NPNF2-08. Basil: Letters and Select Works - Holy Bible Institute

Dogmatic.eternal life.’ 445 It would be wrong, on account of the words ‘There shall none other be accountedof in comparison of Him,’ to understand the Son to be greater than the Father; normust we suppose the Father to be the only true God. Both expressions must be used inconnexion with those who are falsely styled, but are not really, gods. In the same way it issaid in Deuteronomy, ‘So the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no strange God withhim.’ 446 If God is alone invisible and wise, it does not at once follow that He is greater thanall in all things. But the God Who is over all is necessarily superior to all. Did the Apostle,when he styled the Saviour God over all, describe Him as greater than the Father? The ideais absurd. The passage in question must be viewed in the same manner. The great Godcannot be less than a different God. When the Apostle said of the Son, we look for ‘thatblessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ,’ 447did he think of Him as greater than the Father? 448 It is the Son, not the Father, Whose appearanceand advent we are waiting for. These terms are thus used without distinction ofboth the Father and the Son, and no exact nicety is observed in their employment. ‘Beingequally with God’ 449 is identical with being equal with God. 450 Since the Son ‘thought itnot robbery’ to be equal with God, how can He be unlike and unequal to God? Jews arenearer true religion than Eunomius. Whenever the Saviour called Himself no more thanSon of God, as though it were due to the Son, if He be really Son, to be Himself equal to theFather, they wished, it is said, to stone Him, not only because He was breaking the Sabbath,but because, by saying that God was His own Father, He made Himself equal with God. 451Therefore, even though Eunomius is unwilling that it should be so, according both to theApostle and to the Saviour’s own words, the Son is equal with the Father.”On Matt. xx. 23. Is not Mine to give, save for whom it is prepared. 452xliii445 1 John v. 20. There is some MS. authority for the insertion of “God” in the first clause, but none for theomission of the former ἐν τῷ.446 Deut. xxxii. 12.447 Tit. ii. 13.448 St. Basil, with the mass of the Greek Orthodox Fathers, has no idea of any such interpretation of Tit. ii.13, as Alford endeavours to support. cf. Theodoret, pp. 391 and 321, and notes.449 τὸ εἶναι ἴσα Θεῷ, as in Phil. ii. 6, tr. in A.V. to be equal with God; R.V. has to be on an equality with God.450 τῷ εἶναι ἴσον Θεῷ.451 John v. 18.452 I do not here render with the Arian gloss of A.V., infelicitously reproduced in the equally inexact translationof R.V. The insertion of the words “it shall be given” and “it is” is apparently due to a pedantic prejudice againsttranslating ἀλλά by “save” or “except,” a rendering which is supported in classical Greek by such a passage asSoph., O.T. 1331, and in Hellenistic Greek by Mark ix. 8. The Vulgate has, quite correctly, “non est meum darevobis, sed quibus paratum est a patre meo,” so far as the preservation of the Son as the giver is concerned. A72