The Visible and the Invisible

Suppose I fail to settle this point of our faith out of the Old Testament, where the passages can be argued over. Then I will take my confirmation out of the New, so that you cannot simply hand over to the Father every relation and condition I assign to the Son. Look, then: in the Gospels and in the apostles alike I find a visible God and an invisible God, set out under a plain distinction of persons, each in his own condition. [a]

There is a flat statement of John’s: “No one has ever seen God.” He means, of course, at any time up to then. But in fact he has removed the question of time altogether by saying that God has never been seen at all. The apostle backs this up. Speaking of God he says, “Whom no one has seen or can see” — because the man who saw him would die. Yet these same apostles testify that they both saw Christ and handled him.

Now if Christ is himself both the Father and the Son, how can he be both the visible one and the invisible one? Someone on the other side will want to reconcile the two by saying that both statements are perfectly true: he was visible in the flesh but invisible before he appeared in the flesh, so that the one who as Father was invisible before the flesh is the same as the Son who was visible in the flesh. But if he is the same one who was invisible before he came in the flesh, how was he actually seen in ancient times, before the flesh? And by the same reasoning, if he is the same one who was visible after coming in the flesh, how is it that the apostles now declare him invisible? How, I ask, can any of this stand — unless one of them was in ancient times visible only in mystery and riddle, and became more clearly visible by taking flesh, the Word who was also made flesh; while the other is the one whom no one has ever seen, who is none other than the Father, the one to whom the Word belongs?

Let us examine, then, who it was that the apostles saw. “What we have seen with our eyes,” says John, “what we have looked at and our hands have handled, of the Word of life.” Now the Word of life became flesh and was heard and seen and handled, because he was flesh — he who before he came in the flesh was the “Word in the beginning with God” the Father, and not the Father with the Word. For although the Word was God, still he was with God, because he is God from God; and being joined to the Father, he is with the Father.

“And we have seen his glory, the glory as of the only Son of the Father” — that is, of course, the glory of the Son, the one who was visible and was glorified by the invisible Father. And so, having said that the Word of God was God, John adds one more sentence over and above what he needed, to give no help to his opponent’s presumption that he had seen the Father himself, and to draw the line between the invisible Father and the visible Son: “No one has ever seen God.” What God does he mean? The Word? But he has already said, “Him we have seen and heard, and our hands have handled the Word of life.” So — I must ask again — what God does he mean? The Father, of course: the one with whom the Word was, the only Son, who is in the Father’s bosom and has himself made him known. He was heard and seen, and, so that no one would take him for a phantom, actually handled.

Paul saw him too, and yet did not see the Father. “Have I not,” he says, “seen Jesus Christ our Lord?” And he calls Christ God outright: “To whom belong the fathers, and from whom, as far as the flesh goes, Christ came, who is over all, God blessed forever.” He shows us as well that the Son of God, who is the Word of God, is visible, because the one who became flesh was called Christ. But of the Father he says to Timothy, “Whom no one among men has seen, nor indeed can see,” and he piles the description higher still: “Who alone has immortality and lives in light that cannot be approached.” It was of the Father, too, that he had said a little earlier, “Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, to the only God.”

So we may apply the opposite qualities to the Son himself — mortality, and approachability. The apostle testifies that he “died according to the Scriptures,” and that “last of all he was seen by me” — by means, of course, of a light that could be approached, though he did not come through that light without danger to his eyesight. A danger like it fell on Peter and John and James: they did not face that glory without risking their reason and their senses. And if those men, who could not bear the glory of the Son, had seen the Father instead, they would have died on the spot: “For no one shall see God and live.”

That being so, it is clear that the one who became visible at the end was always seen from the beginning, and that the one who had never been visible from the beginning was not seen at the end. There are two, then: the visible and the invisible. It was the Son who was always seen, the Son who always talked with men, the Son who has always done the work, by the authority and will of the Father. For “the Son can do nothing of himself except what he sees the Father do” — “do,” that is, in his mind and thought. The Father acts by mind and thought; the Son, who is in the Father’s mind and thought, gives effect and shape to what he sees. So all things were made through the Son, and without him nothing was made.

But do not suppose that only the works belonging to the making of the world were done by the Son. Everything God has done since was done by him as well. For “the Father who loves the Son and has given all things into his hand” loves him from the beginning, and from the very first handed everything over to him. That is why it is written, “From the beginning the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” to whom “all power in heaven and on earth is given by the Father.” “The Father judges no one, but has committed all judgment to the Son” — and that from the very beginning. For when he speaks of all power and all judgment, and says that all things were made through him and all things delivered into his hand, he allows no exception in the matter of time; they would not be all things unless they were the things of all time. [i]

So it is the Son who has been administering judgment from the beginning: throwing down the arrogant tower and dividing the languages, punishing the whole world with the violence of water, raining fire and burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah — as the Lord, from the Lord. He it was who came down at all times to talk with men, from Adam on to the patriarchs and the prophets: in vision, in dream, in mirror, in riddle. From the beginning he was laying the groundwork of the ordered course he meant to follow through to the very end.

In this way he was learning, even as God, how to talk with human beings on earth — he who was none other than the Word that was to be made flesh. And he was learning, or rehearsing, in order to level the road of faith for us: so that we might more readily believe that the Son of God had come down into the world, if we knew that something like it had been done in times past. For just as it was on our account, and for our instruction, that these events were written down in the Scriptures, so for our sakes they were also done — ours, I mean, “on whom the ends of the ages have come.”

