Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] And he himself will illuminate the hidden things of darkness -- through Christ, of course, since it is Christ who promised illumination, and who also declared himself a lamp, one who searches hearts and minds. From him too will come praise for each person, and from him the opposite of praise, as from a judge. Surely, you say, here at least he means by "world" the god of this world, when he says, "We have become a spectacle to the world, and to angels, and to men" -- because if "world" had meant merely "men of the world," he would not afterward have named "men" separately. On the contrary, so that you not argue that way, the providence of the Holy Spirit has shown precisely why he said, "We have become a spectacle to the world," meaning to the angels who minister to the world, and to the men to whom they minister. [2] No doubt a man of such firmness -- not to say the Holy Spirit itself -- was afraid, especially in writing to sons he had begotten through the gospel, to name the god of this world openly, since he could not seem to be preaching against him except explicitly. I am not defending the point that, under the creator's law, the man who had his father's wife displeased him. He was simply following the discipline common to public religion generally. But when he condemns that man to be handed over to Satan, he is the herald of the god who condemns. Consider, too, how he put it: "unto the wasting away of the flesh, so that his spirit might be kept safe on that day when the Lord comes" -- thereby pronouncing sentence at once on the flesh's ruin and on the spirit's deliverance, and, in ordering that evil be removed from their midst, echoing a sentence repeated over and over by the creator: [3] "Purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, as you are unleavened." So then the unleavened loaves were figures of us, in the creator's own scheme. So too "our Passover is sacrificed, even Christ." Why is Christ called Passover, if the Passover was not a figure of Christ, through the likeness of the saving blood of that sacrificial animal and of Christ's own? What have we and Christ to do with the images of the creator's solemn feasts, if they were not ours to begin with? [4] Then, turning us away from fornication, he makes plain the resurrection of the flesh: "The body," he says, "was not made for whoring, but belongs to the Lord, just as the Lord belongs to it, so that it stands as a shrine to God, and God dwells within that shrine." Will the temple perish for God, and God for the temple? But no -- you see, "He who raised up the Lord will raise us up too" -- will likewise raise our very bodies, seeing that the body belongs to the Lord and he in turn to it. And he does well to press further: "Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?" What will the heretic say? That the members of Christ will not rise again, because they are no longer ours? For "we were bought with a great price." [5] Plainly with nothing at all, if Christ was a phantom and had no bodily substance to pay out on behalf of our bodies. So then Christ too had something with which to redeem us, and if he redeemed these bodies at some great price, bodies into which fornication may no longer be committed as though they were members of Christ and no longer ours, he will surely preserve safe for himself what he purchased at so great a cost. Now then -- how are we to honor, how are we to carry about, a God in a body doomed to perish? [6] Next comes the subject of marriage, which Marcion, more rigid than the apostle, forbids to the faithful. For the apostle, though he prefers the good of continence, nonetheless allows marriage to be contracted and to be made use of, and urges rather that it be kept than dissolved. Now Christ, plainly, forbids divorce, while Moses permits it. Marcion, sweeping away all intercourse from the faithful -- his catechumens can look to their own case -- ordering divorce before marriage even begins, whose ruling does he follow here, Moses's or Christ's? [7] But Christ too, when he commands that a wife not depart from her husband, or if she has departed, that she stay single thereafter or else make peace again with her husband, has both allowed divorce -- which he did not forbid absolutely -- and confirmed marriage, which he first forbade to be dissolved, and which, if by chance dissolved, he wished restored. But what reasons for continence does he give? [8] "Because the time is drawn together." I had supposed there was a different god in Christ; and yet the one from whom comes the drawing-together of time will also be the one to whom what suits that drawing-together belongs. No one legislates for a time not his own. You make your god a petty thing, Marcion, if the creator's time can hem him in on any point. Certainly, in ordering that marriage take place "only in the Lord," so that no believer contract a marriage with a pagan, he is upholding the creator's own law, which everywhere forbids marriages with foreigners. [9] But as for "even if there are those called gods, whether in heaven or on earth" -- it is clear why he put it that way: not as though they truly existed, but because there are beings so called, though they do not exist. For he had begun the passage speaking of idols, about to discuss meat offered to idols: "We know that an idol is nothing." Even Marcion does not deny that the creator is a god; so the apostle cannot be seen as placing the creator too among those who are called gods and yet are not, since, even granting they existed, still "for us there exists but a single God, who is Father." "from whom all things come to us" -- and whose could all things be, if not his to whom all things belong? What things are these? You have it in what came before: "Everything is at your disposal -- be it Paul, Apollos, Cephas, the world, life, death, whatever now stands, or whatever is still to arrive." [10] So he makes the creator the god of all things -- from whom come both world and life and death, which cannot belong to a different god. From him, then, among all things, is Christ too included. Teaching that each man ought to live from his own labor, he had already given examples enough beforehand from soldiers, shepherds, farmers; but he lacked divine authority for it. So he sets against the ungrateful the creator's own law -- the very law he was supposedly demolishing; for his own god had no such law to offer. "You shall not muzzle the ox that treads out the grain," he says, and adds, "Does God take care for oxen?" -- meaning, is it also, for man's sake, kindly meant even concerning oxen? "For it was written for our sakes," he says. [11] So then he has proven that the law is to be read allegorically, in our sense, and that it supports, out of the gospel, those who live by it -- and for this very reason those who preach the gospel belong to none but the one whose statute already looked to their needs, since he says, "It was set down on our account." But he chose not to make use of the law's right, because he preferred to labor free of charge. This he counted to his own glory, which he denied anyone would nullify -- not to the destruction of the law, whose right he proved another would use. For see, blind Marcion stumbles even against the rock, from which our fathers drank in the wilderness. For if that rock was Christ, it was certainly the creator's rock, since the people too were his -- whose figure does he then make this to be, by his interpretation of it as belonging to a foreign mystery? Or was it rather to teach precisely this, that the old things were figures pointing forward to Christ, to be reckoned as belonging to that same order? For, about to run through the rest of the people's fate as well, he prefaces it: "Now these things happened to them as examples." [13] Tell me -- were these made examples for men by the creator, on behalf of some other, unknown god? Or would one deity fetch its warnings from another -- and a competing one, no less? I am alarmed on his behalf, this god to whom he transfers my faith. Will this adversary make me a better man? Now then, if I should sin as that people sinned, will I suffer the same, or not? But if not the same, he is proposing to frighten me groundlessly with things I shall never suffer. And suffer at whose hand shall I? If at the creator's, what sort of things is it in his character to inflict? And what sense would it make for a jealous god to punish the sinner of his rival more severely than, on the contrary, a zealous god would cherish him? If at the hand of that other god -- but he does not know how to punish. So this whole proposition of the apostle stands on no reasoning at all, unless it belongs to the creator's own discipline. [14] Finally, in the closing words he answers his own opening. "These things befell them as a pattern, and they stand recorded to instruct us, on whom the closing periods of the ages have fallen." O the creator, already foreknowing and already admonishing Christians not his own! I pass over cases already covered elsewhere, and briefly strike out a few others. A great argument for another god is his permission of all kinds of food, over against the law. As though we ourselves did not also confess that the burdens of the law have been lifted -- but lifted by the very one who imposed them, who also promised renewal. So too with the foods he took away: he gave back what he had granted from the beginning. As for the rest -- if there had been some other god, a destroyer of our God, nothing would have kept his own people further from living off the resources of his adversary.
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