Patristic Wisdom: Looking to the Fourth Sunday of Easter

Peter and John before the Sanhedrin.

Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers of the people and elders of Israel: If we this day are judged for a good deed done to a helpless man, by what means he has been made well, let it be known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by Him this man stands here before you whole. This is the ‘stone which was rejected by you builders, which has become the chief cornerstone.’ Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:8–12)

The builders were the Jews, while all the Gentiles remained in the wasteland of idols. The Jews alone were daily reading the law and the prophets for the building up of the people. As they were building, they came to the cornerstone, which embraces two walls—that is, they found in the prophetic Scriptures that Christ, who would bring together in himself two peoples, was to come in the flesh. And, because they preferred to remain in one wall, that is, to be saved alone, they rejected the stone, which was not one-sided but two-sided. Nevertheless, although they were unwilling, God by Himself placed this at the chief position in the corner, so that from two Testaments and two peoples there might rise up a building of one and the same faith.

Bede, Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles

For “there is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,” since “there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved,” and “in him God has defined to all men their faith, in that he has raised him from the dead.” Now without this faith, that is to say, without a belief in the one Mediator between God and humankind, the man Christ Jesus; without faith, I say, in his resurrection by which God has given assurance to all people and which no one could of course truly believe were it not for his incarnation and death; without faith, therefore, in the incarnation and death and resurrection of Christ, the Christian truth unhesitatingly declares that the ancient saints could not possibly have been cleansed from sin so as to have become holy and justified by the grace of God. And this is true both of the saints who are mentioned in holy Scripture and of those also who are not indeed mentioned therein but must yet be supposed to have existed—either before the deluge or in the interval between that event and the giving of the law or in the period of the law itself—not merely among the children of Israel, as the prophets, but even outside that nation, as for instance Job. For cleansing from sin was by the selfsame faith. The one Mediator cleansed the hearts of these too, and there also was “shed abroad in them the love of God by the Holy Spirit,” “who blows where He wills,” not following people’s merits but even producing these very merits Himself. For the grace of God will in no wise exist unless it be wholly free.

Augustine of Hippo, On Original Sin