Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume III/Anti-Marcion/Against Praxeas/II

by Tertullian

Chapter II.—The Catholic Doctrine of the Trinity and Unity, Sometimes Called the Divine Economy, or Dispensation of the Personal Relations of the Godhead.

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 οἰκονομία , as it is called, that this one only God has also a Son, His Word, who proceeded^[1] 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 Man and God, the Son of Man 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 the 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, and that He will come to judge the quick and the dead; who sent also from heaven from the Father, according to His own promise, the Holy Ghost, the Paraclete,^[2] the sanctifier of the faith of those who believe in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost. That this rule of faith has come down to us from the beginning of the gospel, even before any of the older heretics, much more before Praxeas, a pretender of yesterday, will be apparent both from the lateness of date^[3] which marks all heresies, and also from the absolutely novel character of our new-fangled Praxeas. In this principle also we must henceforth find a presumption of equal force against all heresies whatsoever—that whatever is first is true, whereas that is spurious which is later in date.^[4] But keeping this prescriptive rule inviolate, still some opportunity must be given for reviewing (the statements of heretics), with a view to the instruction and protection of divers persons; were it only that it may not seem that each perversion of the truth is condemned without examination, and simply prejudged;^[5] especially 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, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are the very selfsame Person. As if in this way also one were not All, in that All are of One, by unity (that is) of substance; while the mystery of the dispensation^[6] is still guarded, which distributes the Unity into a Trinity, placing in their order^[7] the three Persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: three, however, not in condition,^[8] but in degree;^[9] not in substance, but in form; not in power, but in aspect;^[10] yet of one substance, and of one condition, and of one power, inasmuch as He is one God, from whom these degrees and forms and aspects are reckoned, under the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.^[11] How they are susceptible of number without division, will be shown as our treatise proceeds.

Footnotes

1. The Church afterwards applied this term exclusively to the Holy Ghost. [That is, the Nicene Creed made it technically applicable to the Spirit, making the distinction marked between the generation of the Word and the procession of the Holy Ghost.]
2. The “Comforter.”
3. See our Anti-Marcion, p. 119, n. 1. Edin.
4. See his De Præscript. xxix.
5. Tertullian uses similar precaution in his argument elsewhere.  See our Anti-Marcion, pp. 3 and 119. Edin.
6. οἰκονομία.
7. Dirigens.
8. Statu.
9. See The Apology, ch. xxi.
10. Specie.
11. See Bull’s Def. Fid. Nic., and the translation (by the translator of this work), in the Oxford Series, p. 202.