No One Is His Own Father

So it is either the Father or the Son. Day is not the same thing as night, and the Father is not the Son in such a way that the two of them are one, and one or the other of them is both. But that is exactly what these thoroughly empty-headed Monarchians insist on. [a]

They put it like this: “He himself made himself a Son to himself.” But a father makes a son, and a son makes a father. Two who come to stand in that relation, each out of the other and each toward the other, cannot possibly come to stand in it all by themselves and toward themselves — so that the Father makes himself a Son to himself and the Son makes himself a Father to himself. God set these relations up, and God also keeps them.

A father has to have a son in order to be a father, and a son has to have a father in order to be a son. But having and being are two different things. To be a husband I have to have a wife; I can never be my own wife. In the same way, to be a father I have a son, since I can never be a son to myself; and to be a son I have a father, since it is impossible for me ever to be my own father. It is these relations that make me what I am, once I come to have them. I will be a father when I have a son, and a son when I have a father.

Now if I am to be one of these relations to myself, I no longer have the thing I am supposed to be — not a father, because I am to be my own father, and not a son, because I am to be my own son. And since I have to have the one in order to be the other, then if I am to be both at once I will fail to be the one while I do not have the other.

Suppose I have to be my own son, being a father as well. Then I no longer have a son, since I am my own son. But not having a son, since I am my own son, how can I be a father? I have to have a son in order to be a father. So I am not a son either, because I have no father to make me a son. In the same way, suppose I am my own father, being a son as well. Then I no longer have a father; I am my own father. But not having a father, since I am my own father, how can I be a son? I have to have a father in order to be a son. And I cannot be a father either, because I have no son to make me a father.

All of this has to be the devil’s device — this shutting each one out and cutting each one off from the other. By folding the two of them together into one, under cover of the sole rule, he sees to it that neither of them is held or acknowledged. God is not the Father, since in fact he does not have the Son; and he is not the Son either, since in the same way he does not have the Father — because while he is the Father, he will not be the Son. That is how they hold on to the sole rule: they hold neither the Father nor the Son.

Yes, but “with God nothing is impossible.” True enough. Who could fail to know it? And who could be unaware that “the things that are impossible with men are possible with God”? Or that “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise”? We have read it all. So then, they argue, it was no hard thing for God to make himself both a Father and a Son, against the way things go among human beings. For a barren woman to have a child, against nature, was no difficulty for God, and neither was it for a virgin to conceive. Of course “nothing is too hard for the Lord.”

But if we are going to apply that principle as wildly and as roughly as our fancies please, then we can make God out to have done anything we like, on the ground that it was not impossible for him to do it. We must not suppose that because he is able to do everything he has actually done what he has not done. We have to ask whether he really did it. God could have fitted man out with wings to fly with, if he had liked, just as he gave wings to kites. We must not run to the conclusion that he did it because he was able to. He could also have snuffed out Praxeas and every other heretic on the spot; it does not follow that he did, simply because he was able. There had to be kites, after all, and there had to be heretics — and there had to be a Father who was crucified.

In one sense there will be something difficult even for God: the thing he has not done — not because he could not, but because he would not. With God, being willing is being able, and being unwilling is being unable; but everything he has willed he has both been able to carry out and has shown that he could. So then: if God had wanted to make himself a Son to himself, it was in his power to do it; and if it was in his power, he carried it through. You will have made your case for his power and his will in this matter when you have proved to us that he actually did it.

It is your job, though, to bring your proofs out of the Scriptures as plainly as we bring ours, when we prove that he made his Word a Son to himself. If he calls him Son, and if the Son is no one but the one who came out from the Father himself, and if the Word came out from the Father himself, then he will be the Son, and not the one he came out from. The Father did not come out from himself. [e]

Now you who say that the Father is the same as the Son are making one and the same person both send out from himself and, at the same moment, come out from himself — that being who is God. If he could have done this, at any rate he did not do it. Produce the proof I am asking you for, one like my own: show me that the Scriptures make the Son and the Father the same, in the way that on our side the Father and the Son are shown to be distinct. Distinct, I say, not separate.

On my part I bring out the words of God himself: “My heart has brought forth a most excellent Word.” You, in the same way, ought to bring out against me some text where God has said, “My heart has brought forth myself as my own most excellent Word” — in such a sense that he is himself both the one who brings forth and the thing brought forth, both the one who sends out and the one who is sent out, since he is both the Word and God.

Look at this too. On my side I put forward the passage where the Father said to the Son, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” If you want me to believe that he is both the Father and the Son, show me some other passage where it says, “The Lord said to himself: I am my own Son; today I have begotten myself”; or again, “Before the morning star I begot myself”; or likewise, “I the Lord possessed myself as the beginning of my ways for my own works, and before all the hills I begot myself” — and any other passages to the same effect.

