§590Only the divine identity of Jesus' person can justify so absolute a claim as "He who is not with me is against me"; and his saying that there was in him "something greater than Jonah,. . . greater than Solomon", something "greater than the Temple"; his reminder that David had called the Messiah his Lord,371 and his affirmations, "Before Abraham was, I AM", and even "I and the F…

1. On the subject of attention in hearkening it is superfluous to exhort you any more, so quickly have you shown by your actions the effects of my advice. For your manner of running together, your attentive postures, the thrusting one another in your eagerness to get the inner places, where my voice may more clearly be heard by you, your unwillingness to retire from the press u…

1. What I have often said, I will now say, that Christ looks not so much to His own honor as to our salvation; not how He may utter some sublime saying, but how something able to draw us to Him. On which account His sublime and mighty sayings are few, and those also hidden, but the humble and lowly are many, and abound through His discourses. For since by these men were the rat…

I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. Calvin expounds Christ's parable of the sheepfold. The good shepherd knows his sheep and is known by them. He has other sheep not of this fold — the Gentiles whom he will also bring in. No one takes his life from him; he lays it down of himself. "I and my Father are one" — Calvin shows this declares the un…

Chapter 1 The first book of our answer to the treatise of Celsus, entitled A True Discourse, which concluded with the representation of the Jew addressing Jesus, having now extended to a sufficient length, we intend the present part as a reply to the charges brought by him against those who have been converted from Judaism to Christianity. And we call attention, in the first pl…

4. How then can they be Christians, who for Christians are Ario-maniacs ? Or how are they of the Catholic Church, who have shaken off the Apostolical faith, and become authors of fresh evils? Who, after abandoning the oracles of divine Scripture, call Arius's Thaliæ a new wisdom? And with reason too, for they are announcing a new heresy. And hence a man may marvel, that, wherea…

16. Such thoughts then being evidently unseemly and untrue, we are driven to say that what is from the essence of the Father, and proper to Him, is entirely the Son; for it is all one to say that God is wholly participated, and that He begets; and what does begetting signify but a Son? And thus of the Son Himself, all things partake according to the grace of the Spirit coming f…

33. These are the evil sophistries of the heterodox; yet, though we have already shown their shallowness, the exact sense of these passages themselves and the force of these illustrations will serve to show the baseless nature of their loathsome tenet. For we see that reason is ever, and is from him and proper to his essence, whose reason it is, and does not admit a before and …

16. How full of irreligion this is, I consider none can doubt who has ever so little understanding. But since they mutter something about Word and Wisdom being only names of the Son , we must ask then, If these are only names of the Son, He must be something else beside them. And if He is higher than the names, it is not lawful from the lesser to denote the higher; but if He be…

Q. What does it mean that he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary? A. That the eternal Son of God, who is and remains true and eternal God, took to himself, through the working of the Holy Spirit, from the flesh and blood of the virgin Mary, a truly human nature so that he might become David's true descendant, like his brothers in every way except for si…

The things said concerning Christ fall into four generic modes. For some fit Him even before the incarnation, others in the union, others after the union, and others after the resurrection. Also of those that refer to the period before the incarnation there are six modes: for some of them declare the union of nature and the identity in essence with the Father, as this, I and My…

We believe the three Persons of the Holy Trinity — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit — to be one God, one in essence, and inseparable. The Father is altogether unbegotten and unoriginate; the Son is begotten of the Father before the ages; the Holy Spirit proceedeth from the Father, as from a fountain and cause. These are three Persons in one Godhead, equal in honor, in m…

Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit. The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, t…

Tertullian draws the crucial distinction between alius (another person) and aliud (another thing). The Son is "another" in person from the Father, but not "another thing" in substance. When Christ says "I and the Father are one," this is unity of substance, not identity of person.

Leo explains that it is not a contradiction for the same Person to say both "The Father is greater than I" and "I and the Father are one." The first is spoken according to the human nature that is less than the Father; the second according to the divine nature that is equal to the Father. Both statements are true of the one Christ in His two natures.