A brief declaration and vindication of the doctrine of the Trinity as also of…

Secondly, It is proposed as the object of our Faith, that the Father is God. And herein as is pretended there is also an agreement, between us, and those who oppose the Doctrine of the Trinity. But there is a mistake in this matter. Their hypothesis as they call it, or indeed presumptuous error, casts all the conceptions that ⟨p. 39⟩are given us concerning God in the Scripture, into disorder and confusion. For the Father, as he whom we worship, is often called so, only with reference unto his Son; as the Son is so, with reference to the Father. He is the only begotten of the Father, John 1. 14. But now, is this Son had no preexistence in his Divine nature before he was born of the Virgin, there was no God the Father seventeen hundred years ago, because there was no Son. And on this ground did the Marcionites of old, plainly deny the Father whom under the New Testament we Worship, to be the God of the Old Testament, who made the World and was Worshipped from the foundation of it. For it seems to follow, that he whom we worship being the Father, and on this supposition that the Son had no preexistence unto his incarnation, he was not the Father under the Old Testament, he is some other from him that was so revealed: I know the folly of that inference; yet ⟨p. 40⟩how on this opinion of the sole existence of the Son in time, Men can prove the Father to be God, let others determine. He who abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son, but whosoever transgresseth and abideth not in the Doctrine of Christ, he hath not God, 2 John 9. Whoever denies Christ the Son, as the Son, that is the eternal Son of God, he loses the Father also, and the true God; he hath not God. For that God which is not the Father, and which ever was, and was not the Father, is not the true God. Hence many of the Fathers, even of the first Writers of the Church, were forced unto great pains in the confirmation of this truth, that the Father of Jesus Christ was he who made the World, gave the Law, spake by the Prophets, and was the Author of the Old Testament; and that against Men who professed themselves to be Christians. And this brutish apprehension of theirs, arose from no ⟨p. 41⟩