Article 2 of 13 in the series “The Old Paths of Trinitarian Doctrine: Reading Edmund Calamy’s Thirteen Sermons.”
Having established the deity and eternal Fatherhood of the Father, Edmund Calamy turns immediately to the deity of the Son. His text is 1 John 5:20:
“And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life.”
Calamy’s central claim is direct: the concluding words identify Jesus Christ as “the true God, and eternal life.” The apostle could scarcely have spoken more highly. If the Son is the true God, he gives eternal life because life belongs to him. If he gives eternal life as its possessor and source, he cannot be a creature, however exalted.
Yet Calamy does not rest the deity of Christ upon a single disputed antecedent. His argument is cumulative. Scripture assigns to the Son the names, attributes, works, worship, and saving offices that belong properly to God. The force lies in their convergence.
The Son Bears the Divine Names
Jesus Christ is called God, Lord, Jehovah, Emmanuel, and the true God. Some divine titles can be used figuratively in Scripture, but Calamy refuses the inference that every application is therefore equivocal. Context determines whether a title is metaphorical or proper.
Thomas addresses the risen Christ, “My Lord and my God.” Paul speaks of Christ as “God blessed for ever.” Hebrews applies to the Son the words, “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever,” and then addresses him as the Lord who laid the foundation of the earth. John identifies the eternal Word as God before declaring that the Word became flesh.
These passages do not present Jesus as one god among others. The same New Testament that names him God excludes all rival deities. The Son therefore belongs within the identity of the one true God.
The Son Possesses the Divine Perfections
The Son is eternal, immutable, omniscient, omnipresent, almighty, holy, and worthy of absolute trust. Calamy repeatedly presses the indivisibility of these attributes. A dependent or finite deity is not a lower species of God; it is no deity at all.
Christ knows the hearts of all. He promises to be with his church always and wherever believers gather in his name. He is “the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.” He sustains all things by the word of his power. He will raise the dead and judge the world. These are not merely delegated honours that leave his nature untouched. They disclose who he is.
Calamy accordingly rejects the proposal that all divine powers were communicated to the Son except “absolute supremacy and independency.” If independence and necessary existence belong essentially to deity, one cannot remove them while continuing to call the result God. Scripture says that all the Father has belongs to the Son. The exception is introduced by the system, not supplied by the text.
The Son Performs the Works of God
Creation is decisive in Calamy’s presentation. All things in heaven and earth, visible and invisible, were created by the Son. Nothing belonging to the created order can therefore include its own Creator. The distinction is exhaustive: the Son either belongs to “all things” made, or he is the one through whom all things were made. Scripture places him on the Creator’s side.
The Son also preserves creation, forgives sins, gives life, raises the dead, sends the Spirit, governs the church, and executes final judgment. Calamy does not imagine three independent agents dividing the universe among themselves. The external works of God are undivided, though Scripture reveals a personal order in their execution.
The Son’s work in redemption reinforces rather than replaces his original deity. He can save completely because the mediator is God and man. A merely created saviour could neither bear the infinite weight of divine justice nor become the universal object of faith, prayer, and worship.
The Form of God and the Radiance of Glory
Calamy appeals to Philippians 2, where Christ exists in the form of God before taking the form of a servant. The Latin explanation he preserves is exact:
Esse autem in forma Dei non alia intelligentia est, quam in Dei manere natura.
“To be in the form of God admits no other understanding than to remain in the nature of God.”1
The contrast depends upon reality in both clauses. If Christ truly took the nature and condition of a servant, he truly possessed the nature and glory of God. Calamy also retains the Greek word ἁρπαγμός (harpagmos) and its verbal relation to ἁρπάζειν (harpazein), “to seize” or “to treat as booty.” Whatever interpretive nuance is adopted, the passage does not describe a creature climbing toward deity. It describes the one who already exists in the form of God humbling himself.
Hebrews calls the Son the ἀπαύγασμα (apaugasma) of the Father’s glory—his “radiance” or “effulgence.”2 Radiance is not alien to the glory it reveals. The image conveys distinction without separation and communication without inferiority.
Calamy likewise notes the title ὁ παντοκράτωρ (ho pantokratōr), “the Almighty.”3 Almighty power cannot belong properly to a semi-divine being. The Son does not receive a limited share of an attribute that remains fully possessed only by the Father. He possesses the divine perfection because he possesses the divine nature.
The Son Receives Divine Worship
Scripture commands all to honour the Son, calls believers to invoke his name, records prayers addressed to him, and portrays heaven giving him blessing, honour, glory, and power. The church baptizes disciples into the one name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Apostolic benedictions place Christ beside the Father as the source of grace and peace.
This worship cannot be dismissed as a ceremonial honour granted to a creature. God’s jealousy for his own glory rules out the transfer of religious worship to another being. If the Son were not truly God, the New Testament would establish the very idolatry it condemns.
Calamy quotes an older argument:
Si homo tantummodo Christus, quomodo adest ubique invocatus; cum haec homini natura non sit sed Dei…?
“If Christ is only a man, how is he present everywhere when invoked, since this belongs not to human nature but to God’s?”4
The question joins worship and omnipresence. Millions may call upon Christ because he is present to hear, wise to understand, and powerful to save.
Mediatorial Subordination Is Not Inferior Deity
The Gospels plainly portray the Son as sent, commanded, obedient, anointed, praying, suffering, and receiving authority. Calamy does not evade those texts. He distinguishes the Son’s eternal divine nature from the servant-form and mediatorial office he freely assumed.
The incarnation adds a true human nature; it does not subtract deity. As man and mediator, Christ obeys the Father, grows, suffers, prays, and receives. As the eternal Son, he possesses the same divine perfections as the Father. The economic order of redemption must not be converted into an eternal inequality of essence.
This distinction is not an artificial rescue. It arises from Scripture’s own twofold testimony. The same Christ is weary and upholds all things; learns and knows all things; dies and is the Prince of life; prays and receives prayer. A faithful doctrine must confess both sets of texts without forcing either to silence.
Why a Subordinate God Is Impossible
Calamy’s sharpest conceptual point is that “an inferior and dependent God is no God at all.” Scripture recognizes the infinite Creator and dependent creatures. It does not reveal a middle order of lesser but proper deities.
To call the Son “God” while denying him divine independence, eternity, or perfection empties the title of its scriptural meaning. It also recreates paganism within Christian language: one supreme God presiding over inferior gods. The biblical confession is not that Christians worship the highest member of a hierarchy. It is that there is one God, and that the Father and Son are distinguished within that one divine being.
The Pastoral End of the Argument
Calamy closes by moving from demonstration to trust. If Christ is the true God and eternal life, believers may entrust themselves wholly to him. He can hear prayer, search the heart, remain present with his church, raise the dead, judge the world, and save sinners to the uttermost.
The deity of Christ is therefore not a theological luxury. Remove it and the gospel mediator becomes incapable of sustaining the faith Scripture requires. Confess it, and the Christian may rejoice that the one who assumed our nature, bore our sins, and promises eternal life possesses the infinite sufficiency of God.
The second sermon establishes the positive case. The next three examine the principal objections and show why texts of Christ’s humiliation cannot be turned against texts of his divine identity.
Previous: Article 1, “One God, the Father.”
Next: Article 3, “Honour the Son Even as the Father.”