is also the authority from which belief in the Son springs. “And whoever sees me sees the one who sent me.” How so? Because, as he says further on, “I have not spoken from myself; but the Father who sent me, he has given me a command about what I should say and what I should speak.” For “the Lord God has given me the tongue of the learned, so that I would know when I ought to speak” the word I actually speak. “So I speak just as the Father has told me.”

Now, in what way these things were said to him, the evangelist John — the disciple he loved — knew better than Praxeas. And so John adds his own explanation: “Before the feast of the Passover, Jesus knew that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God.” Praxeas, though, would have it that it was the Father who came out from himself and went back to himself — so that what the devil put into Judas’s heart was the betrayal not of the Son but of the Father himself. But as it happens, things have turned out badly for the devil and for the heretic alike; because even in the Son’s case, the treachery the devil worked against him did him no good at all.

So it was the Son of God, who was in the Son of Man, that was betrayed — as the Scripture says just afterward: “Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in him.” Who is meant here by “God”? Certainly not the Father, but the Father’s Word, who was in the Son of Man — that is, in the flesh, in which Jesus had already been glorified by the divine power and word. “And God,” he says, “will also glorify him in himself” — that is, the Father will glorify the Son, because he has him within himself. And even though the Son was laid flat on the ground and put to death, the Father would soon glorify him by his resurrection, and by making him conqueror over death.