Sin in the Flesh

The famous Alexander has made himself conspicuous against us as well, driven by that love of a quarrel which is the standing temper of a heretic. He insists that we say Christ put on flesh of earthly descent in order to abolish sinful flesh in his own person. Even if that were in fact our position, we could defend it in a way that entirely escapes the wild absurdity he fastens on us — that Christ’s own flesh was abolished in him as being sinful. We say publicly that it is seated at the Father’s right hand in heaven, and we declare further that it will come back from there on the high platform of the Father’s glory. It is therefore just as impossible for us to say that his flesh has been abolished as it is for us to call it sinful and so made void, since there was no fault in it. [a]

What we do maintain is that what was abolished in Christ is not carnem peccati, “flesh of sin,” but peccatum carnis, “sin of the flesh” — not the material, but its character; not the substance, but its fault. And we say this on the apostle’s authority, since he says, “He abolished sin in the flesh.” In another sentence he says that Christ was “in the likeness of sinful flesh” — not, however, as though he had taken on “the likeness of flesh,” meaning a semblance of a body instead of the real thing. He means us to understand a likeness to the flesh that sinned. For the flesh of Christ, which committed no sin itself, resembled the flesh that had sinned: it resembled it in nature, but not in the corruption it took from Adam. That is why we also say that there was in Christ the same flesh whose nature in man is sinful.

So we say that sin has been abolished in the flesh, because in Christ that same flesh was kept without sin which in man was not kept without sin. It would do nothing for Christ’s purpose of abolishing sin in the flesh — and nothing for his glory — if he did not abolish it in the very flesh in which the nature of sin lay. It would surely have been no remarkable thing to remove the stain of sin in some better flesh, flesh of a different and sinless nature. Then, you say, if he took our flesh, Christ’s flesh was sinful. Do not tie up in mystery a point that is perfectly plain. In putting on our flesh he made it his own; in making it his own, he made it sinless.

A word of caution is owed to everyone who refuses to believe that our flesh was in Christ on the ground that it did not come from a human father’s seed. Let them remember that Adam himself received this flesh of ours without the seed of a human father. Earth was turned into this flesh of ours without a human father’s seed; in the same way it was perfectly possible for the Son of God to pass into the substance of that same flesh without any curdling from a man.

But let us leave Alexander to his syllogisms, which he twists so badly in his arguments, and to the hymns of Valentinus, which he has the nerve to slip in as the work of some reputable author. Let us hold our inquiry to a single point: did Christ receive flesh from the virgin? If he drew its substance from his mother’s womb, we have a settled proof that his flesh was human — though we already have plain evidence of that from the name and description given it as a man’s, from the way it was put together, from the working of its senses, and from its suffering of death. [i]

First, though, we have to show what reason there was beforehand for the Son of God to be born of a virgin. He who was going to consecrate a new order of birth had to be born himself in a new way, and Isaiah foretold that the Lord himself would give the sign of it. What is the sign? “Look, a virgin will conceive and bear a son.” And a virgin did conceive and bear “Emmanuel, God with us.” This is the new birth: a man is born in God, and in this man God was born, taking flesh of an ancient stock but without the ancient seed, so that he might make it over with a new seed — that is, in a spiritual way — and cleanse it by taking away all its old stains.

But the whole of this new birth was sketched out ahead of time, as everything else was, in an ancient pattern: the Lord was born as man by an arrangement in which a virgin was the means. The earth was still virgin, not yet broken by any human labor, with no seed yet cast into its furrows, when, as we are told, God made man out of it into a living soul. Since the first Adam comes to us in that way, it is a fair inference that the second Adam likewise, as the apostle has told us, was formed by God into a life-giving spirit out of the ground — that is, out of flesh not yet stained by any human breeding. And so that I lose no chance of pressing my argument from the name of Adam: why does the apostle call Christ Adam, unless it is that, as man, he was of that same earthly stock?

Reason itself holds to the same conclusion here, because it was by an exactly answering act that God recovered his own image and likeness, which the devil had robbed him of. It was while Eve was still a virgin that the ensnaring word which was to build the house of death crept into her ear. Into a virgin’s soul, in the same way, the Word of God had to be brought which was to raise the house of life — so that what had been ruined through this sex might through the same sex be recovered for salvation. As Eve had believed the serpent, so Mary believed Gabriel. The wrong the one did by believing, the other wiped out by believing.

But, you will say, Eve did not conceive in her womb at the devil’s word. Well, she did conceive at all events; the devil’s word afterward became a seed to her, so that she conceived as an outcast and gave birth in pain. And what she bore was a devil who murdered his brother, while Mary bore one who would one day bring salvation to Israel — his own brother in the flesh, and his own murderer. God therefore sent his Word down into the virgin’s womb as the good Brother, to blot out the memory of the evil brother. And so Christ had to come forth for man’s salvation in the very condition of flesh that man had been in ever since his sentence.

