John of Damascus

 

Saint John of Damascus or John Damascene (675?-749?) was a theologian, writer, scholar, Father of the Church, and Doctor of the Church, born in Damascus, Syria. Although a Christian, he served as a high-ranking financial officer under the Saracen caliph of Damascus. Because of the caliph's hostility to Christians, John resigned his post about 700. He retired to the monastery of Mar Saba, near Jerusalem, where he was ordained a priest before the outbreak of the controversy over iconoclasm. John opposed and fought the edicts of the Byzantine emperor Leo III against the veneration of statues and images; he was able to do so with impunity because he was not Leo's subject. He spent the rest of his life in religious study, except for a period shortly before his death, when he journeyed throughout Syria preaching against the iconoclasts.

Contemporaries considered John one of the ablest philosophers of his day and was known as Chrysorrhoas (Greek, “Golden Stream”) because of his oratorical ability. He was the author of the standard textbook of dogmatic theology in the early Greek church. This textbook, Source of Knowledge, is divided into three parts: Heads of Philosophy, Compendium of Heresies, and An Exact Exposition of Orthodox Faith. The third and most important section contains a complete theological system based on the teachings of the early Greek church fathers and church synods from the 4th to the 7th century. Both the Roman Catholic church and the Greek church consider John of Damascus a saint. His feast day in the Roman Catholic church is March 27; in the Greek, December 4.

He wrote a summary of the orthodox faith, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. He wrote it during the first waves of Arab Conquest. It contains four books.

We turn to Book I. He begins by offering what modern theology would call a prolegomena. We learn quickly that considering the essence of God has connections with philosophical notions like that of infinite and eternal, which he will relate to the oneness of God. However, the identity of God is not as easy affirming this oneness, for the witness of scripture to divine revelation discloses that the divine life involves the monarchy of the Father, who always begat the Son and from whom the Spirit always proceeded. He stresses the role of the Spirit. His exposition of “orthodox faith” centers in Christ. Christian theology is a Christ-centered reasoned reflection on the witness to revelation we find in scripture.

I.1-2 consider the knowability of God in a way that we might think of as a prolegomena.[1] In I.1, he begins with the affirmation that no human being “has ever known God, he to whom He revealed Himself.” Deity “is ineffable and incomprehensible.” The Son knows the Father, the Father knows the Son, and the Holy Spirit knows the things of God. Deity has full and adequate knowledge of the divine essence. However, we are not completely ignorant, God has implanted the knowledge of the existence of God in all persons. God discloses proclaims the majesty of the divine nature. He will suggest that one cannot have human personality without hypothesizing a divine person that elicits and awakens human personality. Thus, free and responsible personhood is the highest achievement and of precious value. God has disclosed through revelation knowledge of God “as that was possible for us.” We must not seek knowledge above this revelation. Such revelation occurs because God is good and wants to provide what is profitable, revealing “which it was to our profit to know; but what we were unable to bear He kept secret.” He concludes the chapter: “With these things let us be satisfied, and let us abide by them, not removing everlasting boundaries, nor overpassing the divine tradition.” He is drawing a distinction between a rational experience of the world that might lead to an affirmation of the reality of God on the one hand, and faith in the revelation of God contained in scripture. Thus, he offers a dogmatic in the sense of guidance to independent dogmatic work and not just the imparting of the specific results of a specific teacher.[2] Classic Christian teachers worked to bring into ordered unity and equilibrium all the doctrines of Christian teaching according to the consensual affirmation of the early councils. In I.2, he admits that in matters related to deity and the incarnation, some matters remain unknowable. We will always dimly understand divine matters. We cannot put them in fitting terms. We can only address matters in accord with our limited capacity. He will then offer the basic orthodox Christian affirmation of these divine matters. 

 

God is without beginning, without end, eternal and everlasting, uncreate, unchangeable, invariable, simple, uncompound, incorporeal, invisible, impalpable, uncircumscribed, infinite, incognisable, indefinable, incomprehensible, good, just, maker of all things created, almighty, all-ruling, all-surveying, of all overseer, sovereign, judge; and that God is One, that is to say, one essences; and that He is known, and has His being in three subsistences, in Father, I say, and Son and Holy Spirit; and that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in all respects, except in that of not being begotten, that of being begotten, and that of procession; and that the Only-begotten Son and Word of God and God, in His bowels of mercy, for our salvation, by the good pleasure of God and the co-operation of the Holy Spirit, being conceived without seed, was born uncorruptedly of the Holy Virgin and Mother of God, Mary, by the Holy Spirit, and became of her perfect Man; and that the Same is at once perfect God and perfect Man, of two natures, Godhead and Manhood, and in two natures possessing intelligence, will and energy, and freedom, and, in a word, perfect according to the measure and proportion proper to each, at once to the divinity, I say, and to the humanity, yet to one composite persons; and that He suffered hunger and thirst and weariness, and was crucified, and for three days submitted to the experience of death and burial, and ascended to heaven, from which also He came to us, and shall come again. And the Holy Scripture is witness to this and the whole choir of the Saints.

 

Despite this statement, Christianity cannot express the essence of God, or “how” the Son is begotten eternally and emptied himself and became a man through “virgin blood,” as he will say later. It remains beyond our capacity to think or say anything about God beyond revelation, by which he means the witness of nature and the witness of scripture. Part of the point he is making is that God knows God fully, so does not need our words about God. Theology is a study that fallible, finite human beings undertake. 

            He is offering a picture of the world that at least provides individuals the possibility of affirming the reality of God. Such general knowledge of God available to all provides the background for the witness of scripture. The witness of scripture does not occur in a vacuum but arises out of the religious experience of humanity. Scripture is a witness to revelation from God, the existence of whom our experience of the world provides at least hints, even if it does not provide proof. Today, it would be better to focus upon the uniqueness of the human journey as providing hints toward “something more” than what temporality and finitude can satisfy. However, a proper understanding of the scientific description of nature and ontology may provide such hints as well.

In I.3, although we have knowledge of God implanted by nature, the Evil One prevails in many to deny the existence of God. Yet, those whose witness we find in Scripture received wisdom from the Holy Spirit, and worked miracles in divine power and grace, drawing them out of ignorance and into the light of the knowledge of God. Thus, we regard the prophets and apostles as witnesses of divine revelation and ascribe to them a definite separation from us and all other people. We cannot separate the form and content of the witness. These witnesses and these writings have a role and dignity peculiar to themselves.[3] All we can do now is receive the enlightening grace of the Spirit and enlighten others walking in darkness. He invites us to consider that created things change (mutable) as they move toward death. This means that the uncreated does not change (immutable). He thinks those opposed by the nature of their existence as created or uncreated must also oppose each other in the mode of their existence, as subject to change or not. Change refers to progression or retrogression, increase or decrease, matters of quality, and matters of movement in space. He does argue that things created require the work of an uncreated maker, whom we call rightly the Creator and Deity. He then argues that the continuity of creation shown in its preservation and governance teaches the existence of Deity. He directs our attention to the opposite natures that we find in creation that yet form one complete world. The emergence of order out of the tension of the interaction of opposites in nature suggests the presence of an omnipotent power which binds them together, thereby preserving them from dissolution. Thus, rather than arguing from design or order in nature to God, he argues that we see many discordant elements in the universe that would not work harmoniously unless God gave it intelligent direction by implanting in them “the law whereby the universe,” which we might call the order expressed in the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, continue in preservation and direction. He clearly thinks that such laws can only have Deity as a source. Science has discovered the laws by which nature binds opposing forces together, and in so doing could acknowledge that such laws require a divine lawgiver. He acknowledges the possibility of their spontaneous appearance, but even that would seem to require an Artificer at work. 

He moves the argument beyond the notion of “order” and toward recognizing the oppositions and tensions within the natural order that suggests the divine presence binding oppositions in a whole. However, I would also suggest that directing us to our relationship with the infinite and eternal is an improvement over any argument from order. Seeing our lives in the context of the infinite and eternal places us in the context of the “something more” with which so many human beings long to connect. The revelation of God to which scripture witnesses, far from occurring in the air, emerges from and clarifies who this is infinite and eternal is and what it means for human life. 

1.4-8, neither male nor female language grasps the fullness of the divine reality, because God is beyond the ability of our language to express. 1.4, he does say that “there is a God. However, what God is in essence is incomprehensible and unknowable.”[4] God must be beyond that which the laws of physics can measure. In this way, God can permeate the fill the universe. If so, even while the essence of God is energy, we can see that “the first mover is motionless,” because God is already there, in every place. Now, to say things like that God does not have a beginning, does not change, does not perish does not describe the essence of God because all we have done is say what God is not. Thus, we can say nothing of the essence of God, but only what it is not, for God is above all beings.[5] We can positively explain the essence of a finite and temporal thing, but we cannot do so with God, who is separate from such things. In that sense, we can affirm that God has no existence, for God is above the notion of existence. I believe he anticipates Paul Tillich here, who also stressed that since God is not “a being” in the world of experience, we ought not argue for the “existence” of God. This is another way, a provocative way, of saying that God is above the ability of our normal process of acquiring knowledge. In this way, he hesitates to say one can demonstrate the existence of God. “God then is infinite and incomprehensible and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility.” 

