Reading Church History

Tertullian

• 32: “The first Latin theologian stamped his unique personality into the character of Western Christianity with a force few have equalled.”

Life

• 32: “Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus was born in Carthage…”
• 33: In his youth, “… he seems to have indulged happily in worldly pleasures to what he later considered an extravagant degree.”
  “… received a good education,” and probably was a lawyer.
  “… converted to Christianity,” probably by being impressed with the courage of the martyrs.
  “Tertullian dwells on the glories of martyrdom.”
• 33: “After his conversion he threw himself wholeheartedly into his new faith, immersing himself in its Scriptures to a profound degree.”
• 33: “Tertullian was the first important theologian to write in Latin.”
  “… [his] works were short, brutally direct and completely uncompromising.”
  But, “His attacks often seem to go beyond what Christian charity would normally consider appropriate.”
  34: “In opposing what he saw as doctrinal error, he pioneered new avenues for Christian thought. His works against his theological opponents laid down the lines along which later thinking on the Trinity and the person of Christ would run.”
• He eventually joined a sect called the Montanists, an “early-3rd-century charismatic movement.”
  “Most Christians, however, rejected Montanism; and so Tertullian finally turned his pen against the mainstream church he had once defended.”

Thought

• 35: “Tertullian is the first of the church fathers to have left a large body of work… [it reveals] a remarkably systematic pattern of thought for someone professed to hate philosophy.”
• The sources of theology.
  • 35: “He can see no good whatsoever in either philosophy or philosophers themselves…”
  • 36: “Human reason, then, is not the sources of our knowledge of God. But neither is Scripture alone, since the heretics appeal to Scripture as well.”
  • 36: “Tertullian seems to suggest that the ultimate authority in matters of doctrine is tradition.”
• The Trinity.
  

  All of them are One, by unity of substance; while we still keep the mystery of the distribution which spreads the Unity into a Trinity, placing in their order the three Persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But they are three, not in state, but in degree; not in substance, but in form; not in power, but in appearance; yet of one substance, and of one state, and of one power, inasmuch as he is one God, from whom these degrees and forms and appearances are understood, under the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. (Against Praxeas 2)

  • 36: “Tertullian’s greatest contribution to Christian doctrine is undoubtedly his treatment of the Trinity.”
  • 37: “Perhaps most striking is that Tertullian lists some ways in which the three Persons are one and ways in which they are three, recognizing that there is something paradoxical in what he says.”
  • 37: “The very word trinity … is applied to God for the first time.”
  • 37: The word substance can refer to:
    • what something is made from;
    • an essential quality;
    • property.
  • 38: “[Tertullian] thinks of the Father as the origin of the Trinity … the Son and the Spirit are divine because they come from the Father. The Father is identical with the divine substance of the Trinity; he is the reference point of divinity.
    This is known as ‘subordinationism,’ since although it recognizes the divinity and unity of all three Persons it regards the Father as the source of the Trinity and therefore as greater than the other two members.”
• Christ.
  • 39: “… where the Trinity is three Persons with one substance, Christ is one person with two substances.”
  • 39: “Tertullian’s christological teaching is not only clearer than that of any of his predecessors but basically identical to what would become Christian orthodoxy at the epochal Council of Chalcedon two and a half centuries later.