By Water & Blood

Chapter 14: Explanations of the sound sense of the readings

Through so many words Marcellus has both been ignorant of the Son’s “body of glory” and denied his unending kingdom, not having noticed that “until” is customarily used according to a certain idiom peculiar to Scripture. Thus the Saviour said to the disciples, “Lo, I am with you all the days, until the consummation of the age”—not denying that he would be with them after the consummation also, but teaching that now he will be with them until the consummation, overseeing and guarding all who are his disciples, and that after the consummation he will be with them in a better way, making them sharers in his kingdom.

So, then, both “Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool,” and “Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restoration,” were said not as though he would no longer be so afterward, but as of one who, at the time of the consummation, is to rise up from the Father’s throne and make a second descent from heaven. Concerning this the apostle teaches, saying, “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.” The Saviour, then, must remain in heaven and sit at the right hand of the Father “until the consummation”; but at the very consummation of the universe, having made his glorious and second coming, he will take his saints to himself, to be with him always—not up to a certain time, but for a boundless age. For “so,” he says, “shall we ever be with the Lord.”

Therefore the saints, being with him always, will enjoy his kingdom in the promised kingdom of the heavens. But the noble man, not understanding these things—when the divine apostle had said of our Saviour, “For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,” and again, “And when all things shall be subdued unto him,

then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all”—uses this same habit and misinterprets these words too, understanding, I know not how, the Son’s being subject to the Father as the Word’s being united to God. And when was he not united to him, if indeed he was a Word existing eternally in God? How, then, does the apostle say “then shall he be subject” “to God, even the Father”?