1.5, he begins with the affirmation that he has demonstrated the likelihood that there is a God, and that the essence of God is incomprehensible to us. He wants to add that the essence of God is unitary or one. Scripture affirms this. To those who do not have regard for scripture, he would argue that the perfection of the divine necessitates one God. If God has no boundaries, there can only be one God. The governance of the world demands one God. Thus, there cannot be more than one necessary being. All of this suggests that he hesitates to say one can demonstrate the existence of God. Yet, in I.6, he will begin by saying that the one God has a Word or Logos within the eternal and infinite life of God. Our word is perishable and easily dissolvers, but the divine Word is eternal and perfect. This Word has the attributes of the Father who eternally begets the Word. This Word has an independent subsistence differentiated from the Father while sharing the same essence of the Father. The theme that the Logos is the Father’s self-reflection would become a permanent part of trinitarian thought. God is not without a word. He compares the enduring word that comes from God to the temporary word from us.[6] In I.7, he begins by affirming that the “the Word must also possess Spirit.” Spirit refers to force, attraction, and movement in human life, and the divine Word possesses Spirit in perfection. The Spirit of God is “the companion of the Word and the revealer of His energy.” The Spirit is “an essential power, existing in its own proper and peculiar subsistence, proceeding from the Father and resting in the Word, and shewing forth the Word.” He then states that the Spirit “being in subsistence in the likeness of the Word, endowed with life, free volition, independent movement, energy, ever willing that which is good, and having power to keep pace with the will in all its decrees, having no beginning and no end. For never was the Father at any time lacking in the Word, nor the Word in the Spirit.” This Christian view takes what is profitable from both the Greeks and the Jewish thought.  Thus, the Spirit is a substantial power, self-related in his own individuating hypostasis.[7] To sum up the argument of the past two chapters, the Father creates by thinking and what is thought is worked by the Logos and perfected by the Spirit.[8] By saying that the Father “has” the Word and Spirit he is affirming the monarchy of the Father.

            I.8 is a difficult but important attempt to describe the orthodox view of the inner life of God. He begins by affirming what we have just discussed as the oneness of the divine essence as eternal, infinite, and boundless, “the fountain of goodness and justice.” God encompasses and maintains all things, “occupying all essences intact and extending beyond all things and being separate from all essence as being super-essential and above all things.” God is “the fountain of being to all that is, of life to the living, of reason to those that have reason; to all the cause of all good: perceiving all things even before they have become.” Christian baptism is in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit, which is sufficient for him to discuss these three as constituting the inner life of God. The Father has begotten the Son eternally, manifested in Jesus Christ, “consubstantial with the Father.” The Son “is the effulgence of the glory, the impress of the Father's subsistence.” Thus, the Father was always with the Son, and the Son always with the Father. The Father has eternally begotten or generated the Son, doing so without introducing passion or change in the divine essence (!). God is without time (!). He distinguishes between begetting as God’s work arising from his nature and as God’s work arising from the divine will.[9] Such begetting is “without time and flux and passion, in a manner incomprehensible and perceived by the God of the universe alone.” He uses the image that fire exists and light proceeds from it. Therefore, “just as light is ever the product of fire, and ever is in it and at no time is separate from it, so in like manner also the Son is begotten of the Father and is never in any ways separate from Him, but ever is in Him.” He distinguishes the generation of the Son from the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father, which is a different mode of being from that of the Son, “alike incomprehensible and unknown.” Father, Son, and Spirit have different modes of being,[10] but “no difference in essence nor dignity…. For the Father alone is ingenerate, no other subsistence having given Him being. The Father alone is without origin according to tradition.[11] And the Son alone is generate, for He was begotten of the Father's essence without beginning and without time. And only the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father's essence, not having been generated but simply proceeding. For this is the doctrine of Holy Scripture. But the nature of the generation and the procession is quite beyond comprehension.” The orthodox faith affirms all of this based upon the witness of scripture to the revelation it finds in Jesus Christ. Despite the image of fire and light from nature, he admits that “it is quite impossible to find in creation an image that will illustrate in itself exactly in all details the nature of the Holy Trinity.” He goes on to affirm that orthodox faith also believes “in one Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life: Who proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son: the object of equal adoration and glorification with the Father and Son, since He is co-essential and co-eternal.” He again stresses the difference between generation and procession[12]: “we have learned that there is a difference between generation and procession, but the nature of that difference we in no wise understand.[13] Further, the generation of the Son from the Father and the procession of the Holy Spirit are simultaneous.” The Holy Spirit is Lord over every creature but is not lorded over. He deifies but is not deified. He fills but is not filled. He causes to participate but does not participate. He sanctifies but is not sanctified. The point is that the essence of God has no past, present, or future, but is the eschaton.[14] “For in these hypostatic or personal properties alone do the three holy subsistences differ from each other, being indivisibly divided not by essence but by the distinguishing mark of their proper and peculiar subsistence.” “Owing to the three subsistences, there is no compoundness or confusion: while, owing to their having the same essence and dwelling in one another, and being the same in will, and energy, and power, and authority, and movement we recognize the indivisibility and the unity of God. For verily there is one God, and His Word and Spirit.” Remembering that nothing in nature is an exact parallel to the relations with the Triune God, Peter and Paul share one human nature or essence, but are differing persons. Divine life includes this communal dimension of essence while maintaining the self-distinction we find with the Father, Son, and Spirit. The communal quality of essence and distinction that we find in nature is far removed from what we find in the case of the superessential and incomprehensible Trinity, but it may help us understand better the divine life. “For there is one essence, one goodness, one power, one will, one energy, one authority, one and the same, I repeat, not three resembling each other. But the three subsistences have one and the same movement. For each one of them is related as closely to the other as to itself: that is to say that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one in all respects. … For the subsistences dwell in one another, in no wise confused but cleaving together…. For the subsistences dwell in one another, in no wise confused but cleaving together.” He again clarifies. “The Father is one Father, and without beginning, that is, without cause: for He is not derived from anything. The Son is one Son, but not without beginning, that is, not without cause: for He is derived from the Father. But if you eliminate the idea of a beginning from time, He is also without beginning: for the creator of times cannot be subject to time. The Holy Spirit is one Spirit, going forth from the Father, not in the manner of Sonship but of procession.” We could say that the monarchy of the Father is such at the Father “has” both Son and Spirit.[15]

            The stress in Chapter 8 is on the co-presence of the other modes of being in the one. This insight finds expression in the doctrine of the perichoresis (circumincessio, passing into each other) of the divine persons. The divine modes of being mutually condition and permeate each other so completely that one is always in the other two and the other two in the one. Based on this doctrine the inner life of “God would be an uninterrupted cycle of the three modes of being, and we are gladly reminded of the inappropriateness of the figure resulting from the literal meaning. The image prefers a spatial rather than temporal description of divine life. It implies both a confirmation of the distinction in the modes of being, for none would be what it is, no0t even the Father, without its co-existence with the others, and a relativization of this distinction, for none exists as a special individual, but all three exist only in concert as modes of being of the one God.[16] The concept of perichoresis or circumincession contains the idea of reciprocity and has been adopted as an expression of trinitarian unity. It has had only a limited impact because of the one-sided viewing of the intratrinitarian relations as relations of origin.[17]

            I am going to suggest that the “orthodox faith” today needs to reconsider some of this, while remaining respectful of and in agreement with the intent. The divine essence includes generation, or the giving of life, which is change. The giving of life is a passionate matter. It may well be that within orthodox faith is an understanding of divinity that embraces change and passion in a way that transcends our experience of them and brings them into divine life. The infinite and eternal God brings finitude and temporality within the divine essence and brings them to completion. The oppositions he acknowledges in nature are present in human life. Life can feel disjointed and alienated. Suffering and death introduce a profound experience of emptiness. The “orthodox faith” carries within it the possibility that God has brought such painful experience within the life of God. Contrary to the tradition, God is deeply touched by suffering and death to the point of bringing them within the eternal life of God. I can affirm this because of the infinite and eternal nature of the divine essence and because of the unique place the Son of the Father has in divine life. I will have more to say about this.

            In I.9, God simply “is.” God “keeps all being in His own embrace.” “God is a fire consuming all evils.” God sees all “before they were, holding them timelessly in His thoughts; and each one conformably to His voluntary and timeless thought.” 

            In I.10, even the terms begotten and procession “do not explain His essence, but the mutual relationship and manner of being or existence.” We are only understanding the attributes of the divine essence in the variety of names we apply to God. He points out that the incarnation of the Word is unique “in that neither the Father nor the Spirit have any part at all, unless so far as regards approval and the working of inexplicable miracles which the God-Word, having become a human being like us, worked, as unchangeable God and Son of God.” Only the Son of God became a son of man, in contrast to Augustine, who said either the Father or Spirit could have become incarnate, a failure on the part of Augustine to care for the distinctions within the trinity.

            In 1.11, human beings cannot understand or speak of the divine energy of the Trinity only out of our experience. Our statements about God can only be symbols that have a higher meaning. We see in the Bible images of the “body” when referring to God (ears, eyes, hand, mouth, backside) that are symbolic of what the author intends to say about the attributes of God. the same is to of the emotions of God, such as anger and forgetfulness. When the Bible speaks of God repenting, the essence of God remains the same, but God is responding to new human contingencies.

