Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
So too you twist his 'repentance' to a bad sense, as though he repents out of fickleness or lack of foresight — indeed, as if out of the very memory of a fault — since he did say, 'I repent that I made Saul king,' laying down, as you would have it, that repentance implies confession of some evil deed or error. But that is not always so. For it can happen that the confession of repentance, even over good deeds, arises from indignation and reproach against someone who has proved ungrateful for a kindness done — just as here, in the case of Saul, whose honoring is being announced by the Creator, who had done no wrong when he took Saul up into the kingship and enlarged him with the Holy Spirit; for he had chosen a man supremely good — 'such as,' it says, 'there was none among the sons of Israel' — most deservedly. Nor had he failed to foresee how it would turn out. No one will grant you the right to charge with lack of foresight the very one whom you yourself, without denying he is God, confess to be provident — for that is a property proper to his divinity. No, it was Saul's evil deed, as I said, that he was burdening with the confession of his own 'repentance' — a repentance which, given that there was no fault in the choosing of Saul itself, ought rather to be understood as expressing indignation, not accusation. 'But look,' you say, 'I see it plainly meant as a crime in the case of the Ninevites, where the Scripture of Jonah says, "And the Lord repented of the evil he had said he would do to them, and did not do it," just as Jonah himself said to the Lord, "Therefore I fled beforehand to Tarshish, because I knew that you are merciful and compassionate, patient and abounding in mercy, one who repents of evils."' Well then, it is well that he put first the title of the best of gods — namely, most patient toward the wicked and most abounding in mercy and compassion toward those who acknowledge and lament their sins, such as the Ninevites were then. For if he is 'best' who is such as this, you ought first to grant on this point that a rush of malice does not befit such a one — that is, one who is best. And because Marcion himself maintains that a good tree may not produce bad fruits either, yet Scripture named it 'malice' all the same — something the 'best' god, as you conceive him, cannot admit — is there then some interpretation available by which these 'evils' can be understood in a sense that could indeed befall the 'best'? There is. We say, in short, that what is meant here by 'malice' is not something to be traced back to the nature of the Creator, as though he were evil, but to his power, as of a judge; in that sense he declared, 'I am he who forms evils,' and, 'Behold, I send evils upon you' — not sins, but punishments, whose ill repute we have already sufficiently cleared as befitting a judge. And just as, though called 'evils,' they are not blamed in a judge, nor do they by this name show the judge himself to be evil, so too this 'malice' now under discussion must be understood as that which, reckoned among those judicial 'evils,' belongs together with them to the judge. For among the Greeks too, 'malice' is sometimes used for afflictions and injuries, not for wickedness of character — just as it is used here. And so, even granting that the Creator 'repented' of this malice — as though of a creature deserving rejection and due for destruction — even so no crime whatsoever will be charged against the Creator, who had justly and deservedly decreed the destruction of a most iniquitous city. Thus what he had justly determined he did not determine wickedly; he determined it out of justice, not out of malice — but he named the punishment itself 'malice,' from the evil and desert of that very suffering. So, you will say, if you excuse the 'malice' under the name of justice — because he had justly decreed ruin for the Ninevites — then by the same token he must be blamed for having felt repentance over a justice that needed no repenting of. No, I say, God will not repent of justice; and it remains now only to grasp what God's 'repentance' actually is. For if a man repents, it is often out of memory of some great fault, and sometimes even out of resentment over some good deed unappreciated — but it does not follow that God does so in the same way. For to the degree that God neither commits evil nor condemns good, to that same degree there is, with him, no room for repentance either of good or of evil. For Scripture itself settles this for you elsewhere, where Samuel says to Saul: 'The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from your hand this day, and will give it to your neighbor, better than you, and Israel shall be split into two, and he will not turn back nor repent, for he is not as man, to repent.' This statement, then, establishes for every case a wholly different form of divine repentance — one to be reckoned neither from lack of foresight, nor from fickleness, nor from any condemnation of a good or evil deed, as with human repentance. What, then, will be the manner of divine repentance? It is already plain, if you refuse to measure it by human conditions. Nothing else will be understood by it than the simple reversal of an earlier verdict — one that can be admitted even without any blame attaching to the one who makes it, even in a man, let alone in God, whose every verdict is free of fault. And indeed in the Greek sound of the word, 'repentance' [metanoia] is compounded not from the confession of a fault, but from a change of mind — which is exactly how we have shown it to be governed in God's case, in response to the shifting turn of events.
25.