Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] From this point, then, to all the questions you raise, you dogs whom the apostle drives outdoors, barking against the God of truth! These are the bare bones of your arguments, which you gnaw at. If God is good, and foreknows the future, and has power to avert evil, why did he allow man — his own image and likeness, indeed his own very substance, by the reckoning of the soul — to slip from obedience to the law into death, ensnared by the devil? [2] For if he is good, and would not wish such a thing to happen, and foreknowing, and so could not fail to know it would happen, and powerful, and so able to prevent it — then in no way could what happened have happened, given these three conditions of divine majesty, under which it could not have happened. But if it did happen, then the opposite conclusion follows of necessity: that God must be believed neither good nor foreknowing nor powerful — since exactly to the extent that nothing of the sort would have happened had God been such (that is, good and foreknowing and powerful), to that same extent it did happen precisely because God is not such. [3] To this I answer: first one must defend, in the Creator, these very attributes that are being called into question — I mean his goodness, his foreknowledge, and his power. And I shall not dwell long on this point, since Christ himself has led the way in defining it: proofs are to be drawn from works. The works of the Creator testify to both — to his goodness, since they are good, as already demonstrated, and to his power, since they are so vast, indeed fashioned from nothing at all. For granted that they were shaped from some already-existing matter, as certain people maintain, nevertheless, even on that view, they came from nothing in this sense: that they were not, before they were what they now are. [4] Finally, they are great even on that view, since they are good; and God is powerful either way, since all things are his — therefore he is termed all-powerful. Yet what am I to say regarding his foreknowledge, which has as many witnesses as it has made prophets? Yet what title to foreknowledge is there in the author of all things but this — that in disposing of the universe he foreknew it, and in foreknowing it he disposed of it? Certainly he foreknew the very transgression itself; had he not foreknown it, he would never have attached to it that warning under threat of death. [5] So then, if these powers were indeed in God, powers by virtue of which no evil could or should have befallen man, and yet it did befall him, let us also look at man's own condition, in case it was rather through that condition that what could not happen through God did happen. I find man instituted by God as free, master of his own choice and his own power, discerning in him no image and likeness of God more than in this very form of his condition. [6] For he was not modeled on a uniform God in face and bodily outline, so various across the human race, but in that substance which he drew from God himself — that is, in a soul answering to the form of God — and he was marked with the freedom and power of his own choice. This condition of his was confirmed even by the law which God then laid down. [7] For a law would not have been laid upon one who did not have it in his own power to render the obedience owed to the law; nor again would the threat of death have been attached to transgression, unless contempt of the law too were reckoned to man's freedom of choice. So too you will find in the later laws of the Creator, setting before man good and evil, life and death — nor, for that matter, is the whole order of discipline arranged through precepts anything other than this, with God calling away and threatening and exhorting, unless man is free and willing both in obedience and in contempt.
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