And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, so that we may be also glorified together.
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Ambrosiaster
AD 400
Since there is no way that God the Father can be said to have died and Christ the Son is said to have died because of his having become flesh. How is it that he who died is always said to be the heir of the life, when heirs are normally heirs of the dead? But of course Christ died in his humanity, not in his divinity. For with God, which is where our inheritance lies, the Father’s gift is poured into his obedient children, so that one who is alive may be the heir of the Living One by his own merit and not by reason of death…. What it means to be a fellow heir with Christ we are taught by the apostle John, for among other things he says: “We know that when he appears we shall be like him.”… To suffer together with Christ is to endure persecutions in the hope of future rewards and to crucify the flesh with its evils and lusts, i.e., to reject the pleasures and pomp of this world. For when all these things are dead in a man, then he has crucified this world, believing in the life of the world to come in which he believes that he will be a fellow heir with Christ. Commentary on Paul’s Epistles.
