Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] "So," you say, "if God said and God made, and one God said and another made, then two gods are being preached." If you're really so thick-headed, humor yourself for a moment. And to convince yourself of this still further, take note that the psalm also names two gods: "Your throne, O God, is forever; the scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of righteousness; you have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore God, your God, has anointed you." [2] If he's speaking to God, and calls the anointed one "God" by God, then this passage too asserts two gods — "for the scepter of your kingdom." So too Isaiah, speaking of the person of Christ: "And the men of Seboim, arrogant men, will cross over to you and follow after you in chains, and will worship you, because God is in you; for you are our God and we did not know it, God of Israel." Here too, by saying "God is in you" and "You are God," he sets forth two — the one who was in Christ, and Christ himself. [3] More telling still is what you find in exactly so many words in the Gospel: "At the very origin the Word already existed, and that Word was present alongside God, and the Word himself was God" — one party existing, and another alongside whom he existed. And I read the name "Lord" applied to two as well: "The Lord declared to my own Lord, Take your seat at my right side." And here is Isaiah's cry: "O Lord, who has put faith in what we proclaimed, and to whom has the Lord's arm now been laid bare?" He would not have said "your arm," meaning the Lord's, unless he meant us to understand both a Lord who is Father and a Lord who is Son. [4] Genesis is older still: "And the Lord poured down upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone, a fire sent by the Lord out of the sky above." Either deny these things are written, or else — who are you, not to take them as they are written, especially since they carry their sense not in allegories and parables but in plain, definite statements? But if you're one of those who back then could not stomach the Lord when he showed himself the Son of God, for fear of believing him Lord, then recall that it is written of the same people: "I said, You are gods, and sons of the Most High," and, "God stands in the assembly of the gods" — so that if Scripture was not afraid to pronounce men made sons of God by faith "gods," you should know it conferred the name of "God" and "Lord" all the more rightly upon God's true and only Son. [5] "So," you say, "I challenge you to preach, on this same scriptural authority, two gods and two lords openly, today as well." Never. For we, who by God's grace examine both the times and the reasons behind these scriptures — disciples of the Paraclete, not of men — do indeed distinguish two, Father and Son, and even three with the Holy Spirit, according to the principle of the economy that produces number; not so that (as your perversity infers) the Father himself should be taken as one who underwent birth and endured suffering — a thing we are forbidden to hold, since that is not how it has been handed down. [6] All the same, we never let "two gods" and "two lords" pass our lips — not because Father is not God, and Son is not God, and the Holy Spirit is not God, and each is God — but because back then two gods and two lords were indeed being preached, so that when Christ came he might both be recognized as God and called Lord, being the Son of God and of the Lord. For if a single person of "God" and "Lord" had been found in the Scriptures, Christ would rightly have been refused admission to the name of God and Lord — since no other besides the one God and one Lord was being preached — and it would have followed that the Father himself seemed to have come down, because "one God" and "one Lord" was what was read, and his whole economy — devised and dispensed as the very substance of faith — would have been thrown into shadow. [7] But once Christ came and was known by us to be the one who had made the number back then, ranking second after the Father, and, together with the Spirit, third in order — the Father too being now more fully revealed through him — the name "God" and "Lord" was drawn back together into unity: so that, as the nations passed from a multitude of idols to the one God, a distinction might be established between worshippers of the one and worshippers of many divinities. [8] For it was fitting for Christians to shine in the world as sons of light, worshipping and naming one light, one God and one Lord, and none besides. Otherwise, if out of the very knowledge by which we know the name "God" and "Lord" fits Father, Son, and Spirit alike, we went about calling them "gods" and "lords," we would have snuffed out our own torches — grown timid even at martyrdom, since there would then lie open, for those swearing straight off "by the gods and lords," an easy way to escape, the way certain heretics do, who have many gods. [9] And so I will not say "gods" at all, nor "lords" — I will follow the apostle: if Father and Son must be named together, I will call the Father "God" and name Jesus Christ "Lord." Christ alone, though, I can call God, just as the same apostle does: "Of whom is Christ, who is," he says, "God over all, blessed forever." [10] For I will also call a ray of the sun, taken by itself, "sun" — yet naming the sun to which the ray belongs, I will not therefore straightaway call the ray "the sun." For even if I were to make two suns, still I would count sun and its ray as two things and two forms of one undivided substance, exactly as I count God and his Word, exactly as Father and Son.