Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Let that blasphemy be silenced, let it be silenced. It is enough that Christ the Son of God is said to have died, and this simply because it is so written. For the apostle too, pronouncing that Christ died — not without a certain weight in the saying — adds "according to the Scriptures," so as to blunt the severity of the assertion through the authority of Scripture, and to remove the hearer's offense. And yet, since two substances are reckoned in Christ Jesus, the divine and the human, and it is agreed that the divine is immortal while the human is mortal, it is clear in what respect he is said to have died — namely as flesh, as man, as Son of Man, not as Spirit, Word, and Son of God. In short, by saying "Christ died" — that is, "the Anointed" — the statement shows precisely that it was the anointed thing that died, that is, the flesh. "So then," you say, "we too, saying the same thing by the same reasoning as you, are not guilty of blasphemy toward the Lord God regarding the Son; for we do not claim he died in his divine substance but in his human one." But no — you do blaspheme, not only because you say the Father died but because you say he was crucified. For the curse of crucifixion, which under the Law falls upon the Son — since "Christ was made a curse for us," not the Father — you turn into blasphemy against the Father by converting Christ into the Father. We, on the other hand, saying that Christ was crucified, do not curse him but merely report the Law's curse-formula, just as the apostle, saying the same, did not blaspheme by saying it. For just as anything may be said without blasphemy of one to whom it is applicable, so it is blasphemy to say of one to whom it does not apply. So then, neither did the Father "suffer with" the Son. Fearing, evidently, a direct blasphemy against the Father, they hope to soften it this way — conceding, in the process, that Father and Son are already two, if the Son indeed suffers while the Father merely "co-suffers." Foolish here too. For what is it to "suffer with" another except to suffer along with him? Further, if the Father is impassible, he is surely also incapable of co-suffering; or if capable of co-suffering, he is surely passible. You gain nothing for him even by this timid evasion of yours. You are afraid to call him "passible," and yet you call him "co-passible." But the Father is every bit as incapable of co-suffering as the Son himself is incapable of suffering, by that very condition in which he is God. But in what way then did the Son undergo suffering, given that the Father did not co-suffer alongside him? He is set apart from the Son, not from God. For if a river is polluted by some turbulence, though it runs down as one and the same substance from the spring and is never cut off from the spring, still the river's injury does not reach back to the spring; and though the water in the river is the very water of the spring, still, while it does not suffer in the spring but in the river, it is not the spring that suffers but the river that flows from the spring. So too could the Spirit of God suffer in the Son? Because it would not have suffered in the Father but in the Son, would the Father appear to have suffered? But it is enough that the Spirit of God, under its own name, suffered nothing at all — because if it suffered anything in the Son, it would in that sense have been possible for the Father to suffer along with the Son in the flesh. In fact, when this point is examined, no one will deny it: for even we cannot suffer for God's sake unless the Spirit of God is in us, who indeed speaks in us the things of confession — yet not itself the one suffering, but the one enabling the capacity to suffer.