Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But God, as he is eternal and rational, is, I think, also perfect in all things: "You shall be perfect, as your Father who is in heaven is perfect." Show me his goodness perfect as well. Even though it is clear enough that it is imperfect, being found to be neither natural nor rational, it will now be traced along another line as well — no longer merely imperfect, but positively deficient, meager and exhausted, falling short in the number of its own materials, since it is not shown toward everyone. For not all are saved, but fewer than all — fewer even than the Jews and Christians of the Creator are saved. But if more perish, how is a "perfect" goodness to be defended, when it is idle toward the greater part, extending something to the few and nothing to the many, yielding them up to perdition, sharing out ruin as its portion? And if more are not going to be saved, then what we have is not goodness but a more perfect malice. For just as it is the working of goodness that saves people, so it is the working of malice that fails to save them. And a goodness that fails to save while saving only a few is more perfect at not helping than at helping. Nor can you shift this failure of goodness toward all onto the Creator's account. For whatever judge you claim him to be, whatever dispenser of goodness you might, perhaps, wish him understood as, you are not free to call him a mere squanderer of it — a title you claim for your own god. To this extent alone do you set your god above the Creator in goodness — a goodness which, if he professes it alone and entire, ought to fail no one. But I do not wish, for now, to convict Marcion's god of imperfect goodness on the score of the greater part who perish. It is enough that even those he does save are found to have an imperfect salvation, and thereby show his goodness to be imperfect — saved, that is, only as far as the soul, while lost as to the flesh, which for him does not rise again. Where does this halving of salvation come from, if not from a deficiency of goodness? What would perfect goodness have done but restore the whole man to salvation — the whole man condemned by the Creator, the whole man won over by the supremely good god? As far as I know, the flesh too is baptized in his rite, the flesh too is withdrawn from marriage, the flesh too rages under torture in the confession of the Name. But even if sins are charged to the flesh's account, the soul's guilt comes first, and the primacy of the fault must rather be assigned to the soul, to which the flesh comes as a mere servant, bearing its name. Flesh, in fact, lacking a soul, cannot sin at all. So here too his goodness is unjust, and thereby imperfect as well, abandoning to ruin the more innocent substance — one that sins by obedience, not by its own choice — and this though Christ, even if he did not (as your heresy would have it) put on its reality, nevertheless deigned to take on its likeness. By the very fact that he counterfeited it, he owed it something as its debtor. But what else is man but flesh, since the very name "man" was given by its author from bodily, not from spiritual, material? "And God made man," it says, "of the slime of the earth" — not of a soul; for the soul came from his breath: "and man became a living soul" — who? clearly the one made of slime. "And God placed man in paradise" — the one he had shaped, not the one he had breathed into; the one who is now flesh, not the one who is soul. If this is so, then with what face will you maintain the title of "perfect" for a goodness that has failed not merely in a special partition of the man to be freed, but in his general nature altogether? If it is a full grace and a solid mercy that saves the soul alone, this present life, in which we enjoy ourselves whole and entire, offers more. But to rise again only in part will be a punishment, not a liberation. This too belonged to perfect goodness: that man, once freed into faith in the supremely good god, should immediately be removed from the dwelling and dominion of the savage god. But as it is, you still run a fever, Marcionite, and the pain of your flesh still serves up to you the rest of the thorns and briars, and you are subject not only to the Creator's lightning bolts, wars, plagues, and other scourges, but even to his scorpions. In what sense do you imagine yourself freed from the kingdom of one whose very flies still trample you underfoot? If you have been rescued as regards the future, why not as regards the present too, so as to be perfectly freed? Our situation before our Maker, before our Judge, before the Ruler of our race whom we have offended, is one thing; you merely set up a good god in preference. But you cannot show him to be perfectly good when you are not perfectly freed by him.
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