Worshipped with God but Not as God

Still, to avoid thinking of the Lord Jesus as one of the common mass of people, you have given him some glory. You grant him honor as a saint, but not deity as true man and true God. For what do you say? “God brought about the Lord’s incarnation. Let us honor the form of the Theodochos together with God, as one form of Godhead, as a figure that cannot be severed from the divine link, as an image of the unseen God.” Above you said that Adam was the image of God; here you call Christ the image. The one you speak of as a statue, and the other also as a statue. [a]

But I suppose that, for God’s honor, we ought to be grateful to you, because you grant that the form of the Theodochos should be worshipped together with God. In this you wrong him rather than honor him. For here you do not give the Lord Jesus Christ the glory of deity; you deny it. By a subtle and wicked art you say that he is to be worshipped together with God so that you need not confess that he is God. And by the very statement in which you seem, deceitfully, to join him with God, you actually sever him from God. For when you blasphemously say that he is certainly not to be adored as God, but is to be worshipped together with God, you grant him a union of nearness to divinity in order to get rid of the truth of his divinity. Oh, you most wicked and crafty enemy of God! You want to commit the crime of denying God under the pretext of confessing him. You say, “Let us worship him as a figure that cannot be severed from the divine will, as an image of the unseen God.” I suppose, then, that it is because of his kind acts that our Lord Jesus Christ has gained honor among us as Creator and Redeemer. If, then, we were redeemed by him from eternal destruction, by calling our Redeemer a figure we are indeed trying to answer his kindness and goodness with worthy service and worthy loyalty, if we try to do away with that glory which he did not refuse to lay low for our sakes!