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| In What Manner the Son is Less Than the Father, and Than Himself.
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Chapter 7.—In What Manner
the Son is Less Than the Father, and Than Himself.
14. In these and like testimonies
of the divine Scriptures, by free use of which, as I have said, our
predecessors exploded such sophistries or errors of the heretics,
the unity and equality of the Trinity are intimated to our faith.
But because, on account of the incarnation of the Word of God for
the working out of our salvation, that the man Christ Jesus might
be the Mediator between God and men,57
many things are so said in the
sacred books as to signify, or even most expressly declare, the
Father to be greater than the Son; men have erred through a want of
careful examination or consideration of the whole tenor of the
Scriptures, and have endeavored to transfer those things which are
said of Jesus Christ according to the flesh, to that substance of
His which was eternal before the incarnation, and is eternal. They
say, for instance, that the Son is less than the Father, because it
is written that the Lord Himself said, “My Father is greater than
I.”58
But the truth
shows that after the same sense the Son is less also than Himself;
for how was He not made less also than Himself, who “emptied59
Himself, and took upon Him the form
of a servant?” For He did not so take the form of a servant as
that He should lose the form of God, in which He was equal to the
Father. If, then, the form of a servant was so taken that the form
of God was not lost, since both in the form of a servant and in the
form of God He Himself is the same only-begotten Son of God the
Father, in the form of God equal to the Father, in the form of a
servant the Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; is
there any one who cannot perceive that He Himself in the form of
God is also greater than Himself, but yet likewise in the form of a
servant less than Himself? And not, therefore, without cause the
Scripture says both the one and the other, both that the Son is
equal to the Father, and that the Father is greater than the Son.
For there is no confusion when the former is understood as on
account of the form of God, and the latter as on account of the
form of a servant. And, in truth, this rule for clearing the
question through all the sacred Scriptures is set forth in one
chapter of an epistle of the Apostle Paul, where this distinction
is commended to us plainly enough. For he says, “Who, being in
the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but
emptied Himself, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was
made in the likeness of men: and was found in fashion60
as a man.”61
The Son of God, then, is equal to
God the Father in nature, but less in “fashion.”62
For in the form of a servant which
He took He is less than the Father; but in the form of God, in
which also He was before He took the form of a servant, He is equal
to the Father. In the form of God He is the Word, “by whom all
things are made;”63
but in the
form of a servant He was “made of a woman, made under the law, to
redeem them that were under the law.”64
In like manner, in the form of God
He made man; in the form of a servant He was made man. For if the
Father alone had made man without the Son, it would not have been
written, “Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness.”65
Therefore,
because the form of God took the form of a servant, both is God and
both is man; but both God, on account of God who takes; and both
man, on account of man who is taken. For neither by that taking is
the one of them turned and changed into the other: the Divinity is
not changed into the creature, so as to cease to be Divinity; nor
the creature into Divinity, so as to cease to be
creature.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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