The Formation of Christendom, Volume IIAllies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Religion
The Formation of Christendom, Volume II
Allies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Christianity; Christianity -- Miscellanea
that Crucified One was the same day taken down from the cross and laid in
its sepulchre, the power which reigned in polytheism and spoke by the
mouth of the judge, seemed to have given the final answer of triumphant
force to its question, What is truth? and falsehood might be thought to
reign supreme and victorious in the world.
It was with the resurrection of that Body, in which Truth was enshrined,
that the resurrection of truth among men began. He had said to His
disciples a few hours before, not “I show the truth,” but “I am the
Truth.” His birth and His advent took place that His witness might be
given to it, the witness to it being that very birth and advent, His
appearance among men, and the reception He would meet with. The
crucifixion itself—the reply of triumphant force to its own unanswered
question—was the witness which, first in Him, and then in His followers,
should make itself heard over the earth, now held in captivity by
falsehood. And since Truth is His proper Name and His personal Being from
eternity, and by being the Truth He who spoke is the second Person in the
Godhead, the perfect Image of all Truth, let us consider the import of His
Name as the summing-up of the great antagonism which He then planted on
the earth.
For He named Himself the Truth because He is the Son and the Word of the
Father. “Thus the Father, as it were uttering Himself, begot His Word,
equal to Himself in all things. For He would not fully and perfectly have
uttered Himself, if there were anything less or anything more in His Word
than in Himself.... And therefore this Word is truly the Truth; inasmuch
as whatever is in that knowledge of which He is begotten, is also in
Himself; and whatsoever is not in it, is not in Himself.... The Father and
the Son know each other, the one by generating, the other by being
generated.”(44) Thus it is that He is the perfect Word, the absolute Image
of God; and being the Image of God He created man in the beginning a copy
of that Image, and according to its resemblance, in that He created him in
the indivisible unity of a soul intelligent and willing—a created copy of
the Trinity in Unity. But though by the original constitution of the soul
this copy could not be destroyed, being the very essence of the soul, yet
the resemblance might be marred, and the harmony which reigned in the
original man between the soul, its intellect, and will, through the
indwelling of God’s Spirit, was broken by the act of sin; whereupon that
Spirit withdrew from him, and left the copy of the divine Image defaced
and disordered. All the heathenism we have been considering is the
sequence of that disorder, part of which is the grievous obscuration of
truth, that is, of the whole relation between God and man, of which
idolatrous polytheism is the perversion. It was the exact representation
of the soul’s own disorder, being the distortion but not the extinction of
worship; the fear of many demons, instead of the fear of one God; slavish
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