Salvation History
Salvation history
In God, the Son is the Word and Image of the Father, and thus the One who makes Him known. It will, therefore, also be the Word of God who shows the Father to the world—just as it is likewise He who shows the world to God—in nature, in grace, and finally by appearing in person Himself.
So all that exists is God’s revelation, but that revelation is effected through God’s Word. To enable us to see and understand this divine revelation, God the Father in His grace gives us His Holy Spirit.
In the course of history the revelations of the divine Word become increasingly clearer. They move, through the prophecies of the Old Testament, towards the central event, the Incarnation of the Word.
Trinitarian revelation
(79) The [true] Creator is God. In His love He is Father, in His power He is Lord, in His Wisdom He is our maker and fashioner. By transgressing His commandment, we have become His enemies. And so in these last times the Lord has restored us to His friendship by His Incarnation. He became ‘the mediator of God and men’ (cf 1 Tim 2:5), propitiating for us the Father against whom we had sinned, consoling Him for our disobedience by His obedience [on the Cross], granting us the grace of conversion and submission to our Creator. He therefore taught us to say in prayer: ‘Forgive us our debts’ (cf Matt 6:12), since He is indeed our Father, and we are His debtors, having transgressed His commandment . . . Rightly, then, says the Word to man: ‘Your sins are forgiven’ (cf Matt 9:2). The very One against whom we had sinned in the beginning grants remission of sins in the end. . . How can sins truly be forgiven unless the One against whom we sinned is the very One who has granted forgiveness ‘through the tender mercy of our God’ (cf Luke 1:78), the mercy in which ‘He has visited us’ through His Son?
In forgiving sins, the Lord not only healed man, He also showed clearly who He was. If no one can forgive sins but God alone, and if the Lord did forgive them and did heal men, it is plain that He was Himself the Word of God made the Son of Man. Because He was both God and man, He received the power to forgive sins from the Father, so that, since as man He suffered with us, so as God He might take pity on us, and forgive us the debts we owe to God our Creator.
V 17, 1-3
(80) The Spirit of God bestows the knowledge of the truth. In accordance with the Father’s will, He is there in each generation to expound the dispensations of the Father and the Son.
IV 33, 7
(81) [The Holy Spirit] therefore descended on the Son of God made the Son of Man. With Him He became accustomed to dwell among the human race, to rest upon men, to inhabit the handiwork of God, accomplishing the Father’s will in them, renewing them, taking them from oldness into the newness of Christ . . . The Lord therefore promised to send the Comforter, who would join us to God. Just as dry wheat without moisture cannot make a single mass of dough or a single loaf, so we who are many could not be made one in Christ Jesus without the water from heaven. And just as dry earth, if it does not receive moisture, does not bear fruit, so we, who at first were a dry tree, could never have borne the fruit of life without the free-flowing rain from above.
III 17, 1-2
(82) The dew is the Holy Spirit . . . We need the dew of God to prevent ourselves being consumed by fire.
III 17, 3
(83) Where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and every grace, but the Spirit is truth.
III 24, 1
(84) God is powerful in all things. In the past He was seen prophetically through the Spirit, then He was seen adoptively through the Son, and in the Kingdom of Heaven He will be seen paternally. The Spirit prepares man for the Son of God, the Son leads him to the Father, while the Father confers on him incorruption and eternal life, which comes from the vision of God to those who enjoy it.
IV 20, 5
(85) Through all these things God the Father is revealed. The Spirit is at work, the Son carries out His ministry, the Father approves, and man is perfected and brought to salvation.
IV 20, 6
Nature, prophecy, incarnation
Universal revelation
(86) ‘No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him’ (Matt 11:27). The word ‘reveal’ does not have just a future meaning, as if the Word only began to manifest the Father when He was bom of Mary; it has a general meeting and applies to the whole of time. From the beginning the Son has been present to His handiwork, and reveals the Father to all, to whom He wills, and when He wills, and as the Father wills. And so in all and through all there is one God the Father and one Word—Son and one Spirit and one salvation for all who believe in Him.
IV 6, 7
(87) Through the creation itself the Word reveals God the Creator, and through the world the Lord, the world’s Maker, and through the work of art the Artist who fashioned it, and through the Son the Father who begets the Son . . . Similarly, through the law and the prophets the Word proclaimed both Himself and the Father . . . Finally, through the Word made visible and palpable, the Father was revealed. Though all alike did not believe, all saw the Father in the Son (cf John 14:9), for the Father is the invisible of the Son, and the Son is the visible of the Father. That is why, in His presence, all said that He was Christ and called Him God. The demons, on seeing the Son, said: ‘We know who you are . . .’ (Mark 1:24). All saw the Son and the Father and called them by those names, but not all believed.
