[7] See Blunt, Art. on Adoptionism.

To give an idea of the lines on which the controversy was carried on, it will be necessary to state some of the arguments of Felix, and in certain cases Alcuin’s rejoinders.  These are:—­

(a.) “If Christ, as man, is not the adopted Son of God, then must His Manhood be derived from the essence of God and consequently must be something different from the manhood of men."[1] To this Alcuin can only oppose another dilemma, which, however, is more of the nature of a quibble.  “If,” he says, “Christ is an adopted Son of God, and Christ is also God, then is God the adopted Son of God?"[2] Here Alcuin confounds the predicates of Christ’s two natures—­the very thing Felix protested against—­and uses the argument thus obtained against that doctrine of Felix, which was based on this very denial of any interchange of predicates.

(b.) Christ is spoken of sometimes as Son of David, sometimes as Son of God.  One person can only have two fathers, if one of these be an adoptive father.  So is it with Christ.  Alcuin answers:  “As a man (body and soul) is called the son of his father, so Christ (God and man) is called Son of God."[3] But to those who deny that a man’s soul is derived from his father, this argument would carry no weight.

(c.) Christ stood in a position of natural dependence towards God over and above the voluntary submission which He owed to His Father as God.[4] This dependence Felix expresses by the term servus conditionalis, applied to Jesus.[5] He may have been thinking of Matt. xii. i8, “Behold my servant, whom I have chosen;” and St Paul’s Ep. to Philipp. ii. 7, “He took upon.  Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men."[6] Or perhaps he had in his mind, if the theory of the influence of Mohammedanism is true, those passages of the Koran which speak of Christ as a servant, as, “Christ doth not proudly disdain to be a servant unto God,"[7] and, “Jesus is no other than a servant."[8]

(d.) To prove that Scripture recognises a distinction between Christ the Man and Christ the God, Felix appeals to Luke xviii. 19, “Why callest thou Me good?  There is none good, save one, even God;” Mark xiii. 32, “Of that day, or that hour, knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.”  Texts such as these can only be met by a reference to other texts, such as John iii. 16, where God is said to have given His only begotten Son to suffer death upon the Cross.

    [1] Alcuin contra Felicem, ii. sec. 12.

[2] Alcuin (ibid., i. sec. 13) also answers:  “If Christ be the adopted Son of God, because as man, he could not be of God’s substance:  then must he also be Mary’s adopted son in respect to his Deity.  But then Mary cannot be the mother of God.”  But this Alcuin thinks an impious conclusion.  Cp. also Contra Felic., vii. sec. 2.

    [3] Contra Felic, iii. sec. 2.