Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] In John's Revelation, too, an order of times is laid out — the very order that the martyred souls, crying beneath that altar for retribution and judgment, have come to endure: that first the world must drain the plagues from the angels' bowls, and that prostituted city must receive from the ten kings the fate it deserves, and the beast antichrist, with his false prophet, must wage war against the church, [2] and only then, once the devil has meanwhile been bound in the abyss, is the privilege of the first resurrection ordered from thrones — and only after that, once fire has been sent, is the reckoning of the universal resurrection made from the books. [3] Since, then, the scriptures mark out the very order of these last times, and place the whole harvest of the Christian hope at the world's exodus, it is plain either that everything promised us by God is fulfilled then, and that what the heretics now claim for the present is empty — or, if the recognition of the mystery is itself the resurrection, then that resurrection which is preached for the very last day is surely safe and certain too: [4] and it follows that, precisely because this spiritual resurrection is claimed there, the bodily one is thereby made the more certain: because if no bodily resurrection were then to be announced, this spiritual one alone, and only this one, would rightly be claimed — but since a bodily one is proclaimed for that final time, that shows that no spiritual one is announced then. [5] For why would a resurrection of the same kind, the spiritual, be announced again, when it would befit it either to be settled now, with no distinction of times at all, or else there, under the seal that closes all times? [6] So it suits us all the better to defend the spiritual resurrection as beginning from the entry of faith — we who recognize its fullness only at the world's exit.