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| That These Have Therefore Erred, by Thinking that There Was No Difference Between the Son of God and the Son of Man; Because They Have Ill Understood the Scripture.
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Chapter
XXIV.5199
| 5199
According to Pamelius, ch. xix. |
Argument.—That These Have Therefore Erred, by Thinking
that There Was No Difference Between the Son of God and the Son of Man;
Because They Have Ill Understood the Scripture.
But the material of that heretical error has arisen, as
I judge, from this, that they think that there is no distinction
between the Son of God and the Son of man; because if a distinction
were made, Jesus Christ would easily be proved to be both man and
God. For they will have it that the self-same that is man, the
Son of man, appears also as the Son of God; that man and flesh and that
same frail substance may be said to be also the Son of God
Himself. Whence, since no distinction is discerned between the
Son of man and the Son of God, but the Son of man Himself is asserted
to be the Son of God, the same Christ and the Son of God is
asserted to be man only; by
which they strive to exclude, “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt
among us.”5200
“And ye shall call His name Emmanuel; which is, interpreted, God
with us.”5201
For
they propose and put forward what is told in the Gospel of Luke, whence
they strive to maintain not what is the truth, but only what they want
it to be: “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the
power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also the Holy
Thing which is born of thee shall be called the Son of
God.”5202
If, then,
say they, the angel of God says to Mary, “that Holy Thing which
is born of thee,” the substance of flesh and body is of Mary; but
he has set forth that this substance, that is, that Holy Thing which is
born of her, is the Son of God. Man, say they, himself, and that
bodily flesh; that which is called holy, itself is the Son of
God. That also when the Scripture says that “Holy
Thing,” we should understand thereby Christ the man, the Son of
man; and when it places before us the Son of God, we ought to perceive,
not man, but God. And yet the divine Scripture easily convicts
and discloses the frauds and artifices of the heretics. For if it
were thus only, “The Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power
of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore that Holy Thing which
is born of thee shall be called the Son of God,” perchance we
should have had to strive against them in another sort, and to have
sought for other arguments, and to have taken up other weapons, with
which to overcome both their snares and their wiles; but since the
Scripture itself, abounding in heavenly fulness, divests itself of the
calumnies of these heretics, we easily depend upon that that is
written, and overcome those errors without any hesitation. For it
said, not as we have already stated, “Therefore the Holy Thing
which shall be born of thee;” but added the conjunction, for it
says, “Therefore also that Holy Thing which shall be born
of thee,” so as to make it plain that that Holy Thing which is
born of her—that is, that substance of flesh and body—is
not the Son of God primarily, but consequently, and in the secondary
place;5203
| 5203
“The miraculous generation is here represented as the
natural, but by no means as the only cause for which He who had no
human father was to receive the name of God’s
Son.”—Oosterzee, in
loco, on Luke.—Tr. | but primarily,
that the Son of God is the Word of God, incarnate by that Spirit of
whom the angel says, “The Spirit shall come upon thee, and the
power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.” For He is the
legitimate Son of God who is of God Himself; and He, while He assumes
that Holy Thing, and links to Himself the Son of man, and draws Him and
transfers Him to Himself, by His connection and mingling of association
becomes responsible for and makes Him the Son of God, which by nature
He was not, so that the original cause5204
of that name Son of God is in the
Spirit of the Lord, who descended and came, and that there is only the
continuance of the name in the case of the Son of man;5205
| 5205 The
edition of Pamelius reads: ut sequela nominis in Filio Dei et
hominis sit. The words Dei et were expelled by Welchman,
whom we have followed. | and by
consequence He reasonably became the Son of God, although originally He
is not the Son of God. And therefore the angel, seeing that
arrangement, and providing for that order of the mystery, did not
confuse every thing in such a way as to leave no trace of a
distinction, but established the distinction by saying,
“Therefore also that Holy Thing which shall be born of
thee shall be called the Son of God;” lest, had he not arranged
that distribution with his balances, but had left the matter all mixed
up in confusion, it had really afforded occasion to heretics to declare
that the Son of man, in that He is man, is the same as the Son of God
and man. But now, explaining severally the ordinance and the
reason of so great a mystery, he evidently set forth in saying,
“And that Holy Thing which shall be born of thee shall be called
the Son of God;” the proof that the Son of God descended, and
that He, in taking up into Himself the Son of man, consequently made
Him the Son of God, because the Son of God associated and joined Him to
Himself. So that, while the Son of man cleaves in His nativity to
the Son of God, by that very mingling He holds that as pledged and
derived which of His own nature He could not possess. And thus by
the word of the angel the distinction is made, against the desire of
the heretics, between the Son of God and man; yet with their
association, by pressing them to understand that Christ the Son of man
is man, and also to receive the Son of God and man the Son of God; that
is, the Word of God as it is written as God; and thus to acknowledge
that Christ Jesus the Lord, connected on both sides, so to speak, is on
both sides woven in and grown together, and associated in the same
agreement of both substances, by the binding to one another of a mutual
alliance—man and God by the truth of the Scripture which declares
this very thing.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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