Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But how can antichrist be overturned root and branch, unless room is also made for demolishing his other thrusts as well, once the defense of our preliminary objections has been relaxed? Let us come, then, from here to the very person of God — or rather to the shadow and phantom of him, as Christ presents him according to Marcion — and let this be examined by the very standard by which he is set above the Creator. There will certainly be fixed rules for testing God's goodness. But first I must find that goodness and get hold of it, and only then bring it to the rules. For when I look around at the ages, nowhere from the very beginning of matter and the first entry of causes — the point at which it ought to have been found, since from there it would have had occasion to act — is it to be found acting as it should have acted. For death already existed, and the sting of death, sin, and the very malice belonging to the Creator, a plight to which that alien god's goodness should surely have hastened as rescuer, thereby satisfying this first rule of divine goodness — that if it proved itself natural, it would have rushed to help the moment the cause for it arose. For everything in God ought to be natural and innate, in order to be eternal, in keeping with his own condition, lest it be reckoned as something that merely came upon him from outside, and thereby be temporal and alien to eternity. So too a goodness that is perennial and continual will be required in God — one which, stored up and ready in the treasury of his natural properties, would have anticipated its own causes and materials, and would have seized the very first opportunity, not looked down on it and let it slip, if it really came before it. In short, here too I will ask no less a question than the one I asked about him before — why was his very revelation not from the beginning? Why should his goodness not likewise have operated from the beginning? Why not, indeed, since it was through goodness that he would have been revealed, if there had ever been such a god at all. It is not permitted to say God cannot do something — still less that he cannot exercise what belongs to his own nature. If his properties can be held back from running their course, they will not be natural properties at all. For nature does not know idleness. It is judged by whether it acts; so his goodness will likewise be thought never to have refused to be exercised, so long as it goes under the name of "nature" in the meantime. For nature cannot refuse itself — it directs itself in such a way that if it should ever stop, it ceases to exist. But the goodness of Marcion's god did, at some point, stop its work. Therefore it was not a natural goodness, since it was able at some point to stop — which is not permitted to natural things. And if it will not be natural, then it cannot be believed eternal either, nor equal to God, since it is not eternal, precisely because it is not natural — a goodness which, in the end, establishes no perpetuity for itself, either out of the past or by promise for the future. For indeed it did not exist from the beginning, and without doubt it will not exist at the end either. It can cease to be at some point, just as at some point it did not yet exist. Since, then, it is agreed that the goodness of that god ceased at the very beginning (for he did not free man from the beginning), and that it ceased by choice rather than by weakness, then the will behind the suppression of that goodness will turn out to be, in the end, malice. For what is so malicious as refusing to help when you are able, as torturing away a benefit, as permitting an injury? In the end, the entire indictment of the Creator will be rewritten against the one whose goodness aided his cruelties by its own delay. For whoever holds it in his power to prevent something from happening is already reckoned complicit when it happens. Man is condemned to death for tasting one little tree, and from then on sins keep pace with their punishments, and now all perish who have never known so much as a patch of turf in paradise. And this "better" god either does not know this or tolerates it. If the point of it is that he should be found better precisely to the degree that the Creator is shown worse by comparison, then he is malicious enough in that very design as well — wanting the Creator burdened with the guilt of his own deeds allowed to run their course, and keeping the world in torment the whole while. What would you make of a doctor who nurses a disease along by delaying treatment, and prolongs the danger by putting off the remedy, so as to effect a cure that costs more or wins more fame? Such, too, must be the verdict on Marcion's god: a permitter of evil, a patron of injury, a pimp of his own grace, a betrayer of the kindness he did not display at once when the case called for it — one who would plainly have displayed it, if he were good by nature and not by later accretion, if he were supremely good by disposition and not by training, if he were God from all eternity and not merely since Tiberius — or rather, to put it more truly, since Cerdo and Marcion. For now it seems that god granted to Tiberius the privilege of having divine goodness dedicated on earth during his reign.
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