Home1797 Edition

EUNOMIANS

Volume 7 · 289 words · 1797 Edition

in church-history, Christian heresies in the 4th century. They were a branch of Arians, and took their name from Eunomius bishop of Cyzicus; whose confession of faith here follows, extracted from Cave's Historia Literaria, vol. i. p. 223.

"There is one God uncreated and without beginning; who has nothing existing before him, for nothing can exist before what is incarnate; nor with him, for what is uncreate must be one; nor in him, for God is a simple and uncompounded being. This one simple and eternal being is God, the creator and ordainer of all things: first indeed and principally of his only begotten Son; and then, through him, of all other things. For God begot, created, and made, the Son, only by his direct operation and power, before all things, and every..." Eunomius, every other creature; not producing, however, any being like himself, or imparting any of his own proper substance to the Son; for God is immortal, uniform, indivisible; and therefore cannot communicate any part of his own proper substance to another. He alone is unbegotten; and it is impossible that any other being should be formed of an unbegotten substance. He did not use his own substance in begetting the Son, but his will only; nor did he beget him in the likeness of his substance, but according to his own good pleasure. He then created the Holy Spirit, the first and greatest of all spirits, by his own power indeed and operation mediately, yet by the immediate power and operation of the Son. After the Holy Spirit he created all other things in heaven and in earth, visible and invisible, corporeal and incorporeal, mediately by himself, by the power and operation of the Son,” &c.