Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Who can be invoked as Lord of heaven who has not first been shown to be its Maker? "I thank you," he says, "and I confess, Lord of heaven, that you have revealed to little children the things that were hidden from the wise and prudent." What things are these? Whose are they? Hidden by whom, and revealed by whom? If they were hidden and revealed by Marcion's god, who had dispatched nothing beforehand within which anything at all might lie concealed — not one prophecy, not one parable, not one vision, not a single fact or saying or name veiled under allegory or figure or riddling obscurity — [2] but had hidden nothing but his own sheer greatness, which he was now, of all things, revealing through Christ, that is quite unjust. What had the wise and prudent done wrong, that God should be hidden from them — a god whose wisdom and prudence were not even sufficient to know him by? He gave no path through any preaching of works, no footprints by which the wise and prudent might be led. And yet even if they had done some wrong against a god still unknown — suppose him known now — they still ought not to have found him jealous, since he is introduced as unlike the Creator. [3] So then: if he had sent nothing ahead in which he could have hidden anything, and had no guilty parties from whom to hide it, and ought not to have hidden it even if he had — then he cannot be the revealer either, since he was never the hider; and so he is neither Lord of heaven nor Father of Christ, but that other one, the one all these things fit. For that other did hide — by sending ahead the instrument of prophetic obscurity, whose meaning only faith would earn (for "unless you believe, you will not understand") — and he did have guilty parties: the wise and prudent, who from so many and such great works failed to seek out an intelligible God, or philosophized wrongly about him, and supplied heretics with their raw material — and finally, he is jealous. [4] Indeed, this is exactly what he was long ago proclaiming through Isaiah, the very thing Christ now rejoices over: "I shall bring to nothing the wisdom of those who are wise, and I shall shroud the discernment of those who discern." And elsewhere too he signals both that he has hidden and that he will reveal: "And I will give them hidden treasures, I will open to them things unseen." And again: "Who else scatters the signs of ventriloquists and the divinations of the heart, turning the wise back and making their thoughts foolish?" [5] But if he also designated his own Christ as the light of the nations — "I have set you as a light for the nations" — nations which we interpret under the name of "little ones," in the sense that they were once small in understanding and infants in prudence, and now again small in the humility of faith — then we will all the more readily believe that the very one who once hid things, and through Christ promised their revelation, is the one who has now revealed them, through Christ, even to little ones. [6] Or if Marcion's god has laid open the things once hidden by the Creator, then he has already gone into business on the Creator's behalf, expounding the Creator's own affairs. "But," you say, "he did it in order to demolish them, to expose them to shame." Then he ought to have exposed them precisely to those from whom the Creator hid them — the wise and prudent. For if he acted out of kindness, the recognition he owed was to those from whom it had been withheld, not to little ones, from whom the Creator had grudged nothing. [7] And yet up to this point, I think, we have been proving that what is found in Christ is the building-up of the Law and the Prophets rather than their demolition. He says all things have been handed over to him by the Father. Believe it, if Christ belongs to the Creator, to whom all things belong: for the Creator handed over to the Son — no lesser than himself — all the things he founded through him, namely through his own Word. But otherwise, if he is that "coming one" of theirs, what are these "all things" that were handed to him by the father? Do they belong to the Creator? [8] Then whatever the Father passed on to the Son must be good — and the Creator, to whom all such good things properly belong, is already good — and that other one, who invaded goods not his own in order to hand them to his son, is no longer good. He who teaches us to keep off what belongs to another turns out to be the most destitute beggar of all, having nothing with which to enrich his own son except what he stole from someone else. Or, if nothing of the Creator's was handed to him by his father, how does he claim for himself the Creator's man? Or if only man was handed to him, man is not "all things." But scripture proclaims that the handing-over of "all things" was made to the Son. [9] But even if you interpret "all things" as the races of men, that is, all the nations, it is still the Creator who handed these over to the Son: "I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession." Or if he too has some things of his own which, together with the Creator's man, he handed over entirely to the Son, then show me just one of these "all things," for proof, as an example — so that I do not, with equally good reason, disbelieve that all things belong to a god of whom I see nothing, as I rightly believe that even the things I do not see belong to the one to whom all the things I do see belong. [10] "But no one knows who the Father