We must now turn against our opponents and attempt to refute the “contradictions” they bring against us from what Scripture calls “knowledge falsely so called.”
They say that the Holy Spirit must not be ranked together with the Father and the Son because his nature is different and his dignity inferior. Against them it is right to answer with the apostles: “We must obey God rather than men.”
For when our Lord instituted the baptism of salvation, he commanded his disciples to baptize all nations “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” not disdaining fellowship with the Spirit. If these people then say that we must not rank the Spirit with the Father and the Son, is it not plain that they openly oppose God’s commandment?
If they deny that this placing together signifies any fellowship or conjunction, let them explain why they think so and tell us what more intimate form of conjunction they could propose. If the Lord did not join the Spirit with the Father and himself in baptism, then they should not accuse us of joining them, for we neither believe nor say anything different from the Lord. But if the Spirit is indeed joined there with Father and Son—and no one is shameless enough to deny it—then let them stop blaming us for following the words of Scripture.
Yet every weapon has been prepared against us. Every intellectual missile is aimed in our direction. Blasphemous tongues strike us again and again, more fiercely than Stephen of old was struck by those who killed the servants of Christ. But they must not be allowed to hide the fact that the attack on us is only the pretext for their war. The real target lies higher.
They say they are setting their engines and snares against us, calling one another to the attack according to each person’s strength or cunning. In reality, the object under assault is the faith itself. The single purpose of this entire alliance of opponents and enemies of “sound doctrine” is to tear down the foundation of the faith of Christ by leveling apostolic tradition to the ground and destroying it completely.
Like debtors—debtors who imagine themselves acting in good faith—they demand written proof and reject the unwritten tradition of the Fathers as worthless. But we will not relax our defense of the truth or cowardly abandon the cause. The Lord delivered to us as a necessary and saving doctrine that the Holy Spirit is to be ranked together with the Father. Our opponents think otherwise. They choose to divide and tear apart, assigning the Spirit to the nature of a ministering spirit.
Is it not obvious that they give their own blasphemy more authority than the law established by the Lord? Let us therefore put mere contentiousness aside and consider the matter itself.
From where does our identity as Christians come? Everyone will answer: from faith. And how are we saved? Plainly because through the grace given in baptism we were born again. How else could it be?
Once we acknowledge that this salvation is established through the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are we then to cast away “the pattern of teaching” we received? Should we not rather groan if we are now found farther from salvation “than when we first believed,” denying today what we received then?
Whether someone leaves this life without baptism or has received a baptism lacking something required by the tradition, the loss is equally serious. And whoever does not always and everywhere hold fast, as a sure safeguard, the confession recorded at our first entrance into the faith—when we were turned “from idols” to “the living God”—makes himself a “stranger” to God’s “promises” and fights against his own written pledge, the confession he made when he professed the faith.
If my baptism was the beginning of life for me, and the day of regeneration was the first of days, then clearly the words spoken in the grace of adoption were more honorable than all others. Can I now, corrupted by the seductive arguments of these men, abandon the tradition that guided me to the light, gave me the knowledge of God, and made me, once an enemy through sin, a child of God?
For myself, I pray that I may depart from this life to the Lord holding this confession. And I charge them to preserve the faith securely until the day of Christ, to keep the Spirit inseparable from the Father and the Son, and to preserve in both the confession of faith and the doxology the teaching delivered to them at baptism.