            In I.12, he refers to the mysteries learned from Dionysius the Areopogite. He notes again that deity is incomprehensible in that we cannot know the divine essence. The finite and temporal cannot understand the infinite and eternal. Yet, God allows some knowledge of God, “He is the cause of all and contains in Himself the reasons and causes of all that is, He receives names drawn from all that is, even from opposites.” In becoming known to us in this multiplicity of attributes, God has condescended to adjust the divine essence to our capacities of understanding.[18] Thus, we use negative symbols like infinite (not finite), without beginning, and invisible, showing God is separate from that which have existence. Some names are positive, such as the cause of all things, essence, cause of reason and wisdom, the rational and the wise, intellect, life, living, power, and so on. “That which is immaterial is more precious and more akin to Himself than that which is material, and the pure than the impure, and the holy than the unholy: for they have greater part in Him…. which is just to say, being more than not being. For goodness is existence and the cause of existence, but wickedness is the negation of goodness, that is, of existence.” For John, the concept of God as the first cause is the basis for the apophatic procedure of negation. John here supplemented his apophatic statements by positive kataphatic predicates that trace back the perfections of the effects to the divine cause. He did not take up again the question of knowing the divine essence, which he had cogently rejected in favor of negative predicates. With his positive statements he could only argue from the infinity of God to his comprehensibility. He was following Pseudo-Dionysius.[19] “God then is called Mind and Reason and Spirit and Wisdom and Power, as the cause of these, and as immaterial, and maker of all, and omnipotent.” Such qualities are the divine essence, but he then clarifies the relation of the three subsistences to each other. “The Father is super-essential Sun, source of goodness, fathomless sea of essence, reason, wisdom, power, light, divinity: the generating and productive source of good hidden in it. He Himself then is mind, the depth of reason (Paul Tillich again), begetter of the Word, and through the Word the Producer of the revealing Spirit. … the Father has no reason, wisdom, power, will, save the Son Who is the only power of the Father the immediate cause of the creation of the universe: as perfect subsistence begotten of perfect subsistence in a manner known to Himself, Who is and is named the Son. And the Holy Spirit is the power of the Father revealing the hidden mysteries of His Divinity, proceeding from the Father through the Son in a manner known to Himself, but different from that of generation. Wherefore the Holy Spirit is the perfecter of the creation of the universe. All the terms, then, that are appropriate to the Father, as cause, source, begetter, are to be ascribed to the Father alone: while those that are appropriate to the caused, begotten Son, Word, immediate power, will, wisdom, are to be ascribed to the Son: and those that are appropriate to the caused, processional, manifesting, perfecting power, are to be ascribed to the Holy Spirit. The Father is the source and cause of the Son and the Holy Spirit: Father of the Son alone and producer of the Holy Spirit. The Son is Son, Word, Wisdom, Power, Image, Effulgence, Impress of the Father and derived from the Father. But the Holy Spirit is not the Son of the Father but the Spirit of the Father as proceeding from the Father. For there is no impulse without Spirit. And we speak also of the Spirit of the Son, not as through proceeding from Him, but as proceeding through Him from the Father. For the Father alone is cause.” 

            In I.13, he considers the notion of space. He refers to physical and mental place, but the latter has no “form.” God is spiritual and has “has not place. For He is His own place,[20] filling all things and being above all things, and Himself maintaining all things. Yet we speak of God having place and the place of God where His energy becomes manifest. For He penetrates everything without mixing with it and imparts to all His energy in proportion to the fitness and receptive power of each: and by this, I mean, a purity both natural and voluntary. For the immaterial is purer than the material, and that which is virtuous than that which is linked with vice. Wherefore by the place of God is meant that which has a greater share in His energy and grace.” Heaven is the throne of God and earth is his footstool, “For in it He dwelt in the flesh among men. And His sacred flesh has been named the foot of God. The Church, too, is spoken of as the place of God: for we have set this apart for the glorifying of God as a consecrated place wherein we also hold converse with Him. Likewise, also the places in which His energy becomes manifest to us, whether through the flesh or apart from flesh, are spoken of as the places of God.” Thus, we can see that orthodox faith attests the value of this world to God by celebrating God’s own determination to become flesh and share in human history. Further, when we think of the infinity of the divine essence, however, we need to remember that this means “being everywhere wholly in His entirety.” Angels are in places, even if as spiritual beings they do not have bodies, “for to God alone belongs the power of energizing everywhere at the same time.” Angels have boundaries alike in time, in mental space, and in apprehension. God has predetermined by divine foreknowledge that which will be in our hands. We need to exercise some care in this humanizing image of foreknowledge. For us, knowledge of the future would be “foreknowledge.” If God is eternal, then every time is equally present to God. We could also say that God knows what is finite and temporal to the fullest, and thus past, present, and the possibilities and probabilities of the future. If we use that image, the future remains an open even for God. In any case, for John, finite and temporal things are distant from the nature of God. However, one who longs for God will see God, for God is in all things. God is mingled with everything, “maintaining their nature: and in His holy flesh the God-Word is made one in subsistence and is mixed with our nature, yet without confusion.” He continues with a reflection on the trinitarian relations: “The Son is the Father's image, and the Spirit the Son's, through which Christ dwelling in man makes him after his own image. The Holy Spirit is God, being between the unbegotten and the begotten, (the Spirit stands in the middle between the Begotten and Unbegotten, an interesting image of the relations within the trinity[21]) and united to the Father through the Son…. God is everlasting and unchangeable essence, creator of all that is, adored with pious consideration. God is also Father, being ever unbegotten, for He was born of no one, but hath begotten His co-eternal Son: God is likewise Son, being always with the Father, born of the Father timelessly, everlastingly, without flux or passion, or separation from Him. God is also Holy Spirit, being sanctifying power, subsistential, proceeding from the Father without separation, and resting in the Son, identical in essence with Father and Son.”

            In I.14, he summarizes what he has written. He opens by summarizing the attributes of the divine essence, the trinitarian relations (see the comments in Chapter 8), the divine effulgence and energy that gives being to existing things, and the divine essence penetrating all things, which is the basis for the divine knowledge of past, present, and future, is sinless, and brings salvation. 

            We now turn to Book II. He will begin with a discussion of creation that will lead into a discussion of human being. He carefully guards the goodness of God by stressing the free will of human beings. He concludes with a discussion of divine providence, distinguishing between the antecedent will of God, the consequent or permissive will of God. Leslie D. Weatherhead has a good set of sermons on this notion. He refers to the foreknowledge of God and predestination, carefully distinguishing that the knowledge God has because God is eternal and infinite does not remove human freedom from the equation. 

            In II.1, he refers to the seven ages of our finite and temporal world. “There is a partial consummation, viz., the death of each man: but there is also a general and complete consummation, when the general resurrection of men will happen. And the eighth age is the age to come.”

            In II.2, “God, Who is good and more than good, did not find satisfaction in self-contemplation, but in fits exceeding goodness wished certain things to come into existence which would enjoy His benefits and share in His goodness, He brought all things out of nothing into being and created them, both what is invisible and what is visible. Yea, even humanity, who is a compound of the visible and the invisible. And it is by thought that He creates, and thought is the basis of the work, the Word filling it and the Spirit perfecting it.” Creation is an act of the pure and free goodness of God.[22]

            In II.3, “an angel, then, is an intelligent essence, in perpetual motion, with free-will, incorporeal, ministering to God, having obtained by grace an immortal nature: and the Creator alone knows the form and limitation of its essence.” Angels are neither corporeal nor material and therefore unlimited and unrestricted, yet they are always in a definite and therefore a limited space.[23] He expresses the general tradition regarding angels. Bodiless and immaterial, changeable, can become evil, and though no bodies, when in heaven they are not on earth.[24] In II.4, God gave an angel guardianship of the earth, but did not sustain the brightness and honor given by the Creator “and of his free choice was changed from what was in harmony to what was at variance with his nature, and became roused against God Who created him, and determined to rise in rebellion against Him: and he was the first to depart from good and become evil. For evil is nothing else than absence of goodness.”

            In II.5, we glorify as Three in One, created the heaven and the earth and all that they contain, and brought all things out of nothing into being. In II.6, he describes diverse options in what philosophers say about the heavens, concluding with an argument from beauty. “The heavens declare the glory of God, does not mean that they send forth a voice that can be heard by bodily ears, but that from their own greatness they bring before our minds the power of the Creator: and when we contemplate their beauty, we praise the Maker as the Master-Craftsman.” In II.7, he describes the knowledge of the moon, sun, stars, constellations, planets, and seasons he had. All of this suggests to me that the orthodox faith can deal with the cosmology as our scientists describe it and find ways to incorporate that knowledge into theological reflection. In II.8 he describes wind and air. In II.9, he describes water, “the most beautiful of God's creations,” with which I concur. In II.10 he describes the earth and its products, with which “we must not turn aside from reverent thought, but must admit that all things are sustained and preserved by the power of the Creator. …For there is not a single animal or plant in which the Creator has not implanted some form of energy capable of being used to satisfy man's needs. For He Who knew all things before they were, saw that in the future man would go forward in the strength of his own will, and would be subject to corruption, and, therefore, He created all things for his seasonable use…. Wild beasts are not without their uses, for, by the terror they cause, they bring man to the knowledge of his Creator and lead him to call upon His name…. But blessed is the man who inherits the earth promised to the meek. For the earth that is to be the possession of the holy is immortal. Who, then, can fitly marvel at the boundless and incomprehensible wisdom of the Creator? Or who can render sufficient thanks to the Giver of so many blessings.” He is suggesting that the divine omniscience is best viewed as the infinite consciousness of God in relation to all possible objects of knowledge. God knows past, present, and future.

