Our opponents meet our argument with such deliberate perversity that they cannot even claim ignorance. It is obvious that they are angry with us because we complete the doxology to the Only-begotten together with the Father and do not separate the Holy Spirit from the Son. For this they call us innovators, revolutionaries, inventors of strange expressions, and every other insulting name they can find. Yet their abuse does not provoke me. Were it not that their loss causes me “great sorrow and unceasing anguish,” I might almost thank them for their blasphemy, since through it they provide an occasion for blessing: “Blessed are you when people revile you for my sake.”
The reason for their indignation is this. They say that the Son is not together with the Father but comes after the Father. Therefore, they argue, glory must be offered to the Father “through him,” but not “with him,” because “with him” expresses equality of dignity while “through him” signifies subordination. They also say that the Spirit is not to be ranked together with the Father and the Son, but beneath the Son and the Father—not coordinated but subordinated, not numbered together with them but numbered beneath them.
With this kind of technical language they distort the simplicity and straightforwardness of the faith. Their cleverness leaves no one unaware of what they are doing, and thus they deprive themselves even of the excuse that ignorance might have offered.
Let us first ask them what they mean when they say that the Son is “after the Father.” Do they mean later in time, lower in order, or inferior in dignity?
No one could be so senseless as to say that the Maker of the ages is later in time, for no interval separates the Father and the Son in their natural conjunction. Even from ordinary human relations, it is impossible to think of the Son as temporally later than the Father simply because he is Son. Father and Son are conceived together through their relationship. Moreover, we normally call events “earlier” or “later” according to their distance from our own time: the events of Noah are earlier than those of Sodom because Noah is farther from us, while those of Sodom are later because they lie nearer to our own day.
How, then, could anyone, without both impiety and extreme folly, measure the existence of the life that transcends every time and age by its distance from the present? Are God the Father and God the Son, who exists before the ages, to be compared as though they were created things subject to beginning and corruption, one being called earlier and the other later?
The Father’s supposed “greater remoteness” is not even conceivable, because thought and understanding are powerless to go beyond the Lord’s generation. John has admirably confined our conception within two words: “In the beginning was the Word.” Thought cannot travel beyond “was,” nor imagination beyond “the beginning.” However far backward your mind may go, it cannot get behind the “was”; however much you strain to see beyond the Son, you cannot pass beyond “the beginning.” Godliness therefore teaches us to think of the Son together with the Father.
If they imagine the Son’s relation to the Father as a kind of spatial lowering—as though the Father sat above and the Son were pushed down to the next seat—then let them say so openly. Nothing further would be needed; the mere statement would expose its absurdity. Those who divide “above” and “below” between Father and Son forget that sound faith confesses God to fill all things. They do not even remember the prophet’s words: “If I ascend into heaven, you are there; if I descend into Hades, you are there also.”
Leaving aside the absurdity of assigning place to incorporeal realities, what excuse can there be for their shameless attack on the scriptural words, “Sit at my right hand,” and, “He sat down at the right hand of the majesty of God”? “Right hand” does not indicate a lower location. It signifies equality of relation and the dignity of honor. It is not to be understood bodily—as though there were a left side in God—but Scripture sets before us the greatness of the Son’s dignity through language of the place of honor.
Let our opponents, then, try to claim that such language indicates inferiority. They must first learn that “Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God”; that he is “the image of the invisible God” and “the radiance of his glory”; and that “God the Father has sealed him,” impressing himself upon him. Are these and the countless similar passages of Scripture declarations of humiliation, or are they proclamations of the majesty of the Only-begotten and of the equality of his glory with the Father?
Let them hear the Lord himself plainly setting forth the equal dignity of his glory with the Father: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”; “when the Son comes in the glory of his Father”; that all “should honor the Son just as they honor the Father”; “we beheld his glory, glory as of the Only-begotten from the Father”; and “the Only-begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father.” They disregard all these passages and then assign the Son the place reserved for his enemies. The Father’s bosom is a fitting place for the Son; the footstool is the place for enemies who must be subdued.
I have touched on these testimonies only briefly because we must proceed to other matters. At your leisure you can gather the evidence together and contemplate the height of the Only-begotten’s glory and the surpassing greatness of his power. Even what we have said is sufficient for a well-disposed hearer—unless “right hand” and “bosom” are understood bodily and therefore in a way that both confines God within spatial limits and invents shape, form, and bodily posture, all of which are utterly foreign to the absolute, infinite, and incorporeal nature.
Indeed, whatever degradation such bodily conceptions imply falls on the Father no less than on the Son. Whoever uses such arguments does not diminish the Son alone; he also blasphemes the Father. Any insult directed against the Son inevitably passes to the Father. If someone places the Father physically “above” and the Only-begotten physically “below,” every consequence of bodily existence follows for the god he has imagined. Such notions are the fantasies of intoxication and madness.
How, then, can those who have been taught by the Lord that “the one who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father” refuse to worship and glorify with the Father the one who is joined to him in nature, glory, and dignity? What defense shall we offer at the fearful judgment of all creation if, when the Lord plainly says that he will come “in the glory of his Father,” when Stephen sees Jesus standing at God’s right hand, when Paul testifies in the Spirit that Christ “is at the right hand of God,” when the Father says, “Sit at my right hand,” and when the Holy Spirit bears witness that he has sat down “at the right hand of the majesty” of God, we nevertheless try to lower the one who shares the honor and the throne from equality to an inferior rank?
Standing and sitting, as I understand them, signify the fixity and complete stability of the divine nature. Baruch, wishing to show the immutability and immobility of God’s mode of existence, says, “You sit forever, while we perish utterly.” And the right hand, in my judgment, indicates equality of honor. It is therefore reckless to deprive the Son of participation in the doxology as though he deserved only an inferior place of honor.