To put the answer more simply: it was not fitting that the Son of God should be born of a human father’s seed, in case, being wholly a man’s son, he should fail to be God’s Son as well and amount to nothing more than “a Solomon” or “a Jonah” — which is what Ebion thought we ought to believe about him. So, in order that he who was already the Son of God (of God the Father’s seed, that is to say, of the Spirit) might also be the Son of man, all he needed was to take on flesh, and that of man’s flesh, without the seed of a man; for the seed of a man stood idle in one who had the seed of God. Just as, before his birth from the virgin, he could have God for his Father without a human mother, so, after his birth from the virgin, he could have a woman for his mother without a human father. He is man together with God, in short, since he is man’s flesh together with God’s Spirit — flesh, I say, without seed from man, Spirit with seed from God. [o]

Now, since God’s plan for his Son required that he be brought forth of a virgin, why should he not have received from the virgin the body that he carried out of the virgin? Because, they say, what he took is something else, taken from God: “The Word was made flesh.” But that very statement plainly shows what it was that was made flesh, and it cannot possibly have been anything other than the Word that was made flesh. Whether the Word was made flesh out of flesh, or out of the divine seed itself, Scripture will have to tell us. But since Scripture says nothing except what it was that was made flesh, and says nothing of what it was made from, it must be taken to imply that the Word was made flesh out of something else and not out of itself. And if not out of itself but out of something else, from what should we more suitably suppose the Word became flesh than from that flesh in which it carried out the plan?

We have proof of the same conclusion in the fact that the Lord himself pronounced, plainly and pointedly, “What is born of the flesh is flesh” — precisely because it is born of the flesh. But if he was speaking there simply of a human being and not of himself, as you maintain, then you must deny outright that Christ is man, and hold that human nature did not suit him. Then he adds, “What is born of the Spirit is spirit,” because God is a Spirit and he was born of God. This description certainly fits him even better than it fits those who believe in him. But if this clause applies to him, why does the one before it not apply as well? You cannot split the pair, fitting this half to him and the earlier half to all other men — especially since you do not deny that Christ has the two substances, both of flesh and of Spirit. Besides, having both flesh and Spirit, he cannot possibly, when speaking of the standing of the two substances that he himself carries, be supposed to have ruled that the Spirit was his own but the flesh was not. So then: as he is of the Spirit he is God the Spirit and is born of God, just as he is also born of the flesh of man, brought forth in the flesh as man.

What, then, does this passage mean: “Born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”? I shall make more use of the passage once I have answered the people who have tampered with it. They maintain that it was written in the plural — “who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” — as though it pointed to the people mentioned just before as “believing in his name,” and so marked out that mysterious seed of the chosen and spiritual sort which they claim for themselves. But how can that be, when everyone who believes in the name of the Lord is, on the common terms of the human race, born of blood and of the will of the flesh and of man — Valentinus himself included? The verb is singular, and refers to the Lord: “He was born of God.” And rightly so, because Christ is the Word of God, and with the Word the Spirit of God, and by the Spirit the Power of God, and whatever else belongs to God. [v]

As flesh, however, he is not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of man, because it was by the will of God that the Word was made flesh. It is to the flesh, not to the Word, that the denial of the birth we all have as men belongs, because it was as flesh that he had to be born in that way, and not as the Word. But while the passage does deny that he was born of the will of the flesh, why did it not also deny that he was born of the substance of the flesh? It did not disown the substance of the flesh when it denied that he was “born of blood.” It disowned only the matter of the seed, which everyone knows is warm blood worked up by frothing into the curdling agent for the woman’s blood. In cheese it is the curdling that gives the milky stuff its firmness, and it is thickened by adding rennet.

So we understand that what is denied is the Lord’s birth by sexual intercourse — which is what “the will of man and of the flesh” suggests — not his birth from a woman’s womb. And why is it pressed with such a piling up of emphasis that he was not born of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, if it were not that his flesh was of a kind about which no one could have any doubt that it was born from intercourse? Again, while denying that he was born from such a union, the passage did not deny that he was born of real flesh; it rather affirmed it, by the very fact that it did not deny his birth in the flesh the way it denied his birth from intercourse.

Tell me, then, why the Spirit of God went down into a woman’s womb at all, if it was not in order to take flesh from the womb. He could have become spiritual flesh without any such process — far more simply without a womb than in one. He had no reason to shut himself up inside one if he was to carry nothing out of it. But he did not go down into a womb without reason. Therefore he received flesh from it. Otherwise, if he received nothing from it, his going down into it was pointless — especially if he meant to become the kind of flesh that does not come from a womb at all, that is, spiritual flesh.