            In II.11, he turns his attention to the paradise of Eden. Of interest is that he concludes that “God meant that we should be thus free from passion, and this is indeed the mark of a mind absolutely void of passion.” Contrary to the Genesis text, he even says that work was not part of the plan.

            In II.12, he turns his attention to humanity. Humanity is a mixture of “heaven” or mental powers and the “earth” or bodily sense, and thus is soul and body. “And it was also fit that there should be a mixture of both kinds of being, as a token of still greater wisdom and of the opulence of the Divine expenditure as regards natures, and to be a sort of connecting link between the visible and invisible natures. … He bestowed upon him by His own inbreathing, and this is what we mean by ‘after His image.’ For the phrase ‘after His image’ clearly refers to the side of his nature which consists of mind and free will, whereas ‘after His likeness "means likeness in virtue so far as that is possible.’” Thus, he proposes a distinction between imago dei and similitude, which scholasticism linked to Augustine’s doctrine of an original state of grace.[25] He points to the future of humanity, for “in the age to come, he is changed and--to complete the mystery--becomes deified by merely inclining himself towards God; becoming deified, in the way of participating in the divine glory and not in that of a change into the divine being.” He points to the importance of free will: “But God made him by nature sinless and endowed him with free will. By sinless, I mean not that sin could find no place in him (for that is the case with Deity alone), but that sin is the result of the free volition he enjoys rather than an integral part of his nature…. he has the power to continue and go forward in the path of goodness, by co-operating with the divine grace, and likewise to turn from good and take to wickedness, for God has conceded this by conferring freedom of will upon him. For there is no virtue in what is the result of mere force.” Thus, God offers himself to the creature in such an intimate way that the creature is awakened and transfigured by divine grace. He stresses that the constitution of humanity is a community with inanimate and animate things: humanity “has community with things inanimate, and participates in the life of unreasoning creatures, and shares in the mental processes of those endowed with reason.” We need our “minerals” just as much as eating other living things, whether vegetation or animal. Throughout this discussion, “the difference between lifeless matter and vegetative matter is enormous. It is life, so God governs organic life in a vastly separate way than inorganic non-life.”

            In II.13, he distinguishes between natural and unnatural or good and evil desires.[26] Pleasures of the soul include learning and contemplation, while pleasures of the body are actually enjoyed by both soul and body, such as food and intercourse. Some are true and some are false in the pleasure they provide. Moral pleasures do not bring pain and bring no cause for repentance, if one practices them within the bounds of moderation. He then explores various dimensions of human life, such as pain, fear, anger, imagination, sensation, thought, memory, conceiving thought and articulation of it, passion and energy (II.14-23). In II.24-25, he works cautiously to preserve the teaching of the holiness of God from the charge that God directly causes evil. The freewill defense is a time-tested response in that it is a good but distortable creation of God that is the source of sin. We do the sinning. God cooperates with humanity by empowering free will to act.

            In II.26, he deals with events, some of which are in our hands, such as mental and deliberative acts, and some are beyond our control. In II.27, he considers why God endowed us with free will. “For reason consists of a speculative and a practical part. The speculative part is the contemplation of the nature of things, and the practical consists in deliberation and defines the true reason for what is to be done. The speculative side is called mind or wisdom, and the practical side is called reason or prudence.” In II.28, he considers what is not in our hands.

            In II.29, he considers providence. “Providence, then, is the care that God takes over existing things. And again: Providence is the will of God through which all existing things receive their fitting issue. But if Providence is God's will, according to true reasoning all things that come into being through Providence must necessarily be both most fair and most excellent, and such that they cannot be surpassed…. Now the works of Providence are partly according to the good-will (of God) and partly according to permission…. the choice of what is to be done is in our own hands: but the final issue depends, in the one case when our actions are good, on the cooperation of God, Who in His justice brings help according to His foreknowledge to such as choose the good with a right conscience, and, in the other case when our actions are to evil, on the desertion by God, Who again in His justice stands aloof in accordance with His foreknowledge…. The first then is called God's antecedent will and pleasure, and springs from Himself, while the second is called God's consequent will and permission and has its origin in us. And the latter is two-fold; one part dealing with matters of guidance and training, and having in view our salvation, and the other being hopeless and leading to our utter punishment, as we said above. And this is the case with actions that are not left in our hands.” What he is explaining is that God’s supervision functions without coercing or eliminating the priceless dimension of human self-determination. The giver of life who creates all things does not just leave them alone, or gaze passively upon them, but continues to nurture and care for them, and is constantly active on behalf of them. He viewed the preservation of the world from the standpoint of the governance of the world by providence.[27] Here is a simple and pure view of predestination, which includes the presupposition of the overruling of God and the basis and goal of its realization. We have to do with the creature under divine lordship and the result of the personal intention of God. Providence is the active relation of God to the created reality.[28]

            In II.30, he deals with divine prescience and predestination. “We ought to understand that while God knows all things beforehand, yet He does not predetermine all things. For He knows beforehand those things that are in our power, but He does not predetermine them. For it is not His will that there should be wickedness nor does He choose to compel virtue. So that predetermination is the work of the divine command based on fore-knowledge. But on the other hand God predetermines those things which are not within our power in accordance with His prescience. For already God in His prescience has prejudged all things in accordance with His goodness and justice.” All of this is consistent with the argument of Arminius against the Calvinism of his day.

            We now turn to Book III. He begins with the reason for the incarnation, where God cared enough for the misery of humanity to condescend to the human condition in one human being, Jesus of Nazareth, in order to emancipate humanity from its bondage to sin. He will explain to his satisfaction, but not mine, the two-natures theory of Christ as of divine and human essence subsisting in one person. I appreciate the connection he makes between the community of the trinity on the one hand and the community of human and divine in Jesus on the other. He will explain what “orthodox faith” means by referring to Mary as theotokos. Although I can understand the veneration of Mary, here is a place where I have a problem with “orthodox faith.” To refer to her has “ever virgin” seems a stretch biblically and introduces a negative of sexual intercourse. The main problem with his two-natures theory that I find difficult to accept is that only the human nature of Jesus suffered and died, while the divine nature of Jesus remains untouched. He concludes with a discussion of the descent of Christ to Hades.

            In III.1, God “earnestly strove to emancipate” humanity from the enslaving bonds of sin, returning humanity to a life of happiness through the coming of the Redeemer. “For the very Creator and Lord Himself undertakes a struggle in behalf of the work of His own hands, and learns by toil to become Master…. God's goodness is revealed in that He did not disregard the frailty of His own handiwork but was moved with compassion for him in his fall, and stretched forth His hand to him… For what greater thing is there, than that God should become Man?... And He becomes obedient to the Father Who is like unto us, and finds a remedy for our disobedience in what He had assumed from us, and became a pattern of obedience to us without which it is not possible to obtain salvation.”

            In III.2, he focuses on the way the Word was conceived and thus the incarnation: “name Jesus; for He shall save His people from their sins. Hence it comes that Jesus has the interpretation Savior…. after the assent of the holy Virgin, the Holy Spirit descended on her… not by procreation but by creation through the Holy Spirit.” He then focuses upon the incarnation. “For the divine Word was not made one with flesh that had an independent pre-existence, but taking up His abode in the womb of the holy Virgin, He unreservedly in His own subsistence took upon Himself through the pure blood of the eternal Virgin a body of flesh animated with the spirit of reason and thought, thus assuming to Himself the first-fruits of man's compound nature, Himself, the Word, having become a subsistence in the flesh…. Wherefore we speak not of man as having become God, but of God as having become Man.” Thus, the Word of God became the mode of being of the flesh. This is consistent with the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, guarding against a double existence of the Word.[29]

            In III.3, he considers the two natures of Christ: “we confess that He alike in His divinity and in His humanity both is and is said to be perfect God, the same Being, and that He consists of two natures, and exists in two natures…. For He is Himself both God and Man…. How, indeed, could one and the same nature come to embrace opposing and essential differences?” He then makes an important statement. “For when we speak of the nature of men as one, observe that in saying this we are not looking to the question of soul and body. For when we compare together the soul and the body it cannot be said that they are of one nature. But since there are very many subsistences of men, and yet all have the same kind of nature: for all are composed of soul and body, and all have part in the nature of the soul, and possess the essence of the body, and the common form: we speak of the one nature of these very many and different subsistences; while each subsistence, to wit, has two natures, and fulfils itself in two natures, namely, soul and body.” Therefore, it does not matter that he was born as a male, for human nature transcends gender. He then explores the implications of the Christological doctrine of the union of two natures in one person were discussed especially in debates regarding the communication of the attributes between the two natures and the person of Christ.[30] “And therefore we hold that there has been a union of two perfect natures, one divine and one human … by synthesis; that is, in subsistence, without change or confusion or alteration or difference or separation, and we confess that in two perfect natures there is but one subsistence of the Son of God incarnate; holding that there is one and the same subsistence belonging to His divinity and His humanity, and granting that the two natures are preserved in Him after the union, but we do not hold that each is separate and by itself, but that they are united to each other in one compound subsistence. For we look upon the union as essential, that is, as true and not imaginary.” He finds it essential that we understand the incarnation was “a true union of them in one compound subsistence of the Son of God, and we hold that their essential difference is preserved. For the created remains created, and the uncreated, uncreated: the mortal remains mortal; the immortal, immortal: the circumscribed, circumscribed: the uncircumscribed, uncircumscribed: the visible, visible: the invisible, invisible.” We now come to the problem with the two-nature theory of the incarnation: “Lord of Glory is said to have been crucified, although His divine nature never endured the Cross, and that the Son of Man is allowed to have been in heaven before the Passion, as the Lord Himself said.” The second Council of Constantinople, Anathema 10, states that one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh, but it was still possible to consider his suffering exterior to his deity. Divinity pervades all things, but nothing pervades it. It shares its glories with the flesh will remaining immune to the sufferings of the flesh, all of which he says regarding the incarnation. Thus, he is not expressing “orthodox faith” well in this case.[31] However, his statement also reveals the problem with the theory. “In respect of His divinity He is connected with the Father and the Spirit, while in respect of His humanity He is connected with His mother and all mankind. And as far as His natures are united, we hold that He differs from the Father and the Spirit on the one hand, and from the mother and the rest of mankind on the other. For the natures are united in His subsistence, having one compound subsistence, in which He differs from the Father and the Spirit, and also from the mother and us.” This statement is important in that only the Son of God become a son of man, in contrast to Augustine, in a failure on his part to care for the distinctions within the trinity.[32]