And why would God, the Lord of all things, have hesitated to speak that way about himself, if that had been the fact? Was he afraid of not being believed, if he had said in so many words that he was both the Father and the Son? Of one thing he was certainly afraid: of lying. He was afraid for himself, and for his own truth. So, believing him to be the true God, I am sure he declared nothing to be in any other way than by his own ordering and arrangement, and that he arranged nothing in any other way than he declared it. On your side, though, you have to make him out to be a liar and a fraud and a tamperer with his own word — if, being a Son to himself, he handed the part of his Son to somebody else to play. For all the Scriptures attest the clear existence of the Trinity and the distinction within it, and they are what give us our rule of faith: that the one who speaks, the one he speaks about, and the one he speaks to cannot possibly be one and the same. So absurd and misleading a statement would be unworthy of God — that when it was himself he was speaking to, he speaks rather to somebody else and not to his very self.

So hear some further sayings of the Father about the Son, through Isaiah’s mouth: “Look at my Son, whom I have chosen, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased. I will put my Spirit on him, and he will bring out judgment to the nations.” Hear too what he says to the Son: “Is it a great thing for you that you should be called my Son, to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the scattered of Israel? I have given you as a light to the nations, so that you may be their salvation to the end of the earth.”

Now hear the Son’s own words about the Father: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to men.” He speaks to the Father about himself in the psalm as well: “Do not leave me until I have declared the strength of your arm to all the generation that is to come.” And to the same effect in another psalm: “Lord, how they have multiplied who trouble me!” In fact nearly every psalm that carries Christ’s part has the Son talking with the Father — that is, Christ speaking to God.

Notice too the Spirit speaking about the Father and the Son as a third party: “The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.” And in Isaiah’s words as well: “This is what the Lord says to the Lord, my Anointed.” And in the same prophet the Spirit says to the Father about the Son: “Lord, who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? We brought a report about him, as though he were a small child, as though he were a root in dry ground, with no shape to him and nothing to look at.”

These are a few pieces of evidence out of many. We are not trying to bring up every passage of Scripture, because we have a fairly large stock of them gathered under the various headings of our subject, where in the several chapters we call them in as our witnesses in the full weight of their standing and authority. Still, even in these few quotations the distinction between the persons in the Trinity is plainly set out. There is the Spirit himself who speaks, and the Father he speaks to, and the Son he speaks about. In the same way the other passages too establish each one of the several persons in his own character — addressed as they are, in some cases, to the Father or to the Son about the Son, in other cases to the Son or to the Father about the Father, and in others again to the Spirit.

If the number in the Trinity bothers you as well, as though it were not bound together in a simple unity, then let me ask you this. How is it possible for a being who is purely and absolutely one and single to speak in the plural — “Let us make man in our own image and after our own likeness”? He ought to have said, “Let me make man in my own image and after my own likeness,” being a one-of-a-kind, single being. [p]

And in the passage that follows, “Look, the man has become like one of us,” he is either deceiving us or having fun with us by speaking in the plural, if he is one only and single. Or was he speaking to the angels, the way the Jews read the passage — since they do not acknowledge the Son either? Or was it because he was at once the Father, the Son and the Spirit that he spoke to himself in plural terms, making himself plural for that very reason? No. It was because he already had his Son close at his side, a second person, his own Word, and a third person as well, the Spirit in the Word, that he deliberately took up the plural: “Let us make,” and “in our image,” and “become like one of us.”

With whom did he make man? And to whom did he make him like? With the Son, who was one day to put on human nature; and with the Spirit, who was to make man holy. Those are the ones he was speaking with, in the unity of the Trinity, as with his ministers and his witnesses.

In the text that follows he also tells the persons apart: “And God made man; in the image of God he made him.” Why say “the image of God”? Why not simply “his own image,” if there was only one who was the maker, and if there was not also one in whose image he was making man? But there was one in whose image God was making man: Christ’s image. Christ, who was one day going to become man — and more surely and more truly so — had already caused the man who was then going to be shaped out of clay to be called his image, the image and likeness of the true and complete Man.

But what does Scripture say about the world’s earlier works? Its first statement is made while the Son has not yet appeared: “And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” Straight away the Word appears — “that true light which gives light to man as he comes into the world” — and through him the world’s light came as well. From that moment God willed that creation be carried out in the Word, with Christ present and serving him; and so God created.

And God said, “Let there be a firmament” — and God made the firmament. And God also said, “Let there be lights” — and so God made a greater light and a lesser one. And all the rest of the created things were made in the same way by the one who made the first ones: I mean the Word of God, “through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made.”

Now if he too is God, as John says — “the Word was God” — then you have two beings: one who gives the order that a thing be made, and another who carries the order out and does the creating. In what sense you ought to understand him to be another, I have already explained: as a matter of person, not of substance; by way of distinction, not of division.

And although I must everywhere hold to one substance only, in three who cohere and cannot be separated, still I am bound to acknowledge, because the case requires it, that the one who issues a command is not the same as the one who carries it out. He would not be issuing a command at all if he were doing the work himself the whole time, while ordering it to be done through the second one. But he did issue the command — and he would not have meant to command himself if he were only one; or else he would have worked without any command at all, because he would not have waited to command himself.