Bought by his blood; one Lord; church of God is Christ’s

“in your body.” If by receiving Christ’s Spirit we have become temples of God, and we are not our own — bought by his blood, so that we no longer live for ourselves but for the one who bought us — how is Christ not clearly God, the one through whom we are temples of God, and whom we serve as God?

“About eating food offered to idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no God but one. For even if there are so-called gods in heaven or on earth — as indeed there are many gods and many lords — yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we for him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and we through him.”

If God alone is one and there is no other beside him, and the one Jesus Christ — through whom are all things — is taken together into the one nature of the deity, then he who is thought divinely in the Father’s same substance is God, even when he has been named Jesus Christ after being born of a woman. Note also: after naming him Christ Jesus, Paul says all things came to be through him, as of one Son according to the economic union.

“I became,” he says, “as without law to those without law — not being without God’s law, but under Christ’s law.” If the one who has Christ’s law has God’s law, how is Christ not God?

“Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God.” Note that when he calls the church God’s, he again knows it as Christ’s.

“I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God.” Blessed Luke, composing Christ’s genealogy for us, begins from Joseph, then, having reached