            In III.4, he discusses the manner of the mutual communication of the divine and human nature of Christ: “in the case of our Lord Jesus Christ, seeing that we recognize that He has two natures but only one subsistence compounded of both, when we contemplate His natures we speak of His divinity and His humanity, but when we contemplate the subsistence compounded of the natures we sometimes use terms that have reference to His double nature, as "Christ," and "at once God and man," and "God Incarnate;" and sometimes those that imply only one of His natures, as "God" alone, or "Son of God," and "man" alone, or "Son of Man;" sometimes using names that imply His loftiness and sometimes those that imply His lowliness. For He Who is alike God and man is one, being the former from the Father ever without cause, but having become the latter afterwards for His love towards man.”

            In III.5, he continues his discussion of the two natures of Christ, making an interesting comparison between the relations within the trinity and the communion of the divine and human Christ. “And just as the three subsistences of the Holy Trinity are united without confusion, and are distinguished and enumerated without being separable, the enumeration not entailing division or separation or alienation or cleavage among them (for we recognize one God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit), so in the same way the natures of Christ also, although they are united, yet are united without confusion; and although they interpenetrate one another, yet they do not permit of change or transmutation of one into the other.”

            In III.6, he writes that the Word unites in its entirety to the human nature: “in the Incarnation of the Trinity of the One God the Word of the Holy Trinity, we hold that in one of its subsistences the nature of the Godhead is wholly and perfectly united with the whole nature of humanity.” He continues his error: “Hence we cannot say ‘The nature of the Word suffered;’ for the divinity in it did not suffer, but we say that the human nature, not by any means, however, meaning all the subsistences of men, suffered in Christ, and we confess further that Christ suffered in His human nature.”

            In III.7, he discusses the one compound subsistence of the Word: “without leaving the Father's bosom, took up His abode in an uncircumscribed manner in the womb of the holy Virgin, without the instrumentality of seed, and in an incomprehensible manner known only to Himself, and causing the flesh derived from the holy Virgin to subsist in the very subsistence that was before all the ages. So then He was both in all things and above all things and also dwelt in the womb of the holy Mother of God, but in it by the energy of the incarnation.” The flesh is mortal on its own account and quickening because of its hypostatic union with the Word. In becoming flesh, the Word remains the Word. The Word never ceases to be the Word. Thus, the Word speaks, acts, prevails, reveals, and reconciles.[33] He distinguishes between two generations of the Son: “We reverence His two generations, one from the Father before time and beyond cause and reason and time and nature, and one in the end for our sake, and like to us and above us; for our sake because it was for our salvation, like to us in that He was man born of woman.”

In III.8, he continues his discussion of the two natures. “Christ, therefore, is one, perfect God and perfect man: and Him we worship along with the Father and the Spirit, with one obeisance, adoring even His immaculate flesh and not holding that the flesh is not meet for worship: for in fact it is worshipped in the one subsistence of the Word, which indeed became subsistence for it. But in this we do not do homage to that which is created. For we worship Him, not as mere flesh, but as flesh united with divinity.” Colossians 2:9 teaches that the divine nature penetrates and perfects every aspect of the human, and the human is pervaded by the divine.

            In III.9, he continues a discussion of the notion of “nature” in discussion of Christology and the incarnation. In III.10 he discusses the trisagium and an addition he finds objectionable.

            In III.11, he considers nature in species and in individuals and the difference between union and incarnation, wanting to explain the statement: “The one nature of God the Word incarnate.” “For He took on Himself the elements of our compound nature, and these not as having an independent existence or as being originally an individual, and in this way assumed by Him, but as existing in His own subsistence.” He again respects the difference within the trinity: “the Father and the Holy Spirit take no part at all in the incarnation of the Word except in connection with the miracles, and in respect of good will and purpose.” We are not dealing with the essence of God when we are thinking of the incarnation, but of the one mode of being as Son or Word of the Father. Thus, the Word that is God became a man, but not the deity as such.[34]

            In III.13, he discusses Mary as theotokos, mother of God. “He who was born of her was true God, she who bare the true God incarnate is the true mother of God. For we hold that God was born of her, not implying that the divinity of the Word received from her the beginning of its being, but meaning that God the Word Himself, Who was begotten of the Father timelessly before the ages, and was with the Father and the Spirit without beginning anti through eternity, took up His abode in these last days for the sake of our salvation in the Virgin's womb, and was without change made flesh and born of her. For the holy Virgin did not bare mere man but true God: and not mere God but God incarnate…. the purpose of God the Word becoming man was that the very same nature, which had sinned and fallen and become corrupted, should triumph over the deceiving tyrant and so be freed from corruption…. And thus it is that the holy Virgin is thought of and spoken of as the Mother of God, not only because of the nature of the Word, but also because of the deification of man's nature…. Who deified the nature that He assumed.” Thus, orthodox faith affirms Mary as God-bearer on account of the nature of the Logos and the deification of the human.[35]

            In III.14, he considers the free will of our Lord Jesus Christ. For him, one hypostasis becomes the synthetic agent of the whole gospel narrative, both of what is divine in it and of what is human in it, identifying the eternal Logos with this hypostasis.[36] “Since, then, Christ has two natures, we hold that He has also two natural wills and two natural energies. But since His two natures have one subsistence, we hold that it is one and the same person who wills and energizes naturally in both natures, of which, and in which, and also which is Christ our Lord: and moreover that He wills and energizes without separation but as a united whole. For He wills and energizes in either form in close communion with the other.” He compares the communion of divine and human nature in Christ with the communion of will and energy within the trinity. However, we see again the problem with the theory of two natures in Christ when he suggests that in the interpretation of the gospel narrative we need to discern whether we find it to be the human divine or human will. “ “Since, then, Christ is one and His subsistence is one, He also Who wills both as God and as man is one and the same. And since He has two natures endowed with volition, since they are rational (for whatever is rational is endowed with volition and free-will), we shall postulate two volitions or natural wills in Him. For He in His own person is capable of volition in accordance with both His natures. For He assumed that faculty of volition which belongs naturally to us. And since Christ, Who in His own person wills according to either nature, is one, we shall postulate the same object of will in His case, not as though He wills only those things which He willed naturally as God (for it is no part of Godhead to will to eat or drink and so forth), but as willing also those things which human nature requires for its support, and this without involving any opposition in judgment, but simply as the result of the individuality of the natures. For then it was that He thus willed naturally, when His divine volition so willed and permitted the flesh to suffer and do that which was proper to it.” He wants to stress that we have a free will: “For to will is a faculty of nature, just as seeing is, for all men possess it.” Freedom of will belongs to the rational and intellectual life. Humanity made in the image of God, who is clearly free, must share in that freedom of will. 

            In III.15, he considers that Christ had two energies in the sense that he possessed the divine and human essence. “Life itself, it should be observed, is energy, yea, the primal energy of the living creature and so is the whole economy of the living creature, its functions of nutrition and growth, that is, the vegetative side of its nature, and the movement stirred by impulse, that is, the sentient side, and its activity of intellect and free-will. Energy, moreover, is the perfect realization of power. If, then, we contemplate all these in Christ, surely we must also hold that He possesses human energy.” He will stress the close communion of human and divine essence in Christ, as he did of the close communion within the trinity.

            In III.16, he considers that some thinkers of his day thought of humanity as having two natures, that of soul and body, and therefore Christ must have three, which, of course, he rejects. In III.17, he considers the deification of the nature of the flesh and will of Christ. For him, his resurrection makes possible the intended and fitting consummation of our humanity. 

