21. With a view to deprive of substantive divinity
the Only-begotten God, Who was God the Word with God in the beginning,
they make Him merely the utterance of the voice of God. The Son
is related to God His Father, they say, as the words to the
speaker. They are trying to creep into the position, that it was
not God the eternal Word, abiding in the form of God, Who was born as
Christ the Man, Whose life therefore springs from a human origin, not
from the mystery of a spiritual conception; that He was not God the
Word, making Himself man by birth from the Virgin, but the Word of God
dwelling in Jesus as the spirit of prophecy dwelt in the
prophets. They accuse us of saying that Christ was born man with
body and soul different from ours. But we preach the Word made
flesh, Christ emptying Himself of the form of God and taking the form
of a servant, perfect according to the fashion of human form, born a
man after the likeness of ourselves: that being true Son of God,
He is indeed true Son of Man, neither the less Man because born of God,
nor the less God because Man born of God.