The Unity of God in Scripture

...of your soul and with all your strength. This is the first; and the second is like unto this: you shall love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:30-31). Greater than these no other commandment exists. And the scribe said to him: 'Well, Teacher, in truth you have spoken, that one is the God and there is none other besides him' (Mark 12:32-33). But the scribe, seeming to have learned piety through the law, appears to be praising the explicit word of the Savior: 'Hear, O Israel' (Deuteronomy 6:4), saying, 'the Lord our God is one,' and believing that he has spoken well by an oath; for he says, 'in truth you have spoken that one is the God and there is no other besides him.'

But those who follow the new covenant, desiring to know mysteries, these also wish to reconstruct a god, wanting to separate him by substance and power from the Father. For the divine Scripture knows to call the unity Lord and God; it has already become clear from the things previously mentioned, through which the God said to Moses, his own servant: 'And God spoke again to Moses: Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel: The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you' (Exodus 3:6).

You see how, by demonstrating one thing here, he addresses the same person as Lord and God. And immediately likewise the Scripture says, 'And the Lord spoke all these words, saying: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. There shall not be to you other gods besides me' (Exodus 20:2-3); you hear how through the pronoun it is made apparent that there is only one God. And again a little later he says, 'I am the Lord your God,' saying that he himself is Lord and God.

And what else do we learn through other Scripture? 'And you shall know this day,' he says, 'and your mind shall not be diverted, that the Lord your God, this is God in the heaven above and upon the earth below, and there is none besides him' (Deuteronomy 4:39). And again in the same Deuteronomy he says, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind' (Deuteronomy 6:4-5). And again in the same: 'Behold, behold that I am, and there is no God besides me; I will kill and I will make live; I will strike and I will heal' (Deuteronomy 32:39).

How then, pretending to follow the holy Scriptures simply and boldly, Asterius did not recognize this part of the saying: "The Lord your God, this is God in the heaven above and upon the earth below, and there is none other besides him" (Deuteronomy 6:4), and that "He is one" and "there is no other besides him"?

How then will the holy prophet Jeremiah not clearly expose him as teaching a different doctrine? For he, prophesying to us according to the Savior, thus said: "This is our God; another shall not be reckoned against him. He found every way of knowledge, and he gave Jacob to his child and Israel to the one beloved by him. After these things he appeared upon the earth, and he associated himself with men" (Jeremiah 24:7).

So that even if someone says, by first constructing a first god and a second, as Narcissus has written with those words (for even he who says, "Let us make man in our image and after our likeness" Genesis 1:26, does not forgive), that both he himself and his father are two, we have heard this in part from the testimony of the Lord and of the holy Scriptures. If, therefore, Narcissus intends to divide the Word of the Father through this, let him know that the prophet who wrote, speaking as if of God, "Let us make man in our image and after our likeness," himself wrote, "And God made the man" (Genesis 1:27).

For having encountered the letter of Narcissus, the leader of the Neronians, which he wrote to one Christian and to Euphronius and Eusebius, as the Holy Bishop had asked him whether he says the same as Eusebius of the two substances of Palestine, I knew from what was written that he believes there are three substances, while answering. For having dared to divide the Word of God and to name another god the Word, and having divided the substance and the power of the Father, it is easy to learn clearly from the very words written by them into what blasphemy he has fallen. For he wrote with those words thus: the image and that of which the image is are not conceived as one and the same, but rather two substances and two things and two powers, as are so many distinctions. But the Apostle writes such things concerning the faith of the Galatians; yet Eusebius, transferring the apostolic meaning, through which the Apostle, on account of the aforementioned reason, said, "My children, whom I again labor with until Christ is formed in you" (Galatians 4:19), fastened down the Galatians as not having the correct view concerning the glory of God. For he truly labored with a certain sharpness...