Christ Made Out to Be No More Than Adam

But since we cannot ignore them, much as we would prefer to, it is now time to expose the rest of your subtler and more insidious blasphemies, so that at least they may not deceive simple people. In one of your pestilent treatises you have maintained and said: “Since man is the image of the divine nature, and the devil dragged this down and shattered it, God grieved over his image as an emperor grieves over his statue, and he repairs the shattered image. Without begetting he formed a nature from the Virgin, like that of Adam, who was born without begetting; and he raises up man’s nature by means of man. For as by man came death, so also by man came the resurrection of the dead.” [a]

We are told that some poisoners have a custom of mixing honey with the poison in the cups they prepare, so that the harmful ingredient may be hidden by the sweet, and while a man is charmed by the sweetness of the honey he may be destroyed by the deadly poison. So it is with you. When you say that man is the image of the divine nature, that the devil dragged it down and shattered it, and that God grieved over his image as an emperor over his statue, you smear the lips of the cup, so to speak, with something sweet like honey. Then men drain the cup offered to them and do not notice its deadliness while they taste what is pleasant. You put God’s name forward in order to speak falsehoods in the name of religion. You set holy things in front in order to persuade men of what is untrue, and by confessing God you contrive to deny the very one you are confessing. For who does not see where you are going, and what you are plotting? You say, indeed, that God grieved over his image as an emperor over his statue, repaired the shattered image, formed without begetting a nature from the Virgin like that of Adam, who was born without begetting, and raises up man’s nature by man, since as by man came death, so also by man came the resurrection of the dead. So, with all your earnestness and all your professions, you crafty plotter, you have managed by your smooth statements, with God’s name at the front, to come down to a mere man at the end. In the end you lower him to the state of a mere man, having already taken away from him the glory of God under a show of humility.

You say, then, that the divine goodness has restored the image of God which the devil shattered and destroyed, for you say that he restores the shattered image. Now see with what craft you say that he restores the shattered image! You want to persuade us that there was nothing more in him in whom the image is restored than there was in the image itself that was being restored. And so you make out that the Lord is only what Adam was, and that the restorer of the image is nothing more than the destructible image itself. Finally, in what follows you show what you are aiming and driving at, when you say that he formed without begetting a nature from the Virgin like that of Adam, who was born without begetting, and raises up man’s nature by man. You maintain that the Lord Jesus Christ was like Adam in every respect: the one without begetting and the other without begetting, the one a mere man and the other a mere man. And so, you see, you have carefully guarded against our thinking of the Lord Jesus Christ as in any way greater or better than Adam. You have measured them both by the same standard, so that you would think you were taking something away from Adam’s perfection if you added anything more to Christ.