            In III.18, the priority always lies with the divine initiative, not with human responsiveness. “Wherefore God in His pity and love for man wished to reveal fallen man himself as conqueror and became a human being to restore like with like.” He clarifies that the divine will has superiority over the human will of Christ: “But His human will was obedient anti subordinate to His divine will, not being guided by its own inclination, but willing those things which the divine will willed.” He will provide us an example of how this view works itself out in the exegesis of the prayer of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, an appropriate text for this discussion. His exegesis of the text reveals the weakness of the two-natures theory. “For it was with the permission of the divine will that He suffered by nature what was proper to Him. For when He prayed that He might escape the death, it was with His divine will naturally willing and permitting it that He did so pray and agonize and fear, and again when His divine will willed that His human will should choose tire death, the passion became voluntary to Him. For it was not as God only, but also as man, that He voluntarily surrendered Himself to the death. And thus He bestowed on us also courage in the face of death. So, indeed, He said before His saving passion, Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me," manifestly as though He were to drink the cup as man and not as God. It was as man, then, that He wished the cup to pass from Him: but these are the words of natural timidity. Nevertheless, He said, not My will, that is to say, not in so far as I am of a different essence from Thee, but Thy will be done, the is to say, My will and Thy will, in so far as I am of the same essence as Thou. Now these are the words of a brave heart. For the Spirit of the Lord, since He truly became man in His good pleasure, on first testing its natural weakness was sensible of the natural fellow-suffering involved in its separation from the body but being strengthened by the divine will it again grew bold in the face of death. For since He was Himself God although also man, and man although also God, He Himself as man subjected in Himself and by Himself His human nature to God and the Father, and became obedient to the Father, thus making Himself the most excellent type and example for us.”[37] This suggests that the prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane is Jesus play-acting, giving us an example of how to face temptation. It was not a real struggle for Jesus of Nazareth, but he made it look like a real struggle so that we could better face our temptations. “ “Of His own free-will, moreover, He exercised His divine and human will. For free-will is assuredly implanted in every rational nature. For to what end would it possess reason, if it could not reason at its own free-will? For the Creator hath implanted even in the unreasoning brutes natural appetite to compel them to sustain their own nature. For devoid of reason, as they are, they cannot guide their natural appetite but are guided by it. And so, as soon as the appetite for anything has sprung up, straightway arises also the impulse for action. And thus they do not win praise or happiness for pursuing virtue, nor punishment for doing evil. But the rational nature, although it does possess a natural appetite, can guide and train it by reason wherever the laws of nature are observed. For the advantage of reason consists in this, the free-will, by which we mean natural activity in a rational subject. Wherefore in pursuing virtue it wins praise and happiness, and in pursuing vice it wins punishment.”

            In III.19, he considers the theandric energy: “just as in the case of the flaming sword we speak of the cut burn as one, and the burnt cut as one, but still hold that the cut and the burn have different energies and different natures, the burn having the nature of fire and the cut the nature of steel, in the same way also when we speak of one theandric energy of Christ, we understand two distinct energies of His two natures, a divine energy belonging to His divinity, and a human energy belonging to His humanity.”

            In III.20, he considers the natural and innocent passions, suggesting the hallowing of the human that occurs in the incarnation. “He assumed all the natural and innocent passions of man. For He assumed the whole man and all man's attributes save sin. For that is not natural, nor is it implanted in us by the Creator, but arises voluntarily in our mode of life as the result of a further implantation by the devil, though it cannot prevail over us by force. For the natural and innocent passions are those which are not in our power, but which have entered into the life of man owing to the condemnation by reason of the transgression, such as hunger, thirst, weariness, labor, the tears, the corruption, the shrinking from death, the fear, the agony with the bloody sweat.”

            In III.21-29, the humbling of the Son refers to his birth, but also to the way the Son grew to maturity and had to choose repeatedly the way of the way of the humble One until such choosing ended in death. In III.22, as an example of the omniscience of the Son voluntarily constrained, the paradox is that the Son became like a child, even as we must, to grasp the meaning of coming governance of God. In III.23, he considers fear in Jesus. In III.24, he considers prayer in Jesus, using the example of Lazarus. Again, we see the problem of the two-natures theory in that he feels the need to explain why the incarnate Son would pray, since he is already in close communion with the Father. In III.25, he considers the natural and personal appropriation of attributes. 

In III.26, he considers the suffering of the humanity of Jesus and the non-suffering of the divinity of Jesus. Highlighting the problem with the two-natures theory, he says, “we say that God suffered in the flesh, but never that His divinity suffered in the flesh, or that God suffered through the flesh.” Separate from the issues he has discussed; he offers a statement of the role of examples. “For one must not take the examples too absolutely and strictly: indeed, in the examples, one must consider both what is like and what is unlike, otherwise it would not be an example. For, if they were like in all respects, they would be identities, and not examples, and all the more so in dealing with divine matters. For one cannot find an example that is like in all respects whether we are dealing with theology or the dispensation.” 

In III.27, the says the divine essence remained inseparable from the soul and body of Jesus even at death, so that his subsistence continued as one. He offers what some might consider an offensive image regarding the death of Jesus for us. “He dies, therefore, because He took on Himself death on our behalf, and He makes Himself an offering to the Father for our sakes. For we had sinned against Him, and it was meet that He should receive the ransom for us, and that we should thus he delivered from the condemnation. God forbid that the blood of the Lord should have been offered to the tyrant. Wherefore death approaches and swallowing up the body as a bait is transfixed on the hook of divinity, and after tasting of a sinless and life-giving body, perishes, and brings up again all whom of old he swallowed up. For just as darkness disappears on the introduction of light, so is death repulsed before the assault of life, and brings life to all, but death to the destroyer.”

In III.28, he considers corruption and destruction. “Our Lord's body was subject to corruption. For He voluntarily accepted all these things. But corruption also means the complete resolution of the body into its constituent elements, and its utter disappearance, which is spoken of by many preferably as destruction. The body of our Lord did not experience this form of corruption.”

In III. 29, he considers the descent into Hades. “The soul when it was deified descended into Hades, in order that, just as the Sun of Righteousness rose for those upon the earth, so likewise He might bring light to those who sit under the earth in darkness and shadow of death: in order that just as He brought the message of peace to those upon the earth, and of release to the prisoners, and of sight to the blind, and became to those who believed the Author of everlasting salvation and to those who did not believe a reproach of their unbelief, so He might become the same to those in Hades: That every knee should bow to Him, of things in  heaven, and things in earth and things under the earth. And thus, after He had freed those who had been bound for ages, straightway He rose again from the dead, shewing us the way of resurrection.”

We now turn to Book IV. He begins with considering what happened after the resurrection of Jesus, including his ascension. In IV.9, he will turn to a discussion of faith, baptism, and ethics. We can now see that the church will not be a theological theme in “orthodox faith.” He is also clear that any discussion of ethics occurs in the context of faith and baptism, and only after his Christological discussion. He will discuss the Eucharist. He values the veneration of the saints and especially images of Mary. He discusses the nourishment provided by scripture. He concludes with a discussion of antichrist and the hoped for reuniting of soul and body in the resurrection of the dead. 

IV.1 concerns what happened after the resurrection of Jesus. IV.2 concerns what it means that Christ is at the right hand of the Father. “Christ sits in the body at the right hand of God the Father, but we do not hold that the right hand of the Father is actual place. For how could He that is uncircumscribed have a right hand limited by place?” IV.3 considers whether Christians are actually worshipping the creature since Christ has both human and divine natures. “His flesh, then, in its own nature… is not deserving of worship since it is created. But as it is united with God the Word, it is worshipped on account of Him and in Him.” IV.4 considers why the Son became a human being rather than the Father or Spirit. “The Father is Father and not Son: the Son is Son and not Father: the Holy Spirit is Spirit and not Father or Son. For the individuality is unchangeable. How, indeed, could individuality continue to exist at all if it were ever changing and altering? Wherefore the Son of God became Son of Man in order that His individuality might endure. For since He was the Son of God, He became Son of Man, being made flesh of the holy Virgin and not losing the individuality of Sonship.” In this way, John does better than Augustine in maintaining the distinctions within the triune life of God. IV.5 considers the type of subsistence Christ has: “it bears the properties of the two natures, being made known in two natures: so that the one same subsistence is both uncreate in divinity and create in humanity, visible and invisible.” IV.6 answers the question of when Christ received his calling: “we hold that the Son and Word of God became Christ after He had dwelt in the womb of His holy ever-virgin Mother, and became flesh without change, and that the flesh was anointed with divinity. For this is the anointing of humanity.” 

In IV.7, he considers whether the holy Mother of God bore two natures and whether two natures hung upon the cross. “He is two natures: for He is in His own person God and man. And the same is to be said concerning the crucifixion and resurrection and ascension. For these refer not to nature but to subsistence. Christ then, since He is in two natures, suffered and was crucified in the nature that was subject to passion. For it was in the flesh and not in His divinity that He hung upon the Cross. Otherwise, let them answer us when we ask if two natures died. No, we shall say. And so two natures Were not crucified but Christ was begotten, that is to say, the divine Word having become man was begotten in the flesh, was crucified in the flesh, suffered in the flesh, while His divinity continued to be impossible.” He again does not the divinity of the Son touched by suffering and death. The hypostasis is identical with the Logos and the one agent of the saving narrative. The Logos makes human realities his own in the fashion of an exchange through the perichoresis of the parts. The divine nature did not suffer in the cross.[38] In IV.8, he discusses who the orthodox faith can refer to Christ as “first-born.”

