DISCOURSE III.

ONE ONLY GOD, THE SUPREME CREATOR.

MARK Xii. 32, 34:

And the Scribe said unto him, Well, Master, thou hast said the truth: for there is one God, and there is none other but he. And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.

FROM these words it is, first, observable, that when the scribe saith there is but one God, his meaning must be this-that there was only one who was the Creator of heaven and earth, and is so styled throughout the Old and New Testament: for this was the only one God mentioned in the words cited by our Saviour as the God of the Israelites, who owned no other God but the Creator of the world; and so the scribe could speak of no other God. Secondly, observe that our Lord owns, that this scribe, in saying this, answered vovvεxã, as a man of a good and right understanding in the matter; whereas had it been necessary to be believed, that he himself and the Holy Ghost were the same God as to numerical essence with the Father, or the Sovereign Creator of all things, our Lord could not have given him this testimony of his right understanding in this matter; seeing his faith, according to that doctrine, must have been deficient in two objects of it, as necessary to be believed as was the article of God the Father and Creator of all things. And St. James* writes to the same Jews thus: "Thou believest T ED ES TV, that God is one, thou doest well," without giving us the least hint of a distinction between the Godhead and the Person. See also Gal. iii. 20.

I therefore shall attempt to shew in what sense it is a certain truth, that there is but one God, and that there is no other but he; and, consequentially, in what sense it is, and may be owned, that Jesus Christ is also God.

As, therefore, the word God signifies that self-existent Being who alone has all perfections and all dominion, absolutely in and of himself, original, underived, and independent on any, in this

* James ii. 19.

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sense, certain it is that there is but one God alone. And that our Lord Jesus Christ is not God in this sense, is and must be owned by all the orthodox, who profess him to be the Son of God, God of God, proceeding from the Father by generation and communication of substance to him; and so not self-existent, not ungenerated, nor underived, and not having all his excellencies from himself and from no other, but only by derivation of them from him who is the self-existent Being, or, as the schools say, ens a se, God of himself.

So that we seem all agreed in this, that there is but one selfexistent Being. And the question now seems chiefly to be this, whether one and the same numerical essence can be self-existent and not self-existent, God of God, and yet God of none, having all his perfections in and of himself, and yet all derived from another? Or, in short, whether the word God signifies three Persons in one essence, or only one Person?

Now, that God is one, sis póvos, one only, all the wiser heathens constantly have owned.

*

And hence the primitive Greek fathers, Justin M., Athenagoras, Theophilus Antiochenus, and Tatian, in their apologies to the heathen emperors, plead for the same freedom for the Christians which they had granted to the philosophers, because they also did τὸ θεῖον εἰς μονάδα κατακλείειν, declare their God to be one only. In this sense did the Jews believe God to be only one; they owning no other person to be God besides the Creator of all things, as fully appears from the Dialogue of Trypho with Justin Martyr. And St. Paul saith of all Christians, know that there is no other God but one" (1 Cor. viii. 4); and (ver. 6)," that this one God is God the Father."

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And that this was the constant doctrine of all Christians, even from the beginning, will be fully proved from the concurrent testimonies of almost all the Ante-Nicene Fathers. For, first,

Hermas speaks thus: "First of all believe that there is one God, who created all things, consummated all things, and made all things out of nothing."

And this Irenæus represents as dictamen Scripturæ, the dictate of the Scripture.

Clemens Romanus § saith of the same one God, that "He is the only true God, as he had learnt from the mouth of Christ, speaking to his Father thus: This is life eternal, to know thee,

* Athenag. p. 6.

+ Primum omnium crede, quod unus est Deus, qui omnia creavit, et consummavit, et ex nihilo omnia fecit.-Lib. ii. p. 44. Mandat. I. Advers. Hær. Lib. iv. C. xxxvii. p. 330.

§ Μόνος ἀληθινὸς Θεὸς, et τὸν μόνον ἀληθινὸν Θεόν.—Clem. Rom. Sect. xliii.

