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forgiven, loves more” (cf. Luke 7:42-3), and may themselves know
how mortal and weak they are, but also understand that God is so
immortal and powerful as to bestow immortality on the mortal
and eternity on the temporal, and that they may also know the
other powers of God made manifest in themselves, and, being
taught by them, may think of God in accordance with the great-
ness of God. For the glory of the human being is God, while the
vessel of the workings of God, and of all his wisdom and power is
the human being. (Haer. 3.20.2)

God is patient, while we learn by experience our own weakness and death in
our ungrateful apostasy, trying to live on our own terms (preserving our lives).
God is patient, knowing that having passed through the experience of death,
and having an unhoped-for salvation bestowed upon us, we will remain ever
more thankful to God, willing to accept from him the eternal existence which
he alone can give. In this way we become fully acquainted with the power of
God: by being reduced to nothing, to dust in the earth, human beings simulta-
neously come to know their total dependency upon God, allowing God to work
in and through them, to deploy his power in them as the recipient of all his
work. And both dimensions of this economy—the engul?ng of man, and the
salvation wrought by the Word—are simultaneously represented by Jonah, a
sign of both the transgressing human race and its Savior.

Vivid testimony to the Christian conviction that life comes through
death is seen dramatically in the case of the early martyrs. For instance, the
way in which the slave girl Blandina is portrayed in the Letter of the Churches
of Vienne and Lyons to the Churches of Asia and Phrygia, probably written by
Irenaeus after a violent persecution in Lyons around 177AD.11 Blandina, as a
young slave girl—the epitome of weakness in the ancient world—embodies the
point made by Christ to Paul: “My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2
Cor. 12:9). She was so “weak in body” that the others were fearful lest she not
be able to make a good confession. Yet, she

[Blandina] was ?lled with such power that even those who were
taking turns to torture her in every way, from dawn until dusk,
were weary and beaten. They, themselves, admitted that they
were beaten … astonished at her endurance, as her entire body
was mangled and broken. (H.e. 5.1.18)

11 The Letter is preserved by Eusebius, H.e. 5.1-3.

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