IV 6, 6
The Father revealed in the Son
(88) No one can know the Father without the Word of God, that is to say, unless the Son reveals Him, nor can one know the Son without the good pleasure of the Father (cf Matt 11:26f). The good pleasure of the Father is carried out by the Son: the Father sends, while the Son is sent and comes. The Father, invisible though He is to us, is known by His own Word, and though inexpressible, the Word expresses Him to us. Again, only the Father knows His Word. Both these truths have been revealed to us by the Lord. Thus the Son reveals the knowledge of the Father by his own manifestation, for the knowledge of the Father is the manifestation of the Son. Everything is manifested through the Word.
IV 6, 3
(89) The knowledge of the Father is the Son, but the knowledge of the Son is revealed by the Father through the Son. That is why the Lord said: ‘No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him’ (Matt 11:27).
IV 6, 7
The Son in the Old Testament
(90) The Son of God has been sown everywhere throughout the Scriptures [of Moses]. Sometimes He speaks with Abraham, sometimes with Noah, giving him the measurements of the ark; He looks for Adam, brings judgement on the Sodomites. There are times when He is actually seen, guiding Jacob on his way, speaking with Moses from the bush.
IV 10, 1
(91) Among the things foretold by the prophets was the prediction that those on whom God’s Spirit rested, and who obeyed the Father’s Word, and served Him with all their might, would be persecuted, stoned, and put to death. It was out of love for God, and for the sake of His word, that the prophets prefigured all these things in themselves. For they too were members of Christ, and it was in virtue of that membership that each of them set forth his prophecy. Yet, though many, all foretold one person and announced the things pertaining to that one. Just as the functioning of the whole body is manifested by our members, and yet the form of the complete person is not manifested by one member on its own but by all together, so all the prophets as a whole did indeed prefigure the one person [of Christ], while each individual prophet, as a member, fulfilled his role in the total plan and prophesied the particular action of Christ linked with that member.
IV 33, 10
Foreshadowings
(92) The Spirit of God pointed to future things through the prophets in order to prepare and predispose us for submission to God. Now since one of these future things was man’s enjoyment, by the good pleasure of the Holy Spirit, of the vision of God, it was necessary that those who announced future things should themselves see the God whom they were intimating men would one day see. The plan was that God and the Son of God, the Father and the Son, should not just be announced prophetically in words, but also be seen by all the members sanctified and instructed in the things of God. Man was to be schooled and made ready for that glory which was later to be revealed to those who love God (cf Rom 8:18,28) . . . It was for this reason, then, that they saw the Son of God as man conversing with men. What was still future, they prophesied; the Person who was not yet there, they said was present. The impassible they proclaimed passible, and Him who then was in heaven they said had descended ‘into the dust of death’ (cf Ps 21:16) . . .
The prophets did not, of course, see the face of God unveiled, but only the dispensations and mysteries through which man one day would see God . . . Neither Moses nor Elijah nor Ezekiel saw God, though they did see many heavenly things, things which were ‘likenesses of the glory of the Lord’ (cf Ezek 1:28) and prophecies of the future. If this is so, then it is clear that the Father is indeed invisible, of whom the Lord said, ‘No one has seen God’ (John 1:18). But God’s Word, in conformity to His will and for the good of those who saw Him, revealed the glory of the Father and expounded His saving purposes, as the Lord said: ‘The only-begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made him known’ (John 1:18). The Word is the ‘exegete’ of the Father, and so, since He is richness and multiplicity, He is not seen in just one form or playing one role, but according to the aims and objects of His saving plan . . . Thus the Word of God always showed to men, so to speak, the outlines of the things He was to accomplish in the future, the contours of the Father’s saving plan, thereby teaching us the things of God.
IV 20, 8-11
Fulfilment in the flesh
(93) As He reigned in heaven, so the Word of God reigns on earth . . . and He holds sway, too, over the things which are under the earth, having become ‘the first-born from the dead’ (Col 1:18), so that, as we have said, all things might behold their King, so that the fatherly light might meet and rest upon the flesh of our Lord, and then, from that resplendent flesh, come upon us, and finally so that man, girded with the fatherly light, might attain to incorruption.
IV 20, 2