31. We see how the living Son of the living
Father, He Who is God from God, reveals the unity of the Divine nature,
indissolubly One and the same, and the mystery of His birth in these
words, I and the Father are One. Because the seeming
arrogance of them engendered a prejudice against Him, He made it more
clear that He had spoken in the conscious possession of Divinity by
saying, Ye say that I have blasphemed because I said, I am the Son
of God; thus shewing that the oneness of His nature with that of
God was due to birth from God. And then, to clench their faith in
His birth by a positive assertion, and to guard them, at the same time,
from imagining that the birth involves a difference of nature, He
crowns His argument with the words, Believe the works, that the
Father is in Me, and I in the Father. Does His birth, as here
revealed, display His Divinity as not His by nature, as not His own by
right? Each is in the Other; the birth of the Son is from the
Father only; no alien or unlike nature has been raised to Godhead and
subsists as God. God from God, eternally abiding, owes His
Godhead to none other than God. Import, if you see your
opportunity, two gods into the Church’s faith; separate Son from
Father as far as you can, consistently with the birth which you admit;
yet still the Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father, and
this by no interchange of emanations but by the perfect birth of the
living nature. Thus you cannot add together God the Father and
God the Son, and count Them as two Gods, for They Two are One God. You cannot
confuse Them together, for They Two are not One Person. And so
the Apostolic faith rejects two gods; for it knows nothing of two
Fathers or two Sons. In confessing the Father it confesses the
Son; it believes in the Son in believing in the Father. For the
name of Father involves that of Son, since without having a son none
can be a father. Evidence of the existence of a son is proof that
there has been a father, for a son cannot exist except from a
father. When we confess that God is One we deny that He is
single; for the Son is the complement of the Father, and to the Father
the Son’s existence is due. But birth works no change in
the Divine nature; both in Father and in Son that nature is true to its
kind. And the right expression for us of this unity of nature is
the confession that They, being Two by birth and generation, are One
God, not one Person.