Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Now, to wrap up the rest in brief, whatever else you gather up as petty, weak, and unworthy for the destruction of the Creator, I will lay out on one simple and certain principle: God could not have entered into human dealings without taking on human feelings and human passions, through which he might temper the force of his majesty — intolerable, of course, to human mediocrity — by humility: unworthy of himself, indeed, but necessary for man, and therefore already worthy of God, since no cause is more fitting to God than the rescue of mankind. On this point I would argue at greater length if I were dealing with pagans; though even with heretics the engagement is not so very different. Since you yourselves already believe that God appeared in human form and went about in the rest of the fashion of human life, you can hardly demand any further persuading that God conformed himself to humanity — you stand convicted by your own faith. For if God — and indeed a higher God — laid low the summit of his majesty with such humility that he even subjected himself to death, and death on a cross, why should you not think it fitting that our God too should have accepted a few pettinesses — more tolerable ones, at that, than Jewish insults, gibbets, and tombs? Or are these the very pettinesses that ought, from this point on, to prove that Christ, exposed to human sufferings, belongs to the very God whom you reproach for his humanities? For we too profess that Christ has, from the start, always acted on behalf of God the Father, under his name — that it was he himself who conversed with mankind from the beginning, that he himself met with the patriarchs and prophets, being the Son of the Creator, his Word, whom by uttering him from himself he made his Son, and from then on set over the whole arrangement of his will, diminishing him a little beneath the angels, as it is written in David. By virtue of this diminishment he was also disposed by the Father to those things which you condemn as too human — learning them from the very beginning, being clothed from the very beginning in that manhood which he was to become in the end. He it is who came down, he who asks questions, he who makes requests, he who swears oaths. As for the Father, that he has never been seen by anyone, the common gospel itself will bear witness, Christ saying, 'No one has known the Father except the Son.' For he himself had also declared in the Old Testament, 'No one will see God and live' — marking out the Father as invisible, in whose authority and name he himself, the Son of God, was the God who was seen. But among us too, God is understood in the person of Christ, since in this way he is our God as well. So then, whatever you demand as worthy of God will be found in the invisible, unapproachable, tranquil Father — the god, if I may put it so, of the philosophers. But whatever you condemn as unworthy will be assigned to the Son, the one who was seen, heard, and encountered — the Father's agent and minister, mingling in himself man and God: God in his powers of might, man in his pettinesses — so that he might confer as much on man as he withholds from God. In short, the whole of what you count as disgrace in my God is the very mystery of human salvation. God lived among us in a human way, so that man might be taught to act in a godly way. God dealt with man on equal terms, so that man might be able to deal with God on equal terms. God was found small, so that man might become supremely great. If you scorn such a God as this, I doubt you truly believe, in faith, in a crucified God. How great, then, is your perversity toward both aspects of the Creator's character! You cast him as a judge, and then reproach as savagery the judge's severity that fits the merits of the case. You demand of him supreme goodness, and then, when his gentleness, fitting his kindness, condescends to the measure of human mediocrity, you dismiss it as pettiness. Neither greatness pleases you, nor modesty; neither judge nor friend. What if these very same charges were now discovered in your own god? We have already demonstrated from his own book that he too plays the judge — and a judge must of necessity be stern, and, being stern, is by that same token also harsh, if 'harsh' is indeed the right term.
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