Statement of Faith

We believe in one unbegotten God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things, both visible and invisible, who has his being from himself. And we believe in one Word, Wisdom and Son, the only Son, begotten of the Father without beginning and eternally. He is not a word spoken aloud, nor a thought in the mind. He is not an outflow from the Perfect, nor a division of the substance that cannot suffer, nor an emanation. He is a Son absolutely perfect, living and powerful, the true Image of the Father, equal to him in honor and glory. For this, he says, “is the will of the Father, that as they honor the Father, so they may honor the Son also.” He is true God from true God, as John says in his general letters: “And we are in him who is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.” He is Almighty from Almighty. For all things that the Father rules and governs, the Son rules and governs in the same way. He is wholly from the Whole, being like the Father, as the Lord says: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” But he was begotten in a way no words can tell and no mind can grasp, for “who will declare his generation?” In other words, no one can. At the end of the ages he came down from the bosom of the Father and took from the undefiled Virgin Mary our humanity, Christ Jesus. This humanity he gave up of his own will to suffer for us, as the Lord says: “No one takes my life from me. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.” In this humanity he was crucified and died for us, and rose from the dead, and was taken up into the heavens, having been created as the beginning of ways for us when, on earth, he showed us light out of darkness, salvation from error, life from the dead, and an entrance to paradise. Adam was cast out of paradise, and he entered it again by means of the thief, as the Lord said: “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Paul also once entered it. He also showed us a way up to the heavens, where the humanity of the Lord, in which he will judge the living and the dead, has entered as forerunner for us. We believe also, in the same way, in the Holy Spirit, who searches all things, even the deep things of God. And we anathematize teachings contrary to this. [a]

For we do not hold a Son who is also the Father, as the Sabellians do. They call him of a single substance but not of the same substance, and so they destroy the existence of the Son. Nor do we ascribe to the Father the body capable of suffering that the Son bore for the salvation of the whole world. Nor can we imagine three hypostases separated from one another, as happens with human beings because of their bodily nature, or we would hold many gods, as the pagans do. It is like a river that comes from a well. The river is not separate from the well, and yet there are in fact two things to be seen and two names. For the Father is not the Son, nor is the Son the Father. The Father is Father of the Son, and the Son is Son of the Father. Just as the well is not a river, nor the river a well, but both are one and the same water, carried in a channel from the well to the river, so the Father’s deity passes into the Son without outflow and without division. For the Lord says, “I came out from the Father and have come.” Yet he is always with the Father, for he is in the bosom of the Father, and the bosom of the Father was never empty of the deity of the Son. For he says, “I was beside him as one setting things in order.” But we do not regard God, the Creator of all, the Son of God, as a creature, or a thing made, or as made out of nothing. For he truly exists from him who exists; he alone exists from him who alone exists, since a like glory and power was begotten of the Father eternally and jointly. For “whoever has seen” the Son “has seen the Father.” All things, that is, were made through the Son, but he himself is not a creature, as Paul says of the Lord: “In him all things were created, and he is before all.” Now he does not say that he “was created” before all things, but that he “is” before all things. To be created applies to all things, but “is before all” applies to the Son alone. [j]

So he is by nature an Offspring, perfect from the Perfect, begotten before all the hills, that is, before every being endowed with reason and understanding. In another place Paul also calls him “firstborn of all creation.” By calling him Firstborn, he shows that he is not a creature but the Offspring of the Father, for to call him a creature would not fit with his deity. All things were created by the Father through the Son, but the Son alone was eternally begotten from the Father. That is why God the Word is “firstborn of all creation,” unchangeable from the unchangeable. The body, however, which he wore for our sake is a creature. Jeremiah speaks of it. In the version of the seventy translators it reads, “The Lord created for us, for a planting, a new salvation, in which salvation people will go about.” But in Aquila’s version the same text reads, “The Lord created a new thing in woman.” Now the salvation created for us for a planting, which is new and not old, and for us and not before us, is Jesus, who, with respect to the Savior, was made man, and whose name is translated in one place Salvation and in another Savior. But salvation comes from the Savior, just as illumination comes from the light. So the salvation that came from the Savior, being newly created, did, as Jeremiah says, “create for us a new salvation,” and, as Aquila renders it, “The Lord created a new thing in woman,” that is, in Mary. For nothing new was created in woman except the Lord’s body, born of the Virgin Mary without intercourse. So too it says in the Proverbs, in the person of Jesus, “The Lord created me, a beginning of his ways, for his works.” Now he does not say, “created me before his works,” so that no one would take the text as speaking of the deity of the Word. [m]

So each text that refers to the creature is written about Jesus in a bodily sense. For the Lord’s humanity was created as “a beginning of ways,” and he showed it to us for our salvation, since through it we have our access to the Father. For he is the way that leads us back to the Father, and a way is a bodily, visible thing, as the Lord’s humanity is. Well, then, the Word of God created all things, not being a creature himself, but an Offspring. For he created none of the created things equal to himself or like him. It belongs to a father to beget, but it belongs to a workman to create. So it is that body which is a thing made and created, the body that the Lord bore for us, which was begotten for us, as Paul says, as “wisdom from God, and sanctification and righteousness, and redemption.” Yet the Word was before us and before all creation, and is the Wisdom of the Father. But the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father, is always in the hands of the Father who sends him and of the Son who conveys him, by whose means he filled all things. The Father, having his existence from himself, begot the Son, as we said, and did not create him, as a river comes from a well, a branch from a root, and brightness from a light, things that nature knows to be indivisible. Through the Son be glory and power and greatness to the Father before all ages, and to all the ages of the ages. Amen. [q]