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St Francis Magazine Vol 8, No 4 | August 2012 ought to think of Jesus Christ as we do of God, as judge of the living and the dead. And we ought not to belittle the one who is our salvation” (2 Clement 1.1). Ignatius of Antioch (martyred 110), says: “There is one only physician, of flesh and of spirit, generate and ingenerate, God in man, true Life in death, Son of Mary and Son of God, first passible and then impassible, Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom 7:2). He clarifies this further in one of his epistles to the church in Ephesus: “...God Himself appearing in the form of a man, for the renewal of eternal life” (Epistle to the Ephesians 4:13). And: “For our God Jesus Christ was, according to the appointment of God, conceived in the womb by Mary, of the seed of David, but by the Holy Ghost” (ibid 4:9). Irenaeus (died 202), in Ad. Her. 2.17.4, says: “The Father is God revealing himself, the Son is God revealed (the appearing revelation)”… “But he, Jesus, is himself in his own right, beyond all men who ever lived, God, Lord, and king eternal, and the incarnate word, proclaimed by all the prophets, the apostles …The Scriptures would not have borne witness to these things concerning him, if, like everyone else, he were mere man” Ad. Her. 3:19.1-2. Irenaeus even went on to present a clear belief in the Triune God: The Church, though dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith: ...one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God, and the advents, and the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in the flesh of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord, and His manifestation from heaven in the glory of the Father ‘to gather all things in one,' and to raise up anew all flesh of the whole human race, in order that to Christ Jesus, our Lord, and God, and Savior, and King, according to the will of the invisible Father, ‘every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess, to him, and that He should execute just judgment towards all...’ (Ad. Her. 10.l) St Francis Magazine is a publication of Interserve and Arab Vision 446
St Francis Magazine Vol 8, No 4 | August 2012 Melito of Sardis identified Jesus Christ as fully God and fully man in his writings around 177 AD: “Being God and likewise perfect man, he gave positive indications of his two natures: of his deity, by the miracles during the three years following after his baptism… he concealed the signs of his deity, although he was the true God existing before the ages” Anastasius of Sinai's, The Guide 13. Athenagoras wrote in 160 AD: “…they [the Christians] hold the Father to be God, and the Son God, and the Holy Spirit, and declare their union and their distinction in order.” A Plea for the Christians 10.3. Clement of Alexandria in 190 AD makes a strong case for Christ’s deity and the Trinity in several writings: “I understand nothing else than the Holy Trinity to be meant; for the third is the Holy Spirit, and the Son is the second, by whom all things were made according to the will of the Father.” Stromata, Book 5, ch. 14. “This Word, then, the Christ, the cause of both our being at first (for He was in God) and of our well-being, this very Word has now appeared as man, He alone being both, both God and man.” Exhortation to the Heathen, ch 2 Alexander of Alexandria (died 326 AD) wrote: Thus concerning this, we believe--as it seems best to the apostolic church--in one unbegotten Father, who of his being has no cause, who is immutable and unchangeable, always according to the same things in the same state, neither receiving progress nor diminution, who is giver of the Law, Prophets, and Gospels, who is Lord of patriarchs, apostles, and all the saints; and in one Lord Jesus Christ the only-begotten Son of God, begotten not from nothing but from the Father who is, not according to the likenesses of bodies by dissections or emanations from divisions, as it appears to Sabellius and Valentinus, but inexplicably and indescribably, according to him who said, as we set forth above, 'Who will describe his generation' (Isa. 53:8). Letter to Alexander of Thessalonica, 46 Those confessions of faith were never mere theoretical writings, but were also repeated and recited throughout the liturgies for baptism and the Eucharist. The oldest Coptic baptismal formula says: St Francis Magazine is a publication of Interserve and Arab Vision 447
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