CHAPTER XI.—OF JESUS CHRIST, BEING TRUE GOD AND MAN, AND THE ONLY SAVIOUR OF THE WORLD
Moreover, we believe and teach that the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, was from all eternity predestinated and foreordained of the Father to be the Saviour of the world. And we believe that he was begotten, not only then, when he took flesh of the Virgin Mary, nor yet a little before the foundations of the world were laid; but before all eternity, and that of the Father after an unspeakable manner. For Isaiah says (liii. 8), ‘Who can tell his generation?’ And Micah says (v. 2), ‘Whose egress hath been from everlasting.’ And John says (i. 1), ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,’ etc.
Therefore the Son is coequal and consubstantial with the Father, as touching his divinity: true God, not by name only, or by adoption, or by special favor, but in substance and nature (Phil. ii. 6). Even as the apostle says elsewhere, ‘This is the true God, and life everlasting’ (1 John v. 20). Paul also says, ‘He hath made his Son the heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; the same is the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person, bearing up all things by his mighty word’ (Heb. i. 2, 3). Likewise, in the Gospel, the Lord himself says, ‘Father, glorify thou me with thyself, with the glory which I had with thee before hte world was’ (John xvii. 5). Also elsewhere it is written in the Gospel, ‘The Jews sought how to kill Jesus, because he said that God was his Father, making himself equal with God’ (John v. 18).
We therefore do abhor the blasphemous doctrine of Arius, and all the Arians, uttered against the Son of God; and especially the blasphemies of Michael Servetus, the Spaniard, and of his complices, which Satan through them has, as it were, drawn out of hell, and most boldly and impiously spread abroad throughout the world against the Son of God.
We also teach and believe that the eternal Son of the eternal God was made the Son of man, of the seed of Abraham and David (Matt. i. 25); not by the means of man, as Ebion affirmed, but that he was most purely conceived by the Holy Spirit, and born of Mary, who was always a virgin, even as the history of the Gospel does declare. And Paul says, ‘He took not on him the nature of angels, but of the
