Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] You hold the scriptures by which the flesh is blackened; hold also those by which it is illuminated. You read where it is brought low — fix your eyes too on where it is raised up. [2] 'All flesh is grass' — this is not the only thing Isaiah pronounced, for he also said, 'every creature of flesh shall look upon the deliverance that comes from God.' It stands written in Genesis, where the Lord says, 'My spirit shall not remain in these men forever, for they are flesh' — but it is also heard through Joel, 'I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh.' [3] Nor should you take the Apostle to write with one pen only whenever he jabs at the flesh: for even though he denies that anything good dwells in his flesh, even though he insists that people who live according to the flesh are unable to gratify God, on the ground that flesh sets its desire against spirit, and though he sets down other statements of that kind, the point in all of them is that it is not flesh as a substance but flesh as conduct that stands accused, we shall say elsewhere that nothing is properly to be cast up against the flesh except as a rebuke to the soul, which subdues the flesh to its own service. [4] But meanwhile, in those very letters too, it is Paul who carries the marks of Christ in his own body, who forbids our body to be defiled as God's temple, who makes our bodies members of Christ, who urges us to lift up and magnify God in our body. [5] So if it is the flesh's disgraces that they use to expel its resurrection, why not rather bring in its dignities as grounds for it? Since it is more fitting for God to restore to salvation what he sometimes disapproved, than to hand over to ruin what he also approved.