That is how, even then, he knew exactly what human feelings and affections are: he always intended to take on the actual stuff a man is made of, body and soul. So he questions Adam as though he did not know: “Adam, where are you?” He is sorry that he made man, as though he had failed to see ahead. He tests Abraham, as though he did not know what was in a man. He is offended with people and then reconciled to them. Whatever other weaknesses and shortcomings the heretics fasten on as unworthy of God, in order to discredit the Creator, they do not consider that all of it fits the Son well enough — the Son who was one day going to go through human suffering too: hunger and thirst, and tears, and a real birth and a real death, and who, for the sake of such a plan, was “made by the Father a little less than the angels.”

But the heretics, you may be sure, will not allow that things are suitable even to the Son of God which you are charging against the Father himself, when you claim that he made himself less than the angels on our account. Scripture tells us that the one who was made less was made less by another, and not by himself. And what if the one “crowned with glory and honor” is one, and the one who crowned him another — the Son, in fact, by the Father?

And here is my question. How does it come about that the Almighty, the invisible God, “whom no one has seen or can see, who lives in light that cannot be approached”; who “does not live in temples made with hands”; at whose sight “the earth trembles and the mountains melt like wax”; who holds the whole world in his hand “like a nest”; “whose throne is heaven and the earth his footstool”; in whom every place is, while he himself is in no place; who is the outer limit of the universe — how does it come about, I ask, that this Most High should have walked in the garden toward the cool of the evening, looking for Adam; and shut the ark after Noah had gone in; and refreshed himself under an oak at Abraham’s tent; and called to Moses out of the burning bush; and appeared as “the fourth” in the furnace of the Babylonian king (though there he is called the son of man)? None of it can stand unless all these things happened as an image, as a mirror, as a riddle.

Even of the Son of God such things could not have been believed, if we had not been given them in the Scriptures. And perhaps they could not have been believed of the Father even if we had been given them there — though these men bring him down into Mary’s womb, and stand him in front of Pilate’s judgment seat, and bury him in Joseph’s tomb. That is where their mistake shows itself. Not knowing that the whole ordered plan of God has run from the very first through the Son, they believe that the Father himself was actually seen, and talked with men, and worked, and was thirsty, and went hungry — in spite of the prophet who says, “The everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, will never thirst at all, nor be hungry” (much less die at any time, or be buried!). And so, they think, it was uniformly one God, the Father, who at all times did himself the things that were really done by him through the Son.

They found it easier to suppose that the Father acted in the Son’s name than that the Son acted in the Father’s — although the Lord says himself, “I have come in my Father’s name,” and says to the Father, “I have made your name known to these men”; and although the Scripture likewise says, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” meaning the Son in the Father’s name. [s]

As for the Father’s titles — God Almighty, the Most High, the Lord of hosts, the King of Israel, the One who is — we say (and the Scriptures teach us this much) that they belong to the Son as well, that the Son came under these titles, and has always acted in them, and has in this way shown them out in himself to men. “All things that the Father has,” he says, “are mine.” Then why not his names too?

So when you read of God Almighty, and the Most High, and the God of hosts, and the King of Israel, and the One who is, consider whether the Son is not indicated by these titles as well. He is Almighty God in his own right, being the Word of Almighty God and having received power over all. He is the Most High, being “exalted at the right hand of God,” as Peter says in Acts. He is the Lord of hosts, because all things have been made subject to him by the Father. He is the King of Israel, because the destiny of that nation was committed to him in particular. And he is likewise the One who is, because there are many who are called sons and are not.

As for their claim that the name Christ belongs to the Father too, they will hear what I have to say about that in its proper place. For the moment let this be my answer to the argument they bring from the Revelation of John: “I am the Lord who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” — and from all the other passages which in their opinion make the title Almighty God unsuitable for the Son. As if the one who is to come were not almighty! In fact the Son of the Almighty is as much almighty as the Son of God is God.

What keeps them from readily seeing that the Father’s titles are shared with the Son is the way Scripture speaks whenever it settles that God is only one — as though the very same Scripture had not also set out two, both as God and as Lord, as we showed earlier. Their argument runs like this: “Since we find two and we find one, both must be one and the same — Father and Son alike.” [x]

Now Scripture is in no danger of needing anyone’s argument to keep it from looking self-contradictory. It has a method of its own, both when it sets out one God only and when it shows that there are two, Father and Son; and it is consistent with itself. Plainly it does name the Son. And without any harm to the Son it can quite properly have settled that God is only one — the God to whom the Son belongs — since the one who has a Son does not on that account cease to exist: he is one on his own account, that is, whenever he is named without the Son. And he is named without the Son whenever he is defined as the source, in the character of the first person, which had to be mentioned before the name of the Son; for it is the Father who is acknowledged first, and after the Father the Son is named.

So “there is one God,” the Father, “and besides him there is no other.” And when he makes this declaration himself, he is not denying the Son; he is saying that there is no other God — and the Son is not other than the Father. In fact, if you look carefully at what follows statements like this, you will find that they nearly always have to do with the makers of idols and the people who worship them: the crowd of false gods is to be driven out by the oneness of the one God, who all the same has a Son. And since this Son is undivided and inseparable from the Father, he is to be reckoned as being in the Father even when he is not named.

The fact is that if God had named him expressly he would have separated him, saying in so many words, “Besides me there is no other, except my Son.” He would have made his own Son actually another, by excepting him from the others. Suppose the sun were to say, “I am the sun, and there is no other besides me, except my ray” — would you not have remarked at once how pointless the statement was, as if the ray were not itself counted in the sun?

So he says there is no God besides himself with an eye to idolatry, both among the Gentiles and in Israel — and, for that matter, with an eye to our own heretics, who manufacture idols with their words as the pagans do with their hands; that is, they make another God and another Christ. So when he bore witness to his own oneness, the Father was looking after the Son’s interests, so that Christ should not be supposed to have come from another God, but from the one who had already said, “I am God, and there is no other besides me” — who shows us that he is the only God, but in company with his Son, with whom “he stretches out the heavens alone.”