Even the technical terms which Tertullian employs with such predilection and which are often thought of as contributions of his own to the discussion, such as οἰκονομία, trinitas,[1] for example, need not be new, but may owe it only to accident that they come here for the first time strikingly before us. Indeed, Tertullian does not use them as if they were novelties. On the contrary he introduces them as well-known terms, which he could freely employ as such. He speaks[2] of “that dispensation which we call the οἰκονομία” that is to say, apparently, “which is commonly so called.” And in the same connection he joins the “distribution of the Unity into a Trinity”[3] with the οἰκονομία in such a manner as inevitably to suggest to the reader that this mode of explaining the οἰκονομία belonged to its tradition. Assuredly no reader would derive from the tract the impression that such terms were new coinages struck out to meet the occasion.
Additional point is given to this impression by the circumstance that Tertullian not only puts forward no claim to originality, but actually asserts that his teaching is the traditional teaching of the Church. As over against the novel character of the new-fangled teaching of Praxeas, which falls as such under the prescription which Tertullian was wont to bring against all heresies as innovations and therefore no part of the original deposit of the faith, he sets his doctrine as a doctrine which had always been believed and now much more, under the better instruction of the Paraclete. “We, however, as always, so now especially, since better instructed by the Paraclete, who is the leader into all truth, believe that there is one God indeed, but yet under the following dispensation, which we call the οἰκονομία.”[4] An attempt has been made, it is true, to read in this statement a hint that the doctrine of the Trinity was a peculiarity of the Montanists;[5] and to make out that Tertullian
- ↑ Lipsius, as above, p. 721, instances these two terms as “expressions which meet us here for the first time.” Both terms appear in Hippolytus’ Cont. Noët., and if that tract antedates Tertullian’s this would be an earlier appearance; and each appears once in earlier literature.
- ↑ Chap. ii.
- ↑ Chap. ii. Cf. Chap. iii.
- ↑ Chap. ii.
- ↑ That Tertullian owed his Trinitarianism to Montanism was already suggested by the younger Christopher Sand in the seventeenth century—whose Nucleus Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ was one of the works which Bull’s Defensio was intended to meet. See Bull, II, vii, 7 (E. T., p. 203). It was revived vigorously by the Tübingen School (Baur, Dreieinigkeitslchre, 177, and especially Schwegler, e.g., Nachapost, Zeitalter, II, 341). Lipsius, as quoted, p. 719, opposes the notion, but argues that nevertheless in Africa, at least, there was a connection between Montanism and Trinitarianism. Besides his own paper in the Zeitschrijt für wissensch, Theologie, 1866, p. 194, Lipsius refers for information to Ritschl, Altkathol. Kirche, Ed. 2, p. 487f, and Volckmar, Hippolyt., p. 115. Stier argues the
