Nicene and Post-Nicene Church Fathers Series 2 - The Still Small ...

In how many ways “Through whom” is used; and in what sense “with whom” is…
Father. Do not then let us understand by what is called a “commandment” a peremptory
mandate delivered by organs of speech, and giving orders to the Son, as to a subordinate,
concerning what He ought to do. Let us rather, in a sense befitting the Godhead, perceive
a transmission of will, like the reflexion of an object in a mirror, passing without note of
time from Father to Son. “For the Father loveth the Son and sheweth him all things,” 898 so
that “all things that the Father hath” belong to the Son, not gradually accruing to Him little
by little, but with Him all together and at once. Among men, the workman who has been
thoroughly taught his craft, and, through long training, has sure and established experience
in it, is able, in accordance with the scientific methods which now he has in store, to work
for the future by himself. And are we to suppose that the wisdom of God, the Maker of all
creation, He who is eternally perfect, who is wise, without a teacher, the Power of God, “in
whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” 899 needs piecemeal instruction
to mark out the manner and measure of His operations? I presume that in the vanity of
your calculations, you mean to open a school; you will make the one take His seat in the
teacher’s place, and the other stand by in a scholar’s ignorance, gradually learning wisdom
and advancing to perfection, by lessons given Him bit by bit. Hence, if you have sense to
abide by what logically follows, you will find the Son being eternally taught, nor yet ever
able to reach the end of perfection, inasmuch as the wisdom of the Father is infinite, and
the end of the infinite is beyond apprehension. It results that whoever refuses to grant that
the Son has all things from the beginning will never grant that He will reach perfection.
But I am ashamed at the degraded conception to which, by the course of the argument, I
have been brought down. Let us therefore revert to the loftier themes of our discussion.
21. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father; 900 not the express image, nor yet the
form, for the divine nature does not admit of combination; but the goodness of the will,
which, being concurrent with the essence, is beheld as like and equal, or rather the same, in
the Father as in the Son. 901
898 John v. 20.
899 Col. ii. 3, A.V. cf. the amendment of R.V., “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden,” and Bp.
Lightfoot on St. Paul’s use of the gnostic term ἀπόκρυφος
900 John xiv. 9.
901 The argument appears to be not that Christ is not the “express image,” or impress of the Father, as He is
described in Heb. i. 3, or form, as in Phil. ii. 6, but that this is not the sense in which our Lord’s words in St. John
xiv. 9, must be understood to describe “seeing the Father.” Χαρακτὴρ and μορφὴ are equivalent to ἡ θεία φύσις,
and μορφή is used by St. Basil as it is used by St. Paul,—coinciding with, if not following, the usage of the older
Greek philosophy,—to mean essential attributes which the Divine Word had before the incarnation (cf. Eustath-
ius in Theod. Dial. II. [Wace and Schaff Ed., p. 203]; “the express image made man,”—ὁ τῷ πνεύματι
σωματοποιηθεὶς ἄνθρωπος χαρακτήρ.) The divine nature does not admit of combination, in the sense of confusion
(cf. the protests of Theodoret in his Dialogues against the confusion of the Godhead and manhood in the Christ),
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