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Tdy μóvov åkýlivdy Ody, to be. the only true God; to wit, in that sense in which Christ styles himself to be the true bread that came down from heaven, and to be the true vine; that is, in the most excellent and highest sense, and being so originally and from no other. And of this Clemens Irenæus saith, that he did from the apostolical tradition declare one omnipotent God, the Maker of heaven and earth, and the Former of man.

*

And Justin, in his Cohortation to the Greeks, asserts, "That the Christian religion had its beginning from the prophets, who taught that there was one God, besides whom there was no other."

Irenæus gives us the apostolical tradition of the church in these words: "There is one omnipotent God, the Maker of heaven and earth;" and then adds, "That the church declared him to be the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ:" and, saith he, Polycarp taught these things which he had learnt from the apostles, and delivered to the church as the only truth."

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And Clemens Alexandrinus § saith, "That the chief of their documents belonging to eternal life, is to know the eternal God, the Giver of eternal things, the first, the most high, the one and only good God, and afterwards to know the greatness of our Saviour after him;" which words contain a plain and full descant upon Christ's own words, John xvii. 3.

Tertullian argues thus: "If God be not one, he is no God. God therefore can be but only one: nor can he be the only one God, unless he be the greatest of all that are great; nor can he be the greatest, unless he has no equal; nor can he be without an equal, if he be not the only God. How, therefore, can there be two greatests of all that are great, when the very words themselves, greatest of all that are great, signify not to have an equal; and, forasmuch as not to have an equal can agree but to one only, there cannot be two greatest of all that are great, or two Gods, each of them without an equal.”

* Annunciare unum Deum omnipotentem, factorem cœli et terræ, plasmatorem hominis.-Lib. iii. C. iii.

† Page 34.

Unum Deum omnipotentem, factorem cœli et terræ,--hunc Patrem Domini nostri Jesu Christi ab Ecclesiis annunciari. — Irenæus, Advers. Hæreses, Lib. iii. C. iii. Et Polycarpus inquit, hæc docuit semper quæ ab Apostolis didiscerat, et quæ ecclesiæ tradidit, et sola sunt vera.-Ibid.

§ Maximum et quod est omnium documentorum ad vitam æternam spectantium caput, est γνῶναι τὸν Θεὸν αἰώνιον, καὶ δωτῆρα αἰώνιον, καὶ πρῶτον, καὶ ὑπέρτατον, καὶ ἕνα, καὶ ἀγαθὸν Θεὸν, apud Combef. p. 166, Sect. vi. vii. viii., et scire, ἔπειτα τὸ μέγεθος τοῦ Σωτῆρος μετ' ἐκεῖνον.—Ibid.

Deus si non unus est, non est. Ergo et Deus unicus erit, non aliter unicus nisi summum magnum; nec aliter summum magnum, nisi parem non habens; nec aliter parem non habens, nisi unicus fuerit. Duo ergo summa magna quomodo consistent, cum hoc sit summum magnum, par non habere; par autem, &c.-Tertul. Lib. i. Advers. Marcionem, C. iii.

And Novatian * argues almost in the same words, saying, "Whatsoever is God, is one, and alone so; one to whom nothing can be compared, seeing he hath no peer:" and then adds, "that he is that God, whom our Lord truly pronounces the only good God."

St. Cyprian saith, "That Christ hath made a grand compendium of all his precepts, that in the heavenly discipline the memory of the learners might not be burthened, but might quickly learn all that was necessary to simple faith," by saying, "This is life eternal, to know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent."

The six bishops, met at Antioch, declare this to be the faith delivered from the beginning by the apostles, and maintained by the whole Catholic church, that there is εις Θεὸς ἀγέννητος, καὶ ἀναρχος, one God, who is unbegotten and without beginning, of whom the Son is begotten, the only begotten, the invisible image, and the first-born of the creation.-Lab. Concil. Tom. I. p. 845.

