True Flesh, True Blood

In the four books I have already sent you, my very dear friend, every one of the heretics has been brought out into the open, their teachings shown for what they are, and the men who invented these irreligious opinions refuted. I did it partly by taking up something out of each man’s own peculiar teaching, from what they have left in writing, and partly by arguments of a more general kind that tell against all of them at once. Then I set out the truth, and showed the preaching of the church — the preaching the prophets announced, as I have already demonstrated, which Christ brought to completion and the apostles handed down, and which the church received from them, alone keeps whole and sound throughout the world, and passes on to her children.

So now, having settled every question the heretics put to us, having laid out the apostles’ teaching, and having explained clearly a great many of the things the Lord said and did in parables, I will try in this fifth book of the whole work — the work on the exposure and refutation of knowledge falsely so called — to bring proofs from the rest of the Lord’s teaching and from the apostles’ letters. In this I am doing what you asked of me, since I have in fact been given a place in the service of the word. I am working by every means I have to supply you with substantial help against the contradictions of the heretics, to bring back those who have wandered off and turn them to the church of God, and at the same time to steady the minds of those newly come to the faith, so that they may hold firmly to the faith they received, guarded whole by the church, and may not be turned aside in any way by the men who try to teach them falsehoods and lead them away from the truth.

It will be your business, though, and the business of anyone who happens to read this book, to go back over what I have already said with great care, so that you may know the subjects I am contending against. That is how you will both refute them properly and be ready to take in the proofs brought forward against them, throwing away their teachings as so much filth by means of the heavenly faith, and following instead the one true and steady Teacher, the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who through his surpassing love became what we are, so that he might bring us to be what he is himself.

There was no other way for us to learn the things of God than this: our Teacher, who is the Word, became a man. No one else had the power to reveal the Father’s things to us except his own proper Word. For what other person “knew the mind of the Lord,” or “who has been his counselor?” And there was no other way for us to learn than by seeing our Teacher and hearing his voice with our own ears, so that by becoming imitators of his deeds as well as doers of his words we might have fellowship with him, receiving growth from the perfect One, from him who is before all creation. [e]

We were made only lately by the one who alone is best and good, by the one who also has the gift of immortality. We were formed after his likeness — marked out beforehand, by the Father’s foreknowledge, so that we who did not yet exist might come to be — and made the firstfruits of his creation. And at the times known beforehand we received what belongs to salvation, through the ministry of the Word, who is perfect in all things. For as the mighty Word, and as truly a man, he redeemed us by his own blood in a way that answered to reason, giving himself as a ransom for those who had been carried off into captivity.

The apostasy had tyrannized over us unjustly. We belonged by nature to Almighty God, and it had cut us off from him against nature and made us its own pupils. So the Word of God, who is powerful in all things and falls short in nothing of his own justice, turned against that apostasy justly and bought back from it what was his own. He did not do it by violence, the way the apostasy first gained control of us when it snatched greedily at what was not its own, but by persuasion, as befits a God who works by counsel and does not use force to get what he wants. So justice was not violated, and God’s ancient handiwork did not go to ruin.

The Lord, then, has redeemed us by his own blood, giving his soul for our souls and his flesh for our flesh. He has poured out the Spirit of the Father for the uniting and the fellowship of God and man, bringing God down to men by means of the Spirit and fastening man to God by his own coming in flesh. And at his coming he has given us immortality, solidly and truly, through fellowship with God. Once all this stands, every one of the heretics’ teachings falls in ruins.

Empty, then, are the men who say that he only appeared to be here. These things were not done in appearance; they were done in fact. If he appeared as a man when he was not a man, then the Holy Spirit could not have rested on him — and that did in fact happen — since the Spirit is invisible; and there would have been no truth in him at all, for he would not have been what he seemed to be. I have already remarked that Abraham and the other prophets saw him in a prophetic way, foretelling in vision what was going to come about. So if the one who has now come appeared outwardly as something other than what he really was, then what happened was simply one more prophetic vision given to men, and we would still have to look forward to another coming of his, in which he would be what he has so far only been seen to be in prophecy.

And I have already proved that saying he only seemed to be here comes to the same thing as saying he took nothing from Mary. He would not truly have had flesh and blood — the flesh and blood by which he redeemed us — unless he had summed up in himself the ancient forming of Adam. So the followers of Valentinus are empty men, who bring this opinion forward in order to shut the flesh out of salvation and throw away what God has fashioned.

