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| Of the Same Appearance.
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Chapter 11.—Of the Same
Appearance.
20. That place of Scripture demands
neither a slight nor a passing consideration. For if one man had
appeared, what else would those at once cry out, who say that the
Son was visible also in His own substance before He was born of the
Virgin, but that it was Himself? since it is said, they say, of the
Father, “To the only invisible God.”281
And yet, I could still go on to
demand, in what manner “He was found in fashion as a man,”
before He had taken our flesh, seeing that his feet were washed,
and that He fed upon earthly food? How could that be, when He was
still “in the form of God, and thought it not robbery to be equal
with God?”282
For, pray,
had He already “emptied Himself, taking upon Him the form of a
servant, and made in the likeness of men, and found in fashion as a
man?” when we know when it was that He did this through His birth
of the Virgin. How, then, before He had done this, did He appear as
one man to Abraham? or, was not that form a reality? I could put
these questions, if it had been one man that appeared to Abraham,
and if that one were believed to be the Son of God. But since three
men appeared, and no one of them is said to be greater than the
rest either in form, or age, or power, why should we not here
understand, as visibly intimated by the visible creature, the
equality of the Trinity, and one and the same substance in three
persons?283
| 283 [The theophanies of the Pentateuch
are trinitarian in their implication. They involve distinctions in
God—God sending, and God sent; God speaking of God, and God
speaking to God. The trinitarianism of the Old Testament has been
lost sight of to some extent in the modern construction of the
doctrine. The patristic, mediæval, and reformation theologies
worked this vein with thoroughness, and the analysis of Augustin in
this reference is worthy of careful study.—W.G.T.S.] |
21. For, lest any one should think
that one among the three is in this way intimated to have been the
greater, and that this one is to be understood to have been the
Lord, the Son of God, while the other two were His angels; because,
whereas three appeared, Abraham there speaks to one as the Lord:
Holy Scripture has not forgotten to anticipate, by a contradiction,
such future cogitations and opinions, when a little while after it
says that two angels came to Lot, among whom that just man also,
who deserved to be freed from the burning of Sodom, speaks to one
as to the Lord. For so Scripture goes on to say, “And the Lord
went His way, as soon as He left communing with Abraham; and
Abraham returned to his place.”284
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