Origen saith, that εds autóbɛos, kaì ảyévvytos, “the self-existent and unbegotten God, is called εd, God with an article; even that God whom Christ, in his prayer to the Father, calls the only true God. All others are called @eds, God without an article, being only made so, μETOXỹ Tñs ékεívov Debtytos, by participation of divinity from Him who is the only true God. So are magistrates and holy angels called gods in Scripture: but the first-begotten of all creatures is so in a more eminent manner, as being apXÉTUTOS EKwv, the archetypal image of all other images of God, who was in the beginning with God, &c., in Johan, p. 47." And

Arnobius saith, "We all grant that there is one Father of all, who only is immortal and unbegotten," lib. ii. p. 67. And p. 95, he inquires thus: "Is not he only unbegotten and immortal?" &c.

Lactantius saith of God the Father, that he is "Deus summus, singularis, verus, unus, the Most High, the one true and only God," as I have proved in my Disquisitions, pp. 100, 101.

* Quicquid Deus est, unum et solum esse necesse est, cui conferri nihil potest, dum parem non habet - et quem solum merito bonum pronunciat Dominus.-Novat. C. iv.

† Grande compendium præceptorum suorum, ut in disciplina cœlesti discentium memoria non laboraret, sed quod est simplici Fidei necessarium velocitur disceret, dicens, hoc est vita æterna, ut cognoscant te solum, et verum Deum, et quem misisti Jesum Christum.-Cyprian de Oratione Dominica, p. 151.

Omnes concedimus unum esse rerum Patrem, immortalem, atque ingenitum solum. Lib. ii. p. 67 et p. 95. Nonne solus ingenitus immortalis, et perpetuus solus est?

Eusebius* is so copious upon this subject, that it would be tedious to recite all his words. The very title of one of his chapters runs thus-that "the church acknowledges but one God, though she owns Christ to be God of God;" and in the vith chapter of the same book he speaks thus:† "to us Christians there is but one God the Father, from whom are all things, according to the apostle, 1 Cor. viii. 4, 6."

Here we have Hermas and Clemens Romanus, in the first century; Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Irenæus and Clemens Alexandrinus, in the second; Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen, Novatian, and the six bishops of Antioch, in the third; Arnobius, Lactantius and Eusebius, in the fourth; all confirming this tradition apostolical, that there was but one supreme God alone, and that all the churches taught that he is the Father of our Lord Jesus.

That in this sense the Scripture doth assert that there is but one God, and that there is no other but he, is evident from all those places which speak of God, who is solus Deus, the only God, solus Sapiens, the only wise God, the only Potentate, the only true God, the only good God, and who is God alone.

For that these words, solus, εἰ μὴ εἷς, εἰς Θεὸς, καὶ οὐκ ἐστιν ἕτερος, are all exceptive propositions, excluding all other things from being God in the same sense, is evident to common sense, and hath been fully proved in the first part of my Answer to Dr. Waterland, from the descants of the fathers upon these texts.

And it is here remarkable, that this only true and wise God, and only Potentate, is distinguished from Jesus Christ, in these very places in which these words are mentioned. For instance: this is said to "be life eternal, to believe that God [the Father] is the only true God, and to believe in Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent. And in Rom. xvi. 27, it is said, " to the only wise God be glory, through Jesus Christ."

Secondly, that our Lord Jesus Christ, though he be truly God, as having dominion over all things in heaven and earth given to him by the Father, and power over all flesh, derived from him; yet is he not the same God, as to numerical essence, with the Father, as is fully proved in the first Part of my Answer to Dr. Waterland.

And this is evident, first, from the nature of the thing itself; it being absurd to say that the same numerical essence is selfexistent and not self-existent, is ens a se, and yet ens ab alio; hath all his perfections originally and from none, and yet hath

* Ὅπως ἕνα Θεὸν ἡ Ἐκκλησία γνωρίζει· καὶ τοι τὸν Χριστὸν υἱὸν Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ εivaι пapadexoμér.-Eccles. Theol. Lib. i. C. i.

† Ἡμῖν τοίνυν εἷς Θεὺς ἐξ οὗ τὰ πάντα, κατὰ τὸν ̓Απόστολον.-1 Cor. viii.