John will now move from the themes of Christology to faith and baptism. He will not have a place for the church in his theological discussions.[39] His ethics are in a subordinate position to his exposition of the orthodox faith.[40] In IV.9, “We confess one baptism for the remission of sins and for life eternal. For baptism declares the Lord's death. We are indeed "buried with the Lord through baptism," as saith the divine Apostle. So then, as our Lord died once for all, we also must be baptized once for all, and baptized according to the Word of the Lord, In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, being taught the confession in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit…. But those who were not baptized into the Holy Trinity, these must be baptized again…. For since man's nature is twofold, consisting of soul and body, He bestowed on us a twofold purification, of water and of the Spirit the Spirit renewing that part in us which is after His image and likeness, and the water by the grace of the Spirit cleansing the body from sin and delivering it from corruption, the water indeed expressing the image of death, but the Spirit affording the earnest of life…. The regeneration, however, takes place in the spirit: for faith has the power of making us sons (of God), creatures as we are, by the Spirit, and of leading us into our original blessedness…. The remission of sins, therefore, is granted alike to all through baptism: but the grace of the Spirit is proportional to the faith and previous purification. Now, indeed, we receive the first fruits of the Holy Spirit through baptism, and the second birth is for us the beginning and seal and security and illumination s of another life.” Such baptism has ethical implications, for “with all our strength to steadfastly keep ourselves pure from filthy works, that we may not, like the dog returning to his vomit, make ourselves again the slaves of sin. For faith apart from works is dead, and so likewise are works apart from faith. For the true faith is attested by works.”

            In IV.10, he focuses attention upon faith. When adequate evidence is laid out, it is expected that by grace one is being made able to believe, at least pray for grace to believe. God does not believe for us. God enables believing. When we believe, it is truly our own action, yet always enabled by grace, exercising the gracious ability God has given us to trust in the eventful Word spoken in Jesus Christ. 

In IV.11, the cross is the power of God for those being saved. “For without faith neither does the farmer cut his furrow, nor does the merchant commit his life to the raging waves of the sea on a small piece of wood, nor are marriages contracted nor any other step in life taken…. This is the seal that the destroyer may not touch you, as saith the Scripture. This is the resurrection of those lying in death, the support of the standing, the staff of the weak, the rod of the flock, the safe conduct of the earnest, the perfection of those that press forwards, the salvation of soul and body, the aversion of all things evil, the patron of all things good, the taking away of sin, the plant of resurrection, the tree of eternal life.”

In IV.11, he discusses worshipping toward the East “in expectation of His coming we worship towards the East. But this tradition of the apostles is unwritten. For much that has been handed down to us by tradition is unwritten.” In IV.12, he considers the holy and immaculate mysteries of the Lord. The Eucharist is communion with Christ and with each other. We are co-embodiments of Christ.[41] “We were therefore given a birth by water and Spirit: I mean, by the holy baptism: and the food is the very bread of life, our Lord Jesus Christ, Who came down from heaven…. can He not then make the bread His body and the wine and water His blood? … For just as God made all that He made by the energy of the Holy Spirit, so also now the energy of the Spirit performs those things that are supernatural and which it is not possible to comprehend unless by faith alone…. bread and wine are employed: for God knows the infirmity of humanity: for in general human beings turn away discontentedly from what is not well-worn by custom: and so with His usual indulgence He performs His supernatural works through familiar objects: and just as, in the case of baptism, since it is man's custom to wash himself with water and anoint himself with oil, He connected the grace of the Spirit with the oil and the water and made it the water of regeneration, in like manner since it is man's custom to eat and to drink water and wine, He connected His divinity with these and made them His body and blood in order that we may rise to what is supernatural through what is familiar and natural. The body which is born of the holy Virgin is in truth body united with divinity, not that the body which was received up into the heavens descends, but that the bread itself and the wine are changed into God's body and blood. But if you enquire how this happens, it is enough for you to learn that it was through the Holy Spirit, just as the Lord took on Himself flesh that subsisted in Him and was born of the holy Mother of God through the Spirit. And we know nothing further save that the Word of God is true and energizes and is omnipotent, but the manner of this cannot be searched out. But one can put it well thus, that just as in nature the bread by the eating and the wine and the water by the drinking are changed into the body and blood of the eater and drinker, and do not become a different body from the former one, so the bread of the table and the wine and water are supernaturally changed by the invocation and presence of the Holy Spirit into the body and blood of Christ, and are not two but one and the same…. The bread and the wine are not merely figures of the body and blood of Christ (God forbid!) but the deified body of the Lord itself.”

In IV.14, he considers the genealogy of the Lord and the holy much-lauded ever-virgin one Mother of God. His poetic imagination soared with analogies like this to the dual generation of the Son. “For just as the latter (Eve) was formed from Adam without connection, so also did the former bring forth the new Adam, who was brought forth in accordance with the laws of parturition and above the nature of generation. For He who was of the Father, yet without mother, was born of woman without a father's co-operation. And so far as He was born of woman, His birth was in accordance with the laws of parturition, while so far as He had no father, His birth was above the nature of generation.” He even says, “The conception, indeed, was through the sense of hearing,” a legitimate spiritualization.[42]

IV.15 concerns the honor due to the saints and their remains. “The divine Scripture likewise saith that the souls of the just are in God's hand and death cannot lay hold of them. For death is rather the sleep of the saints than their death.[43] For they travailed in this life and shall to the end, and Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints. What then, is more precious than to be in the hand of God? For God is Life and Light, and those who are in God's hand are in life and light.”

IV.16 considers images of Christ and “our Lady.” “On what grounds, then, do we shew reverence to each other unless because we are made after God's image? For as Basil, that much-versed expounder of divine things, says, the honor given to the image passes over to the prototype…. the Fathers gave their sanction to depicting these events on images as being acts of great heroism, in order that they should form a concise memorial of them. Often, doubtless, when we have not the Lord's passion in mind and see the image of Christ's crucifixion, His saving passion is brought back to remembrance, and we fall down and worship not the material but that which is imaged: just as we do not worship the material of which the Gospels are made, nor the material of the Cross, but that which these typify…. It is just the same also in the case of the Mother of the Lord. For the honor which we give to her is referred to Him Who was made of her incarnate. And similarly also the brave acts of holy men stir us up to be brave and to emulate and imitate their valor and to glorify God.” 

In IV.17 he considers scripture. As trees receive nourishment from water, “so also the soul watered by the divine Scripture is enriched and gives fruit in its season… Let us draw of the fountain of the garden perennial and purest waters springing into life eternal. Here let us luxuriate, let us revel insatiate: for the Scriptures possess inexhaustible grace. But if we are able to pluck anything profitable from outside sources, there is nothing to forbid that. Let us become tried money-dealers, heaping up the true and pure gold and discarding the spurious.” He suggests that unless the Spirit is active to penetrate our self-deceptions, how could we, trapped in a history of finely tuned deception, recognize the address? The Spirit works preveniently to make the mind proximately receptive, to enable openness to the divine address, and to prepare the believer to be unafraid to receive the truth.

In IV.18, he has in important discussion of things concerning Christ. the identity of Christ in the gospels requires distinguishing the human, divine, or divine-human. Before the incarnate theandric union (Consubstantiality with the Father, the perfection of the person, the mutual indwelling of the persons in each other, the subordination of the Son to the Father, the will of the Father as fulfilled by the Son, or the fulfillment of prophecy), during the time of the incarnate union (the deification of the flesh by assuming and lifting up the human, the humbling of the Word by lowering from glory to finitude, by assumption of the flesh, or by temporarily emptying, permeation of both deity and humanity in the union by uniting, anointing, an intimate conjoining, permeating, by mutual indwelling), after the union (so as to show the divine or human nature or one person displaying both divinity and humanity), and after the resurrection (as pertaining to divinity, or to humanity, or to both natures). Each episode will exhibit one of these characteristics. This theandric premise may offer some assistance in reading the gospel narratives.[44] At first, I rejected this idea, but as I think about it, some of the nature miracles could be ascribed to after the resurrection, while the ambiguity of the historical Jesus could be after the union. Most of the Gospel of John would be after the resurrection. I will have to see.

In IV.19-21, scripture teaches that God antecedently wills the salvation of all. In IV.19, God is not the cause of evils. In IV.20, there are not two kingdoms. In IV.21, he ponders the foreknowledge of God in creating persons who would sin and not repent. “God makes all His works good, but each becomes of its own choice good or evil.”

In IV.22, he discusses the law of God and the law of sin. Given the weakness of the flesh, “it is impossible to carry out the precepts of the Lord except by patience and prayer. In IV.23, he opposes Jewish thought on the Sabbath. 

IV.24 considers virginity. Here is a place where “orthodox faith” would find much disagreement with the most conservative Protestant of today. For John, even though the Genesis text has God commanding Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, he argues that God did not intend sex for the Garden of Eden. “For the first parents were the work of virginity and not of marriage. But celibacy is, as we said, an imitation of the angels. Wherefore virginity is as much more honorable than marriage, as the angel is higher than humanity. …    Good indeed is the procreation of children enjoined by the law, and good is marriage on account of fornications, for it does away with these, and by lawful intercourse does not permit the madness of desire to he caromed into unlawful acts. Good is marriage for those who have no continence: but that virginity is better which increases the fruitfulness of the soul and offers to God the seasonable fruit of prayer. Marriage is honorable and the bed undefiled, but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.”

IV.25 considers circumcision. “For just as the circumcision does not cut off a useful member of the body but only a useless superfluity, so by the holy baptism we are circumcised from sin, and sin clearly is, so to speak, the superfluous part of desire and not useful desire. For it is quite impossible that any one should have no desire at all nor ever experience the taste of pleasure. But the useless part of pleasure, that is to say, useless desire and pleasure, it is this that is sin from which holy baptism circumcises us.”

