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| The Natural Invisibility of the Father, and the Visibility of the Son Witnessed in Many Passages of the Old Testament. Arguments of Their Distinctness, Thus Supplied.
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Chapter
XIV.—The Natural Invisibility of the Father, and the Visibility
of the Son Witnessed in Many Passages of the Old Testament. Arguments
of Their Distinctness, Thus Supplied.
Moreover, there comes to our aid, when we insist
upon the Father and the Son as being Two, that regulating
principle which has determined God to be invisible. When Moses in Egypt
desired to see the face of the Lord, saying, “If therefore I have
found grace in Thy sight, manifest Thyself unto me, that I may see Thee
and know Thee,”7920
God said,
“Thou canst not see my face; for there shall no man see me, and
live:”7921
in other words, he
who sees me shall die. Now we find that God has been seen by many
persons, and yet that no one who saw Him died (at the sight). The
truth is, they saw God according to the faculties of men, but not
in accordance with the full glory of the Godhead. For the
patriarchs are said to have seen God (as Abraham and Jacob), and the
prophets (as, for instance Isaiah and Ezekiel), and yet they did not
die. Either, then, they ought to have died, since they had seen
Him—for (the sentence runs), “No man shall see God, and
live;” or else if they saw God, and yet did not die, the
Scripture is false in stating that God said, “If a man see my
face, he shall not live.” Either way, the Scripture misleads us,
when it makes God invisible, and when it produces Him to our sight.
Now, then, He must be a different Being who was seen, because of one
who was seen it could not be predicated that He is invisible. It will
therefore follow, that by Him who is invisible we must understand the
Father in the fulness of His majesty, while we recognise the Son as
visible by reason of the dispensation of His derived
existence;7922
| 7922 Pro modulo
derivationis. | even as it is not
permitted us to contemplate the sun, in the full amount of his
substance which is in the heavens, but we can only endure with our eyes
a ray, by reason of the tempered condition of this portion which is
projected from him to the earth. Here some one on the other side may be
disposed to contend that the Son is also invisible as being the Word,
and as being also the Spirit;7923
and, while
claiming one nature for the Father and the Son, to affirm that the
Father is rather One and the Same Person with the Son. But the
Scripture, as we have said, maintains their difference by the
distinction it makes between the Visible and the Invisible. They then
go on to argue to this effect, that if it was the Son who then spake to
Moses, He must mean it of Himself that His face was visible to no one,
because He was Himself indeed the invisible Father in the name of the
Son. And by this means they will have it that the Visible and the
Invisible are one and the same, just as the Father and the Son are the
same; (and this they maintain) because in a preceding passage, before
He had refused (the sight of) His face to Moses, the Scripture informs
us that “the Lord spake face to face with Moses, even as a man
speaketh unto his friend;”7924
just as Jacob
also says, “I have seen God face to face.”7925
Therefore the Visible and the Invisible are
one and the same; and both being thus the same, it follows that He is
invisible as the Father, and visible as the Son. As if the
Scripture, according to our exposition of it, were inapplicable to the
Son, when the Father is set aside in His own invisibility. We declare,
however, that the Son also, considered in Himself (as the Son), is
invisible, in that He is God, and the Word and Spirit of God; but that
He was visible before the days of His flesh, in the way that He
says to Aaron and Miriam, “And if there shall be a prophet
amongst you, I will make myself known to him in a vision, and will
speak to him in a dream; not as with Moses, with whom I shall speak
mouth to mouth, even apparently, that is to say, in truth, and
not enigmatically,” that is to say, in image;7926
as the apostle also expresses it, “Now
we see through a glass, darkly (or enigmatically), but then face to
face.”7927
Since, therefore,
He reserves to some future time His presence and speech face to face
with Moses—a promise which was afterwards fulfilled in the
retirement of the mount (of transfiguration), when as we read in the
Gospel, “Moses appeared talking with Jesus”7928
—it is evident that in early times it
was always in a glass, (as it were,) and an enigma, in vision and
dream, that God, I mean the Son of God, appeared—to the prophets
and the patriarchs, as also to Moses indeed himself. And even if the
Lord did possibly7929
speak with him face
to face, yet it was not as man that he could behold His face, unless
indeed it was in a glass, (as it were,) and by enigma. Besides, if the
Lord so spake with Moses, that Moses actually discerned His face, eye
to eye,7930
how
comes it to pass that
immediately afterwards, on the same occasion, he desires to see His
face,7931
| 7931 Comp. ver. 13 with
ver. 11 of Ex. xxxiii. | which he ought not to have desired, because
he had already seen it? And how, in like manner, does the Lord also say
that His face cannot be seen, because He had shown it, if indeed He
really had, (as our opponents suppose). Or what is that face of God,
the sight of which is refused, if there was one which was visible to
man? “I have seen God,” says Jacob, “face to face,
and my life is preserved.”7932
There ought to
be some other face which kills if it be only seen. Well, then, was the
Son visible? (Certainly not,7933
| 7933 Involved in the
nunquid. | ) although He was
the face of God, except only in vision and dream, and in a glass and
enigma, because the Word and Spirit (of God) cannot be seen except in
an imaginary form. But, (they say,) He calls the invisible Father His
face. For who is the Father? Must He not be the face of the Son, by
reason of that authority which He obtains as the begotten of the
Father? For is there not a natural propriety in saying of some
personage greater (than yourself), That man is my face; he gives me his
countenance? “My Father,” says Christ,
“is greater than I.”7934
Therefore the
Father must be the face of the Son. For what does the Scripture say?
“The Spirit of His person is Christ the Lord.”7935
| 7935 Lam. iv. 20. Tertullian reads, “Spiritus
personæ ejus Christus Dominus.” This varies
only in the pronoun from the Septuagint, which runs, Πνεῦμα
προσώπου
ἡμῶν Χριστὸς
Κύριος. According to our A.V.,
“the breath of our nostrils, the anointed of the Lord” (or,
“our anointed Lord”), allusion is made, in the destruction
of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, to the capture of the king—the
last of David’s line, “as an anointed prince.” Comp.
Jer. lii. 9. | As therefore Christ is the Spirit of the
Father’s person, there is good reason why, in virtue indeed of
the unity, the Spirit of Him to whose person He belonged—that is
to say, the Father—pronounced Him to be His “face.”
Now this, to be sure, is an astonishing thing, that the Father can be
taken to be the face of the Son, when He is His head; for “the
head of Christ is God.”7936
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