is, except the Son, nor who the Son is, except the Father, and anyone to whom the Son has chosen to reveal him." And so, they say, Christ preached an unknown God. This is where other heretics too find their footing, setting the Creator up as known to everyone — known to Israel by familiarity, and to the nations by nature. But how then does the Creator himself testify that even Israel did not know him? "But Israel has not known me, and my people has not understood me" — and not the nations either? [11] For look, he says, not even among the nations is there a single one who knows. That is why he reckoned even them as a mere drop from a bucket, and left Zion like a watchman's booth in a vineyard. See, then, whether this is not confirmation of the prophetic voice reproaching humanity's ignorance of God — an ignorance that lasted right up until the Son. For that is precisely why Christ went on to add that the Father is known only by the one to whom the Son reveals him: because he himself was the one set up by the Father and announced as the light of the nations — a light, of course, about the God who was to enlighten them, Israel included, precisely through a fuller knowledge of God. [12] So then, arguments that can equally well fit the Creator will do nothing to establish belief in another god — only what does not fit the Creator could possibly do that work. And if you look at what follows — "Blessed are the eyes that see what you see; for I tell you that the prophets did not see what you see" — it descends from the same point made above: that no one had known God as he deserved to be known, since not even the prophets had seen what was now being seen under Christ. [13] For if Christ were not mine, he would not have brought in a mention of the prophets at this very point. What wonder is it, after all, if they had not seen the affairs of an unknown god revealed only so long an age later? But what blessedness would there have been for those who then saw what others could rightly not have seen, unless they had failed to reach the actual presentation of things they had never even foretold? No — the point can only be that men who were equally able to see the affairs of their own God, things which they had even foretold, nevertheless had not seen them. This, then, will be the blessedness of others: that they saw what the first group had only foretold. [14] In the end we shall show — and have already shown — that the things foretold were indeed seen in Christ, yet were hidden even from the prophets themselves, precisely so that they would remain hidden from the wise and prudent of this age too. In the true Gospel, a teacher of the Law approaches the Lord: "What must I do," he says, "to obtain eternal life?" In the heretic's version only "life" is set down, with no mention of "eternal," so that the teacher appears to be asking about that long life which is promised in the Law by the Creator, and so that the Lord's answer according to the Law — "You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul and all your strength" — seems fitted to a man who was inquiring about the Law's kind of life. [15] But surely a teacher of the Law already knew how to obtain the Law's kind of life, and would not have asked about the very thing whose rules he himself taught. No — because the dead were already being raised by Christ, and he had been roused, by these examples of return to life, to a hope of eternal life, he asked about the attaining of eternal life, in case that loftier hope should demand some further observance beyond the Law. So the Lord — being no other than the God of the Law himself, and introducing no new precept, but only the one that lies at the very root of all salvation and of both kinds of life — sets before him the very head and summit of the Law: to love the Lord your God with your whole being. [16] So then, if the man was asking about the long life that belongs to the Creator, and Christ answered about that very thing — not about the eternal life that belongs to Marcion's god — how does he go on to obtain eternal life? Certainly not by the same means as the long life. For where the wages differ, the work required must be believed to differ as well. So the Marcionite will not obtain eternal life by loving your god, in the way that the Creator's lover obtains long life by loving the Creator. [17] But how absurd is it that the one who promises eternal life should not be loved all the more, if the one who promises only long life is to be loved at all? Then both kinds of life must belong to the same God, since the very same discipline must be pursued to gain either one. What the Creator teaches is precisely what must be loved if Christ is to grant it — with that further rule stepping in here too, that the greater gifts are more readily believed to belong to the one with whom lesser gifts have already gone before, than to the one for whom no lesser gifts prepared any credibility for the greater. [18] Let it be seen to now, whether our side has added the word "eternal." It is enough for me that this Christ, the one who invites us to eternal — not merely long — life, when consulted about the long life he was supposedly demolishing, urged the man instead toward eternal life rather than bringing it up on his own. What, I ask you, would the Christ of the Creator have done, had the man whom he was raising up in love of the Creator not himself been the Creator's own? He would, I imagine, have forbidden any love of the Creator whatsoever.
Chapter 26.