The Ebionites are empty as well. They will not take into their souls by faith the union of God and man. They stay in the old leaven of ordinary birth, and refuse to understand that the Holy Spirit came upon Mary and the power of the Most High overshadowed her — which is why what was born is a holy thing, and is the Son of the Most High God, the Father of all, who brought about this One’s coming in flesh and displayed a new kind of birth: so that as by the old birth we inherited death, by this new birth we might inherit life. That is why these men refuse the mixing in of the heavenly wine and want the cup to be nothing but the water of this world. They will not receive God so as to be united with him. They stay in that Adam who was beaten and driven out of the garden.

They do not consider this. At the beginning, when we were formed in Adam, the breath of life that came out from God was joined to what had been shaped, and it made the man alive and showed him to be a creature with reason. In the same way, at the end, the Word of the Father and the Spirit of God were joined to the ancient stuff of Adam’s forming, and they made man living and complete, able to receive the perfect Father — so that as in the natural man we were all dead, in the spiritual man we might all be made alive. For Adam never at any time slipped out of the hands of God, the hands to whom the Father said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” And that is why in the last times, “not by the will of the flesh, nor by the will of man, but by the good pleasure of the Father,” his hands formed a living man, so that Adam might be made once more after the image and likeness of God.

Empty in the same way are the men who say that God came to things that did not belong to him, as though he were greedy for someone else’s property — came, that is, to hand over the man who had been created by another to a God who had never made or formed anything at all, and who from the beginning had been left without any handiwork of men of his own. If that is so, the coming of the one they describe, coming to what belongs to others, was not a just coming. And he did not truly redeem us by his own blood, if he did not truly become man, giving back to his own handiwork what was said of it at the beginning, that man was made after the image and likeness of God. He did not snatch away another’s property by a trick; he took possession of his own, justly and generously. [t]

Toward the apostasy his act was justice: he redeems us from it by his own blood. Toward us who are redeemed it was pure generosity. We had given him nothing beforehand, and he wants nothing from us as though he stood in need of it; it is we who stand in need of fellowship with him. That is why he generously poured himself out, so that he might gather us into the Father’s arms.

But empty at every point are the men who despise God’s whole arrangement, deny that the flesh is saved, and treat its rebirth with contempt, insisting that it is not capable of incorruption. For if the flesh is not saved, then the Lord did not redeem us with his blood; the cup of the thanksgiving is not the sharing in his blood, and the bread we break is not the sharing in his body. Blood can only come from veins and flesh and whatever else goes to make up a human being — and that is what the Word of God actually became. He redeemed us by his own blood, as his apostle also declares: “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins.”

And since we are his members, we are fed by way of the created world — and he himself grants us that world, for he makes his sun rise and sends rain when he chooses. He has acknowledged the cup, which is part of creation, as his own blood, and from it he waters our blood; and the bread, also part of creation, he has established as his own body, and from it he makes our bodies grow.

So when the mixed cup and the baked bread receive the word of God, and the thanksgiving becomes the blood and the body of Christ, and the substance of our flesh is increased and held up by them — how can these men say that flesh cannot receive God’s gift, which is eternal life, when it is fed from the Lord’s body and blood and is a member of him? It is as the blessed Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians: “we are members of his body, of his flesh and of his bones.” He is not saying this about some spiritual, invisible man, for a spirit does not have bones or flesh. He is speaking of the arrangement by which the Lord became a real man, made of flesh and sinews and bones — the flesh that is fed by the cup, which is his blood, and grows by the bread, which is his body.

Think of a cutting from a vine planted in the ground, which bears its fruit in season; or a grain of wheat that falls into the earth and breaks down, and then rises multiplied by the Spirit of God, who holds all things together, and by the wisdom of God is put to human use, and, having received the word of God, becomes the thanksgiving, which is the body and blood of Christ. Our bodies are the same. They are fed by it; they are laid in the earth; they break down there; and at the appointed time they will rise, the Word of God granting them resurrection to the glory of God the Father, who freely gives immortality to this mortal thing and imperishability to this perishable thing.

For God’s strength is brought to completion in weakness, so that we may never be puffed up as though we had life from ourselves, and never lift ourselves up against God with ungrateful minds. Instead we learn by experience that we last forever by his surpassing power and not by our own nature. Then we will neither undervalue the glory that surrounds God as he is, nor be ignorant of what we ourselves are. We will know what God can do and what benefits a man receives, and so will never stray from a true grasp of things as they really are, either about God or about ourselves. And might this not be why, as I have observed already, God allowed us to be dissolved back into the earth — so that, taught in every way, we may be exact in everything from now on, ignorant neither of God nor of ourselves?