Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/273

 the only-begotten Son of God, who is omnipresent, no salvation is possible for men.” (pp. 48 and 49.)

To Nicodemus’s question as to how a man can be reborn in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, Jesus replies that no one can enter heaven and come to God except he who knows God already, who already ascends heaven. No matter how these words may be understood, they cannot be interpreted in such a way as that Jesus is speaking about himself, since he is apparently speaking about all men and directly says that what he is speaking about is the son of man. Independently of the fact that from the meaning of the whole conversation with Nicodemus, which begins with Jesus’ saying that no one shall see the kingdom of heaven, if he is not born from above, it is evident that Jesus does not refer it to himself, but to all men; independently of this obvious meaning, everything which is said, is said now of the son of man and now of the only-begotten, or, more correctly, of the one-begotten son, but it does not say that this son of God is exclusively Christ. Above all, these words cannot have the meaning which the church ascribes to them, because the word “son of man” has the definite meaning of the son of man, that is of men, and the appellation of the son of God is precisely what Christ teaches the men to call themselves, and so Christ, if he had intended to say that he stood in an exclusive relation to God, would have been compelled to choose another expression in order to give it that meaning. I cannot permit myself to believe that Jesus should not have been able or willing to express such an important dogma. If, then, he called himself a son of God, and called other people also sons of God, he wanted to say that, so that the text expresses precisely the opposite of what the author wants to prove.

I am not going to quote here evidences from the gospels which directly deny the divinity of Christ, for I will quote them in their proper place, but I will analyze those