[2] Neander, v. 223. Blunt (1.1.) says just the contrary.
[3] Neander, v. 220.
[4] Alcuin contra Felicem, iii. c. 8.
[5] "Elipand. ad Albinum," sec, 11. Adoptio assumptio (άνάληψις) occurs (a) in the Missa de coena Domini: adoptivi hominis passio; (b) in the prayer de tertia feria Pascha: adoptionis gratia; (c) in that de Ascensione: adoptionem carnis. The Council of Frankfurt (794) branded the authors of the liturgy as heretics (so also did Alcuin) and as the main cause of the Saracen conquest! See Fleury, v. 243.
[6] Enhueber, "Dissertatio," sec. 26. Neander, v. 217, has the same remark in other words.
[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]