Tertullian

Tertullian
150?–220 or 240 A.D.

Tertullian was born in Carthage, Africa.  Little is known directly about his life other than he was the son of the captain of a Roman le­gion.  He received a Græco Ro­man education, acquainting him with the philosophical, poetic, and literary arts.  He followed Christianity after living “in heathen blindness” for thirty to forty years. [1]

The coining of the name “Trinity” has been credited to Ter­tullian.

Among the terms introduced in the discussion of the doc­trine of the Trinity during this period the follow­ing are the most common, viz. (1.) Triaz [emphasis mine], introduced by Theophilus of Antioch in the 2d century, and often used by Origen in the 3d cen­tury.  Tertullian translated it into Latin by the word Trinitas [emphasis mine] of which the En­glish word is an exact rendering.[2]

Tertullian was a spokesmen for the post-apostolic church, and in that role he took an active part in de­fending what he thought to be the ortho­dox view of God.  His role led him to oppose a man named Prax­aes, who was a Monarchian (one King) and la­beled a patripassian (the fa­ther suffered) heretic. 

Monarchians denied a distinction of separate per­sons in the nature of God by insisting on an absolute “Oneness” of God. Praxaes was de­clared to be a pa­tripassian because if Jesus was to be God manifest in the flesh, it would mean that the Father of Jesus suffered on the cross.  This was totally unacceptable to post-apostolic theologians because they believed that God could not suffer, He was impassi­ble.  This belief is a sign of the influence philosophy had on the doctrinal belief of the Church fathers during the post-apostolic period.

There were instances of Monarchians straying from the truth as shown in the case of Sabellius; but it seemed their primary motivation was to pre­serve the monotheistic view of God which, in their eyes, the Trinitarian influence was de­stroying.  It is difficult to determine if

Prax­aes was guilty of any crime be­yond his belief that God was Jesus Christ Him­self.  We know very little of his teaching or doctrine be­yond what was written about him by Tertullian due to the destruction of his writings by his opposition. 

Schaff describes his theology as follows:

Praxaes, constantly appealing to Is. 45:5; Jno. 10:30 (“I and my Father are one”), and 14:9 (“He that hath seen me hath seen the Father”), as if the whole Bible consisted of these three passages, taught that the Fa­ther himself became man, hun­gered, thirsted, suffered, and died in Christ.  True, he would not be understood as speaking di­rectly of a suffer­ing (pati) of the Father, but only of a sympathy (copati) of the Father with the Son; but in any case he lost the inde­pendent per­sonality of the Son.  He conceived the relation of the Fa­ther to the Son as like that of the spirit to the flesh.  The same subject, as spirit, is the Father; as flesh, the Son.  He thought the Catholic doctrine tritheis­tic.[3]

The fact of whether or not God, the father of Je­sus suffered is not explicitly discussed in scripture.  However, it is safe to assume that since Jesus and the Father were one (John 10:30) and the Father was living in Jesus (John 14:10) that the Father under­stood what suffering was.  A portion of Tertullian’s written opposition against Praxaes is re­produced below: 

In the course of time then, the Father forsooth was born and the Father suf­fered – God Himself, the Lord Almighty, whom in their preaching, they de­clare to be Jesus Christ.  We, however, as we indeed always have done (and more es­pecially since we have been better instructed by the para­clete, who leads men in­deed into all truth), believe that there is one only God, but un­der the follow­ing dispensation or oikovouia, as it is called, that this one only God has also a Son, His Word, who proceeded from Himself, by whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made.  Him, we be­lieve to have been sent by the Father into the Virgin, and to have been born of her – – being both God and Man, the Son and the Son of God, and to have been called by the name of Je­sus Christ; we believe Him to have suf­fered, died, and been buried, according to Scriptures, and, af­ter He had been raised again by the father and taken back to heaven, to be sitting at the right hand of the Fa­ther….in the case of this heresy, which supposes itself to possess the pure truth, in thinking that one cannot believe in One Only  God in any other way than by saying that the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost are the very selfsame Per­son…..The sim­ple, indeed, (I will not call them unwise and unlearned), who always constitute the majority of believers [emphasis mine], are star­tled at the dispensa­tion (of the three in One) on the ground that their very rule of faith withdraws them from the world’s plural­ity of gods to the one only true God;….they are con­stantly throwing out against us that we are preachers of two gods and three gods, while they take to themselves pre-em­inently, the credit of being the worshippers of the One God.[4]

Tertullian claims that he was above the belief that Je­sus was GOD in flesh because he was instructed by the paraclete.  He admits to all history that this belief of Prax­aes “constitutes the majority of be­lievers” during his era and he ridicules Praxaes and the “majority of be­lievers” for being simple (mentally deficient).  The sig­nificance of this quotation is overwhelming and very encour­aging to me per­sonally, be­cause it substantiates the fact that abso­lute monotheism was the only accepted belief in the early church.  This view was never eradicated but only lost its prominence as a result of persecution.

[1] Schaff, Volume II, pp. 819-820.

[2] McClintock and Strong,   Volume X, p 553.

[3] Schaff,  Volume II, p 577.   

[4] Alexander Roberts, D.D., and James Donaldson, LL.D.,  Editors, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.), Volume III, pp.598,599.