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| Why Christ's Coming Should Be Previously Announced.
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Chapter II.—Why
Christ’s Coming Should Be Previously Announced.
Coming then at once to the point,3103
I have to encounter the question, Whether
Christ ought to have come so suddenly?3104
| 3104 As Marcion makes
Him. | (I
answer, No.) First, because He was the Son of God His Father. For this
was a point of order, that the Father should announce3105
the Son before the Son should the Father,
and that the Father should testify of the Son before the Son should
testify of the Father. Secondly, because, in addition to the title of
Son, He was the Sent. The authority,3106
therefore, of
the Sender must needs have first appeared in a testimony of the Sent; because none
who comes in the authority of another does himself set it
forth3107
| 3107 Defendit,
“insist on it.” | for himself on his own assertion, but rather
looks out for protection from it, for first comes the support3108
of him who gives him his authority. Now
(Christ) will neither be acknowledged as Son if the Father never named
Him, nor be believed in as the Sent One if no Sender3109
gave Him a commission: the Father, if any,
purposely naming Him; and the Sender, if any, purposely commissioning
Him. Everything will be open to suspicion which transgresses a rule.
Now the primary order of all things will not allow that the Father
should come after the Son in recognition, or the Sender after the Sent,
or God after Christ. Nothing can take precedence of its own original in
being acknowledged, nor in like manner can it in its ordering.3110
| 3110 Dispositione,
“its being ordered or arranged.” | Suddenly a Son, suddenly Sent, and suddenly
Christ! On the contrary, I should suppose that from God nothing comes
suddenly, because there is nothing which is not ordered and arranged by
God. And if ordered, why not also foretold, that it may be proved to
have been ordered by the prediction, and by the ordering to be divine?
And indeed so great a work, which (we may be sure) required
preparation,3111
as being for the
salvation of man, could not have been on that very account a sudden
thing, because it was through faith that it was to be of
avail.3112
| 3112 Per fidem
profuturum. | Inasmuch, then, as
it had to be believed in order to be of use, so far did it require, for
the securing of this faith, a preparation built upon the foundations of
pro-arrangement and fore-announcement. Faith, when informed by such a
process, might justly be required3113
of man by God,
and by man be reposed in God; it being a duty, after that
knowledge3114
has made it a
possibility, to believe those things which a man had learned indeed to
believe from the fore-announcement.3115
| 3115 Prædicatione,
“prophecy.” | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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