Tertullian

c. 155 - c. 220 CE · Roman African (Carthage) · Patristics, Latin Apologetics, Early Christian Ethics

The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.

Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 220) was the first Christian to write theology in Latin, and he did it as a Carthaginian lawyer does everything: by prosecution. Born a pagan in the re-founded Roman city, trained in rhetoric and law, a reader of Varro, Cicero and the Stoics, he says he once laughed at the resurrection and at the Christians who died for it. What converted him was the dying. Watching the martyrs of Africa stand firm, he looked into the thing they would not deny, and he never afterwards wrote a page that was not in some sense a plea before a tribunal.

Topics Tertullian addresses

• the rule of faith (regula fidei)
• the prescription against heretics
• what has Athens to do with Jerusalem
• the soul's testimony
• the Apology to the Roman governors
• the blood of Christians as seed
• the two substances of Christ
• the resurrection of the flesh
• one substance, three persons
• Praxeas and the Monarchian heresy
• Marcion's two gods
• the goodness and justice of the Creator
• the Paraclete and the New Prophecy
• the second repentance
• the sins that cannot be remitted
• martyrdom and flight in persecution
• the veiling of virgins
• the apparel of women and the devil's gateway
• idolatry and the military oath
• the shows and the Christian
• baptism and its delay
• the Lord's Prayer as the pattern of prayer
• monogamy and second marriage
• fasting and the Psychics

Questions to put to Tertullian

Apology and the Roman State

• What are the actual charges the Roman authorities bring against Christians, and how do you answer them?
• You say the blood of Christians is seed — how does persecution end up helping the Church rather than destroying it?
• Why do Christians pray for the emperor but refuse to offer sacrifice to him?
• How do you argue that Roman law itself, applied honestly, would have to acquit the Christians?
• What do you mean when you say every person has a natural right to worship according to their own convictions?

Athens and Jerusalem: Faith Against Philosophy

• What do you mean by asking what Athens has to do with Jerusalem?
• How do you trace the great heresies back to the philosophers rather than to Scripture?
• If philosophy is so dangerous, how do you explain your own use of argument and rhetoric to defend the faith?
• What's the difference between the kind of questioning you forbid and the kind of reasoning you practice?
• Why do you think the itch to keep asking questions after the gospel is itself a spiritual disease?

The Rule of Faith and the Prescription Against Heretics

• What is the rule of faith, and where does it come from?
• How does your legal argument about ownership of the Scriptures work — why can't a heretic simply open the Bible and argue from it?
• What does apostolic succession have to do with who gets to interpret Scripture?
• Why do you think settling the question of who owns the text matters more than debating individual verses?
• How would you respond to someone who says the Church is just using a procedural trick to avoid hard questions?

The Trinity, Christ's Flesh, and the Resurrection

• What do you mean by one substance in three Persons, and how did you arrive at those particular words?
• You say the Son is a portion of the Father's substance — how is that derivation rather than the Son being a lesser God?
• What was wrong with the teaching you attacked in Praxeas, and why did it matter so much to you?
• Why do you insist so strongly that Christ had a real body of flesh, born of a real woman?
• What's the argument behind saying the flesh is the hinge of salvation?

The Soul, Creation, and the Creator's Goodness

• What do you mean when you say the soul is by nature Christian, even before it has heard the gospel?
• How does the soul's spontaneous speech — its oaths, its fears, its hopes — serve as evidence for God?
• Why do you argue that the soul is a kind of body rather than a purely immaterial thing?
• How do you defend the goodness of the Creator against those who say the material world is the work of an inferior or evil power?
• What's wrong with the idea that matter has always existed alongside God?

Discipline, Martyrdom, and the New Prophecy

• Why do you think a Christian cannot attend the theatre or the arena, even as a spectator?
• How do you argue that a Christian soldier cannot wear the military garland, and what does that imply about military service itself?
• What is the New Prophecy, and why did you come to believe it represented the Church's maturity rather than a departure from it?
• You write that a bishop cannot pardon certain grave sins after baptism — how do you defend that position?
• What is martyrdom for you — is it simply death, or something more specific that the Christian is called to seek or accept?

Converse with Tertullian on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Tertullian's own writing, cited to the page.