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| Christ's Assertion About the Unprofitableness of the Flesh Explained Consistently with Our Doctrine.
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Chapter XXXVII.—Christ’s Assertion About the
Unprofitableness of the Flesh Explained Consistently with Our
Doctrine.
He says, it is true, that “the flesh
profiteth nothing;”7525
but then, as in the
former case, the meaning must be regulated by the subject which is
spoken of. Now, because they thought His discourse was harsh and
intolerable, supposing that He had really and literally enjoined on
them to eat his flesh, He, with the view of ordering the state of
salvation as a spiritual thing, set out with the principle, “It
is the spirit that quickeneth;” and then added, “The flesh
profiteth nothing,”—meaning, of course, to the giving of
life. He also goes on to explain what He would have us to understand by
spirit: “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit,
and they are life.” In a like sense He had previously said:
“He that heareth my words, and believeth on Him that sent me,
hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but shall
pass from death unto life.”7526
Constituting,
therefore, His word as the life-giving principle, because that word is
spirit and life, He likewise called His flesh by the same appellation;
because, too, the Word had become flesh,7527
we
ought therefore to desire Him in order that we may have life, and to
devour Him with the ear, and to ruminate on Him with the understanding,
and to digest Him by faith. Now, just before (the passage in hand), He
had declared His flesh to be “the bread which cometh down from
heaven,”7528
impressing on (His
hearers) constantly under the figure of necessary food the memory of
their forefathers, who had preferred the bread and flesh of Egypt to
their divine calling.7529
| 7529 John vi. 31, 49, 58. | Then, turning His
subject to their reflections, because He perceived that they were going
to be scattered from Him, He says: “The flesh profiteth
nothing.” Now what is there to destroy the resurrection of the
flesh? As if there might not reasonably enough be something which,
although it “profiteth nothing” itself, might yet be
capable of being profited by something else. The spirit
“profiteth,” for it imparts life. The flesh profiteth
nothing, for it is subject to death. Therefore He has rather put the
two propositions in a way which favours our belief: for by showing what
“profits,” and what “does not profit,” He has
likewise thrown light on the object which receives as well as the
subject which gives the “profit.” Thus, in the
present instance, we have the Spirit giving life to the flesh which
has been subdued by death; for “the hour,” says He,
“is coming, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God,
and they that hear shall live.”7530
Now, what is “the dead” but the flesh? and what is
“the voice of God” but the Word? and what is the Word but
the Spirit,7531
| 7531 The divine
nature of the Son. See our Anti-Marcion, pp. 129, 247, note 7,
Edin. | who shall justly
raise the flesh which He had once Himself become, and that too
from death, which He Himself suffered, and from the grave, which He
Himself once entered? Then again, when He says, “Marvel not at
this: for the hour is coming, in which all that are in the graves shall
hear the voice of the Son of God, and shall come forth; they that have
done good, to the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil,
unto the resurrection of damnation,”7532
—none will after such words be able to
interpret the dead “that are in the graves” as any other
than the bodies of the flesh, because the graves themselves are nothing
but the resting-place of corpses: for it is incontestable that
even those who partake of “the old man,” that is to say,
sinful men—in other words, those who are dead through their
ignorance of God (whom our heretics, forsooth, foolishly insist on
understanding by the word “graves”7533
| 7533 Compare c. xix.
above. | )—are plainly here spoken of as having
to come from their graves for judgment. But how are graves to come
forth from graves?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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