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| Chapter XXII. The hypostatic union enables us to ascribe to God what belongs to the flesh in Christ.
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Chapter XXII.
The hypostatic union enables us to ascribe to God what
belongs to the flesh in Christ.
How then is Christ (whom
you term a mere man) proclaimed in Holy Scripture to be God without
beginning, if by our own confession the Lord’s manhood2581
| 2581 Dominicus
homo, see above on V. v. | did not exist before His birth and
conception of a Virgin? And how can we read of so close a union of man
and God, as to make it appear that man was ever co-eternal with God,
and that afterwards God suffered with man: whereas we cannot believe
that man can be without beginning or that God can suffer? It is this
which we established in our previous writings; viz., that God being
joined to manhood,2582
i.e., to His
own body, does not allow any separation to be made in men’s
thoughts between man and God. Nor will He permit anyone to hold that
there is one Person of the Son of man, and another Person of the Son of
God. But in all the holy Scriptures He joins together and as it were
incorporates in the Godhead, the Lord’s manhood,2583
so that no one can sever man from God
in time, nor God from man at His Passion. For if you regard Him in
time, you will find that the Son of man is ever with the Son of God. If
you take note of His Passion, you will find that the Son of God is ever
with the Son of man, and that Christ the Son of man and the Son of God
is so one and indivisible, that, in the language of holy Scripture, the
man cannot be severed in time from God, nor God from man at His
Passion. Hence comes this: “No man hath ascended into heaven, but
He who came down from heaven, even the Son of man who is in
heaven.”2584
Where the Son
of God while He was speaking on earth testified that the Son of man was
in heaven: and testified that the same Son of man, who, He said, would
ascend into heaven, had previously come down from heaven. And this:
“What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where He was
before,”2585
where He gives
the name of Him who was born of man, but affirms that He ever was up on
high. And the Apostle also, when considering what happened in time,
says that all things were made by Christ. For he says, “There is
one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things.”2586
But when speaking of His Passion, he
shows that the Lord of glory was crucified. “For if,” he
says, “they had known, they would never have crucified the Lord
of glory.”2587
And so too
the Creed speaking of the only and first-begotten Lord Jesus Christ,
“Very God of Very God, Being of one substance with the Father,
and the Maker of all things,” affirms that He was born of the
Virgin and crucified and afterwards buried. Thus joining in one body
(as it were) the Son of God and of man, and uniting God and man, so
that there can be no severance either in time or at the Passion, since
the Lord Jesus Christ is shown to be one and the same Person, both as
God through all eternity, and as man through the endurance of His
Passion; and though we cannot say that man is without beginning or that
God is passible, yet in the one Person of the Lord Jesus Christ we can
speak of man as eternal, and of God as dead. You see then that Christ
means the whole Person, and that the name represents both natures, for
both man and God are born, and so it takes in the whole Person so that
when this name is used we see that no part is left out. There was not
then before the birth of a Virgin the same eternity belonging in the
past to the manhood as to the Divinity, but because Divinity was united
to manhood in the womb of the Virgin, it follows that when we use the
name of Christ one cannot be spoken of without the
other.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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