Confessing Jesus and Dissolving Him

For this is what John, the man so dear to God, foresaw by the Lord’s own revelation to him, and so he spoke of the one who was speaking in him: “Every spirit,” he says, “that confesses Jesus come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that dissolves Jesus is not of God; and this is the spirit of Antichrist, of whom you have already heard, and he is already in the world now.” O the marvelous and singular goodness of God! Like a most careful and skillful physician, he foretold the diseases that would come upon his church, and when he showed the harm beforehand, in that very showing he gave a remedy for it, so that all, when they saw the evil approaching, might at once flee as far as possible from what they already knew to be at hand. [a]

And so Saint John says, “Every spirit that dissolves Jesus is not of God; and this is the spirit of Antichrist.” Do you recognize him, you heretic? Do you recognize that this is said plainly and pointedly about you? For no one dissolves Jesus in this way except the one who does not confess that he is God. For since the whole faith and the whole worship of the church consists in this, to confess that Jesus is true God, who can dissolve his glory and worship more than one who denies that there is in him all that we all worship? Take care, then, I beg you, take care that no one may even call you Antichrist. Do you think I am abusing and cursing you? What I am saying is not my own idea; for look, the evangelist says, “Everyone who dissolves Jesus is not of God; and this is Antichrist.” If you do not dissolve Jesus and deny God, no one may call you Antichrist. But if you deny it, why do you accuse anyone of calling you Antichrist? While you deny it, I say that you have said it of yourself.

Would you like to know whether this is true? Tell me: when Jesus was born of a virgin, what do you make him out to be, man or God? If God only, you certainly dissolve Jesus, since you deny that manhood was joined to divinity in him. But if you say he was man, you dissolve him no less, since you blasphemously say that a mere man (as you will have it) was born. Unless perhaps you think that you do not dissolve Jesus: you who deny him to be God, you who would certainly dissolve him even if you did not deny that man was born together with God. But perhaps you would like this made clearer by examples. You shall have them in both directions. Outside the church are the Manichees, who declare that Jesus was God alone, and the Ebionites, who say that he was a mere man. Both of them deny and dissolve Jesus: the one by saying that he is only man, the other by saying that he is only God. For though their opinions were the opposite of each other, the blasphemy of these differing opinions is much the same. Except that, if any distinction can be drawn between the size of the evils, your blasphemy, which asserts that he is a mere man, is worse than the one that says he is only God. For though both are wrong, it is more insulting to take away from the Lord what is divine than what is human.

This alone, then, is the catholic and the true faith: to believe that as the Lord Jesus Christ is God, so he is also man; and that as he is man, so he is also God. “Everyone who dissolves Jesus is not of God.” But to dissolve him is to try to tear apart what is united in Jesus, and to sever what is one and indivisible. And what is it in Jesus that is united and one? Certainly the manhood and the Godhead. So he dissolves Jesus who severs these and tears them apart. Otherwise, if he does not tear them apart and sever them, he does not dissolve Jesus; but if he tears them apart, he certainly dissolves him.