Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Otherwise, if you press on, I can answer you more harshly still and pit you against a pronouncement of the Lord himself — let me put the question to you this way: you have him crying out in his passion, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" So either the Son was suffering, forsaken by the Father, and the Father who forsook the Son did not himself suffer — or, if it was the Father who suffered, to what God was he crying out? [2] But this cry belongs to flesh and soul, that is, to man, not to the Word nor to the Spirit — that is, not to God — and it was uttered precisely to show that God is incapable of suffering, since he "forsook" the Son only in the sense that he handed over the Son's manhood to death. [3] This is what the apostle meant when he wrote, "If the Father did not spare his own Son." This is what Isaiah announced beforehand: "And the Lord handed him over for our offenses." So he "forsook" him by not sparing him; so he "forsook" him by handing him over. [4] Yet the Father did not abandon the Son, into whose hands the Son placed his own spirit. Indeed, he placed it there, and at once he died — for while the spirit remains in the flesh, the flesh cannot possibly die outright. Thus for the Son "to be forsaken by the Father" meant simply to die. So the Son both dies and is raised again by the Father, according to the scriptures. The Son ascends into the higher heavens — the very one who also descended into the lower parts of the earth. [5] It is he who sits at the right hand of the Father, not the Father at his own right hand. This is the one Stephen sees, as he is being stoned, standing still at God's right hand, ready from that moment to sit until the Father puts all his enemies under his feet. This is the one who will also come again upon the clouds of heaven, in the same manner as he ascended. It is he who, meanwhile, having received the gift from the Father, poured out the Holy Spirit — the third name of the Godhead and the third degree of majesty, the preacher of the one sovereign rule, yet also the interpreter of the divine economy if anyone will admit the utterances of his new prophecy, and the guide into every truth abiding in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit alike, in keeping with the Christian sacrament.