Читать книгу A Source Book for Ancient Church History - Joseph Cullen Ayer - Страница 142

The position of the Incarnation in the system and its relation to redemption.

In no other way could we have learned the things of God, if our Master, existing previously as the Word, had not been made man. For no one else could have declared to us the truths of the Father than the Father's own Word. For who else knew the mind of the Lord or who else has been his counsellor? [Rom. 11:34]. Nor again in any other way could we have learned except by seeing our Master with our eyes and hearing His voice with our ears; that so as imitators of His acts and doers of His words we might have fellowship with Him and receive of the fulness of Him who is perfect and who was before all creation. All this we have been made in these latter days by Him who only is supremely good and who has the gift of incorruptibility; inasmuch as we are conformed to His likeness and predestinated to become what we never were before, according to the foreknowledge of the Father, made a first-fruit of His workmanship, we have, therefore, received all this at the foreordained season, according to the dispensation of the Word, who is perfect in all things. For He, who is the mighty Word and very man, redeeming us by His blood in a reasonable manner, gave [pg 137] Himself as a ransom for those who had been led into captivity. And since apostasy tyrannized over us unjustly, for though by nature we were God's possession, it yet alienated us contrary to nature, making us its own disciples, the Word of God, powerful in all things and constant in His justice, dealt justly even with apostasy itself, redeeming from it what was His own property. Not by force, the way in which the apostasy had originally gained its mastery over us, greedily grasping at that which was not its own; but by moral force [secundum suadelam] as became God, by persuasion and not by force, regaining what He wished; so that justice might not be violated and God's ancient handiwork might not perish. Therefore, since by His own blood the Lord redeemed us and gave His soul for our soul, and His flesh for our flesh, and shed on us His Father's spirit to unite and join us in communion God and man, bringing God down to men by the descent of the Spirit, and raising up man to God by His incarnation, and by a firm and true promise giving us at His advent incorruptibility by communion with Him, and thus all the errors of the heretics are destroyed.