IV.26 considers the antichrist. “But in a peculiar and special sense he who comes at the consummation of the age is called Antichrist. First, then, it is requisite that the Gospel should be preached among all nations.” The universal preaching of the gospel does not imply the conversion of single living person before the end, but rather, testimony be given, and believers found throughout the earth. “And then shall that wicked one be revealed, even him whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders(2), with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish, whom the Lord shall consume with the word of His mouth and shall destroy with the brightness of His coming….he becomes man as the offspring of fornication and receives all the energy of Satan. For God, foreknowing the strangeness of the choice that he would make, allows the devil to take up his abode in him. He is, therefore, as we said, the offspring of fornication and is nurtured in secret, and on a sudden he rises up and rebels and assumes rule. And in the beginning of his rule, or rathe…r tyranny, he assumes the role of sanctity. But when he becomes master, he persecutes the Church of God and displays all his wickedness. But he will come with signs and lying wonders, fictitious and not real, and he will deceive and lead away from the living God those whose mind rests on an unsound and unstable foundation, so that even the elect shall, if it be possible, be made to stumble…. And the Lord shall come out of heaven… Let no one, therefore, look for the Lord to come from earth, but out of Heaven.” The notion of Antichrist resists the illusion of an ever-increasing, progressive, immanently developing justice growing naturally from within history.

IV.27 considers the resurrection. Orthodox faith affirms “the resurrection of the dead. For there will be in truth, there will be, a resurrection of the dead, and by resurrection we mean resurrection of bodies…. For if they define death as the separation of soul and body, resurrection surely is the re-union of soul and body.” He connects the hope of the resurrection of the dead to moral concerns. Resurrection is a necessary link in the moral chain of divine promises. “For if there is no resurrection, let us eat and drink: let us pursue a life of pleasure and enjoyment…. For God is just and is the rewarder of those who submit patiently to Him. Wherefore if it is the soul alone that engages in the contests of virtue, it is also the soul alone that will receive the crown. And if it were the soul alone that revels in pleasures, it would also be the soul alone that would be justly punished. But since the soul does not pursue either virtue or vice separate from the body, both together will obtain that which is their just due.” He refers to the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John, saying, “He did not raise the soul without the body, but the body along with the soul: and not another body but the very one that was corrupt….    We shall therefore rise again, our souls being once more united with our bodies, now made incorruptible and having put off corruption, and we shall stand beside the awful judgment-seat of Christ: and the devil and his demons and the man that is his, that is the Antichrist and the impious and the sinful, will be given over to everlasting fire: not material fire like our fire, but such fire as God would know. But those who have done good will shine forth as the sun with the angels into life eternal, with our Lord Jesus Christ, ever seeing Him and being in His sight and deriving unceasing joy from Him, praising Him with the Father and the Holy Spirit throughout the limitless ages of ages. Amen.” Redemption restores what had been lost in the fall, the full exercise of the free will to celebrate and reflect the divine good endlessly.

My trinitarian statement

Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and John of Damascus were among those who urged church councils to adopt a set of beliefs regarding God, Christology, and the Holy Spirit. They would present their beliefs in concise, summary form. I thought I would put my mind to the same task. 

Christian theology builds upon the ambiguous human experience of the divine, the sense that our finite and temporal lives connect to something much larger, and we are accountable for the lives we lead.

The Trinity is the way Christians identify God. This doctrine seeks a glimpse into the inner life of God, even though God is beyond our comprehension. God is infinite and eternal, meaning that God is present in every place and in every moment, giving God intimate knowledge of every place and every moment. The infinite and eternal essence of God means that the energy, grace, and presence of God is a reality for every finite and temporal thing. The mark of deity is endless futurity. The divine essence keeps things moving forward to an open future in a way that transcends past conditions and remains open to newness. The essence (οὐσία) of God is energy and movement. The Father has always generated the Son and the life-giving gift of the Spirit has always proceeded from the Father. Therefore, the inner life of God always included humanity and the finite and temporal world from which humanity would emerge. The Father was always moving outward toward all that the Son and Spirit embrace about our world. The three as ὑ πόστασις have always self-distinguished themselves from each other, recognizing that in distinguishing oneself from another defines oneself as also dependent upon that other. The essence of God is the loving embrace of this mutual relationship and dependence upon each other. The Father, through the Son and Spirit, has brought finitude, temporality, and therefore suffering, into the inner life of God, having done so eternally. 

What Christians say about the essence of God has its basis in revelation witnessed to in scripture. The event of the Jewish teacher and prophet Jesus of Nazareth is the heart of this revelation. What some would say is impossible, the humbling of divinity to embrace a human being in his finitude, temporality, suffering, and death, Christianity proclaims as good news for the world. Raised by Jewish parents, Mary and Joseph, raised in the humble setting of Nazareth and distant from Jewish political and religious authority in Jerusalem and Roman political and economic authority in Rome, he received baptism by John the Baptist, taught using the humble form of parable and aphorism rather than the exalted form of learned discourse, and performed healings and exorcisms. Jesus lived a Spirit-filled life and ministry, led a life faithful to the Shema of Israel and the Jewish people, faithful to a loving embrace of the neighbor, and faithful to the proclamation to the rule of God. The Son or Word of the Father, in this event that embraces finitude, temporality, suffering, and death, is revealing what it is to be God and determines the nature of divine infinity and eternity. Jesus of Nazareth is the incarnation of the Son. As the Triune God is a communion within divine life, so is the life of Jesus an intimate communion of the divine and human. While differing in gender, race, and economic settings, what makes us human transcends such differences, making the incarnation of the Son of saving significance for all persons. The oneness of the divine essence has a parallel in the oneness of human essence. The self-actualizing of divine life within the relations of the trinity has a parallel in the actualization of a human life in relation to others. Despite sin and suffering in this world, the Father lovingly embraces this world and finds it worthy of reconciliation and redemption. The event of incarnation discloses the enslavement of humanity by sin. The cross reveals the extent of the love of God for humanity, bringing forgiveness of sin. He endured the suffering and shame of the cross in his death for others and for their sin, but also received the gift of life through the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit. 

Those who turn toward this event live their lives in Christ and Christ lives in them, through the life-giving influence of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit gathers a people called the church who place their faith in the truth of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, thereby experiencing justification with God, builds them up in love toward God and their neighbor, thereby experiencing sanctification through the Spirit, and enlivens them to a life of hope, thereby living with a meaningful vocation. They can live in reconciliation with God and with their world. They honor the disciples and other saints, leaders, and teachers of the church throughout its history. The focus of this life is no longer inner-directed but directed outward, under the influence of the Spirit, toward faithfully embodying the truth of the event of revelation through prayer and meditation upon the biblical witness, especially in love toward God and neighbor, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, the vice-virtue lists in the New Testament, and leading a faithful, loving, and hope-filled life. In this way, embracing the truth expressed in the doctrine of the trinity by faith will not be an abstraction, but engages those who believe it in an ongoing process of transforming love through the Spirit and into the image of the Son. One becomes part of a community united with Christ in his baptism, a symbol of moral cleansing, and in the Supper over which he presides, in communion with Christ and with fellow believers. One can then live with a future that includes the hope of personal and cosmic redemption, in which finitude and temporality will find their completion in the loving embrace of the trinitarian relation.

  

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[1] Barth, CD I.1, 25

[2] Barth CD I.1, 276,

[3] (Barth CD I.2, 495).

[4] Orthodox Faith 4.32-33.

[5] Orthodox Faith, 4.22-38.

[6] Orthodox Faith 6.1-18, 

[7] Orthodox Faith 7.14-21 

[8] Orthodox Faith 6.6-8 

[9] Barth CD I.1, 434.

[10] Orthodox Faith, 8.107, 122, tropos hyparxeos, or way of having being or even mode of origin.

[11] Pannenberg ST vol I,  P. 311.

[12] Pannenberg, ST vol I, 305.

[13] 2.32-36, how God is begotten from God we do not know. Exposition fidei 8.191-193, we have been taught that there is a difference between being begotten and proceeding, but we do not know the character of that difference. 

[14] Barth CD I.1, 464.

[15] Orthodox Faith 8.199-200, 

[16] Barth, CD I.1, 370, 

[17] Pannenberg, ST vol I, P. 319.

[18] (Barth, CD II.1, 328.)

[19] Pannenberg ST vol I, 343.

[20] Orthodox Faith 13.11

[21] Barth, CD I.1, 469. 

[22] Barth, CD I.2, 29.

[23] Barth, CD III.3, 382, 

[24] Orthodox Faith iii, 45-50 

[25] Pannenberg ST vol II, 211.

[26] Pannenberg ST Vol II, 240.

[27] Pannenberg ST II, 36.

[28] Barth, III.3, 4.

[29] Barth, I.2, 163, 

[30] Pannenberg vol II, 387.

[31] Orthodox Faith, 51.57-61.

[32] Exposition fidei, 77.5-8.

[33] Barth I.2, 137.

[34] Barth, CD I.2, 33.

[35] Orthodox Faith 56.60-62.

[36] Orthodox Faith, 58.43-50, 59.193-196, 46.24-30. 

[37] Orthodox Faith 68.19-22, 

[38] Orthodox Faith, 47.75-85.

[39] Pannenberg ST vol III, 21.

[40] Barth, CD I.2, 783,

[41] Orthodox Faith 4.13.

[42] Barth CD I.2, 201.

[43] Orthodox Faith 88.25-26.

[44] Oden, Classic Christianity, 308-9.