On “By what authority do you do these things?”
In illud: In qua potestate haec facis
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Contents
- 1Severian contrasts approaching God’s law with fear and approaching it with arrogance, like the priests who demanded by what authority Jesus acted, and shows that Christ refuses answers to those who ask in malice.
- 2Contrasting the Samaritan woman’s simple faith with the priests’ malicious question, Severian takes Christ’s counter-question about John’s baptism as a rule for answering heretics, and rebuts the heretic’s dilemma about knowing God’s essence: we know that God is, not what he is.
- 3Against the heretic who insists on examining God by reason, Severian sets the limits of Scripture: we cannot explain the heavens or the earth, Moses saw only God’s glory, Paul stood amazed, and heaven and angels proclaim God’s glory, never his essence.
- 4The cherubim and seraphim proclaim God’s glory without prying into his nature, and Moses was punished for measuring God’s command by human reasoning; so Severian challenges the heretic, with his talk of “unbegotten” and “begotten,” to explain even how the risen Christ entered through shut doors.
- 5Scripture tells that the risen Christ entered through shut doors but not how; Severian rejects the claim that faith caused Adam’s fall (it was believing the devil), and answers the heretic’s appeal to “the only true God” with Isaiah’s “I alone,” which, he argues, includes the Son and the Spirit.
- 6Since Paul applies Isaiah’s “I am, and there is no other” to Christ, Severian argues that “alone” in Scripture excludes idols, not the Father or the Son, and he cites 1 John 5:20 and Baruch 3 to show that Christ is the true God.
- 7Severian explains that “My glory I will not give to another” does not exclude the Son, and defends his earlier sermon on Gethsemane against misrepresentation: Christ’s prayer “If it is possible, let this cup pass” speaks for his flesh, just as God himself says in the law, “Who will give this people a heart?”
- 8Comparing Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane with God’s own human-sounding “Who will give?”, Severian answers those who slandered his preaching, appeals to the judgment of “our common father,” and closes by urging his hearers to follow Peter and Paul in confessing Christ as Son of God and God over all.