Against Praxeas 30

Otherwise, if you press further, I can answer you more harshly and set you against the Lord's own declaration, so as to say: Why do you ask about this? You have him crying out in his passion, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” So either the Son was suffering, forsaken by the Father, and the Father, who forsook the Son, did not suffer; or, if it was the Father who was suffering, to what God was he crying out? But this voice of the flesh and soul, that is, of the man, not of the Word and Spirit, that is, not of God, was uttered in order to show that God is impassible, who so forsook the Son, in that he handed over his man to death. This the apostle too understood, writing, “If the Father did not spare the Son.” This Isaiah too declared before: “And the Lord handed him over for our sins.” So he forsook him by not sparing him; so he forsook him by handing him over. But otherwise the Father did not forsake the Son, into whose hands the Son laid his spirit. In fact, he laid it there and at once died; for while the spirit remains in the flesh, the flesh cannot die at all. So to be forsaken by the Father was, for the Son, to die. It is the Son, then, who both dies and is raised by the Father according to the Scriptures; the Son who ascended to the heights of heaven, who also descended to the depths of the earth. He sits at the Father's right hand, not the Father at his own. Him Stephen saw, when he was being stoned, still standing at God's right hand, to sit thereafter until the Father puts all his enemies under his feet. He also will come again on the clouds of heaven, just as he ascended. He meanwhile has poured out the gift he received from the Father, the Holy Spirit, the third name of the Godhead and the third degree of the majesty, the preacher of the one monarchy and also the interpreter of the economy, for anyone who has admitted the words of his New Prophecy, and the guide into all truth, which is in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit according to the Christian sacrament.