41. And so, lest we should believe and say
that the Father works in the Son through His own omnipotent energy, and
not through the Son’s possession, as His birthright, of the
Divine nature, Christ says, Believe Me, that I am in the Father, and
the Father in Me. What means this, Believe Me?
Clearly it refers back to the previous, Shew us the
Father. Their faith—that faith which had demanded that
the Father should be shewn—is confirmed by this command to
believe. He was not satisfied with saying, He that hath seen
Me hath seen the Father also. He goes further, and expands
our knowledge, so that we can contemplate the Father in the Son,
remembering meanwhile that the Son is in the Father. Thus He
would save us from the error of imagining a reciprocal emanation of the
One into the Other, by teaching Their unity in the One nature through
birth given and received. The Lord would have us take Him at His
word, lest our hold upon the faith be shaken by His condescension in
assuming Humanity. If His flesh, His body, His passion seem to
make His Godhead doubtful, let us at least believe, on the evidence of
the works, that God is in God and God is from God, and that They are
One. For by the power of Their nature Each is in the Other.
The Father loses nothing that is His because it is in the Son, and the
Son receives His whole Sonship from the Father. Bodily natures
are not created after such a fashion that they mutually contain each
other, or possess the perfect unity of one abiding nature. In
their case it would be impossible that an Only-begotten Son could exist eternally,
inseparable from the true Divine nature of His Father. Yet this
is the peculiar property of God the Only-begotten, this the faith
revealed in the mystery of His true birth, this the work of the
Spirit’s power, that to be, and to be in God, is for Christ the
same thing; and that this being in God is not the presence of one thing
within another, as a body inside another body, but that the life and
subsistence of Christ is such that He is within the subsisting God, and
within Him, yet having a subsistence of His own. For Each
subsists in such wise as not to exist apart from the Other, since They
are Two through birth given and received, and therefore only one Divine
nature exists. This is the meaning of the words, I and the
Father are One, and He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father
also, and I in the Father and the Father in Me. They
tell us that the Son Who is born is not different or inferior to the
Father; that His possession, by right of birth, of the Divine nature as
Son of God, and therefore nothing else than God, is the supreme truth
conveyed in the mysterious revelation of the One Godhead in Father and
Son. And therefore the doctrine of the generation of the
Only-begotten is guiltless of ditheism, for the Son of God, in being
born into the Godhead, manifested in Himself the nature of God His
Begetter.