15. Their starting-point is this; We
confess, they say, One only God, because Moses says, Hear, O Israel,
the Lord thy God is One Deut. vi. 4.. But is this a
truth which anyone has ever dared to doubt? Or was any believer
ever known to confess otherwise than that there is One God from Whom
are all things, One Majesty which has no birth, and that He is that
unoriginated Power? Yet this fact of the Unity of God offers no
chance for denying the Divinity of His Son. For Moses, or rather
God through Moses, laid it down as His first commandment to that
people, devoted both in Egypt and in the Desert to idols and the
worship of imaginary gods, that they must believe in One God.
There was truth and reason in the commandment, for God, from Whom are
all things, is One. But let us see whether this Moses have not
confessed that He, through Whom are all things, is also God. God
is not robbed, He is still God, if His Son share the Godhead. For
the case is that of God from God, of One from One, of God Who is One
because God is from Him. And conversely the Son is not less God
because God the Father is One, for He is the Only-begotten Son of God;
not eternally unborn, so as to deprive the Father of His Oneness, nor
yet different from God, for He is born from Him. We must not
doubt that He is God by virtue of that birth from God which proves to
us who believe that God is One; yet let us see whether Moses, who
announced to Israel, The Lord thy God is One, has also
proclaimed the Godhead of the Son. To make good our confession of
the Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ we must employ the evidence of
that same witness on whom the heretics rely for the confession of One
Only God, which they imagine to involve the denial of the Godhead of
the Son.