irritation up their noses or like an awl piercing their ears. They become
disturbed and pained by it, so they order anyone voicing opposition to
leave, and if you resist, they throw you out.”
[ 2 ] So I asked him, “Why don’t you believe what they believe?”
He replied that after leaving the world, people are unable to believe
anything else except the convictions they have already adopted. These
beliefs remain entrenched in people and cannot be pulled out—especially
not personal convictions about God. In the heavens everyone’s location
depends on his or her idea of God.
I also asked what evidence he had used to convince himself that the
Father and the Son were two. He said, “It is the fact that in the Word
the Son prays to the Father not only before suffering on the cross but
even during it; and also that he humbles himself before his Father. How
then can they be one like a soul and a body are one in us? Do we pretend
to address a prayer to someone else or pretend to humble ourselves to
someone else when we are actually that other person? No one does
that—certainly not the Son of God. For another thing, in my day the
entire Christian church had split the Divinity into persons, each person
being one entity on its own. ‘Person’ is defined as something that exists and
subsists on its own.”
[ 3 ] When I heard that I replied, “I gather from what you said that
you are totally ignorant of how God the Father and the Son are one.
Because you don’t know that, you have convinced yourself of false beliefs
that the church still has about God.
“Surely you know that when the Lord was in the world he had a soul
like every other human being. Where would his soul have come from but
God the Father? That God the Father is its origin is abundantly clear in
the Word of the Gospel writers. What then is that entity called the Son
except a human manifestation conceived by the divine nature of the
Father and given birth to by the Virgin Mary?
“A mother cannot conceive a soul. That idea completely contradicts
the divine design that governs the birth of every human being. Neither
could God the Father have given a soul from himself and then with-
drawn, the way every father in the world does. God is his own divine
essence, an essence that is single and undivided; and since it is undivided
it is God himself. This is why the Lord says that the Father and he are
one, and that the Father is in him and he is in the Father, as well as other
things like that.
singke
(singke)
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