Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Who would refuse to take care that we have food for the soul and clothing for the body, except the one who provided these things for man beforehand, and who therefore, having every right to the credit, guards their care as a rival to his own generosity? He who fitted the very substance of the soul to be worth more than food, and shaped the very stuff of the body to be worth more than a tunic — he whose ravens neither sow nor reap nor store in barns, and yet are fed by him; whose lilies and grass neither weave nor spin, yet are dressed by him nonetheless, by whom even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. [2] But nothing is so preposterous as for one god to supply a thing while another orders men to rely confidently on that supply — and does so while actually running down the giver! Now if, playing the role of the giver's detractor, he refuses to have men think about such trivial matters as ravens and lilies never trouble themselves over — creatures which, of their own lowliness, are provided for without asking — that will become clear soon enough. Meanwhile, why does he rebuke them for little faith — faith in whom, exactly? [3] Was it faith in the one they could not yet fully render to a god only now being revealed, while they were still in the process of learning who he was? Or was it faith that they owed the Creator precisely on this title — that they should believe he freely supplies these things to the human race, and not fret about them? For when he adds, 'For these things the nations of the world seek after' — meaning, by not believing in the God who founded and provides all things, whom he did not want them made equal to the nations in this respect — he was rebuking the same God of little faith in whom he was branding the nations as unbelieving. Further, when he adds, 'But your Father knows that you need these things,' I want to ask first which Father Christ intends this to be understood as. [4] If he means their own Creator, then he is also affirming him good, since he knows what his children need. But if he means that other god, how does that god know that food and clothing are necessary for man, when he has supplied neither? For if he had known, he would have supplied them. But if he knows what is necessary for man and still has not supplied it, then he failed to supply it either out of malice or out of weakness. Yet by declaring these things necessary for man, he has certainly confirmed them good — for nothing necessary is evil. And he will no longer be depreciating the Creator's works and kindnesses, so as to cancel out what I set aside above for later discussion. [5] Further, if it is another god who knows what is necessary for man and provides and supplies it, how can this one promise the same things himself? Is he generous with what belongs to someone else? 'Seek first the kingdom of God,' he says, 'and these things will be added to you' — added, obviously, by the same one whose kingdom it is. But if by him, then what kind of person supplies what belongs to another? If it is the Creator's kingdom, since it is his, who is this that promises what is not his own? If these things are added along with the kingdom, restored on the second rank, then the one to whom the second rank belongs is the one to whom the first belongs too; the food and clothing belong to the one the kingdom belongs to. [6] So the entire promise stands on the ground of the Creator — that is the state of his parables, the balance of his similitudes, if indeed they point to no one other than the one they match at every turn. We are servants, for we have God as our master. We must gird our loins — that is, be unencumbered by the tangling entanglements of a dissolute life. Likewise we must keep our lamps burning — that is, keep our minds kindled by faith and shining with works of truth — and so wait for our lord, that is, Christ. Returning from where? If from a wedding, it belongs to the Creator, whose weddings these are; if not the Creator's, then Marcion's own Christ would never have gone to a wedding when invited, given that he keeps his eye on a god who detests marriage. So the parable collapses in the person of the lord, if there is no one to whom weddings are fitting. [7] In the following parable too, anyone badly errs who casts that thief — whose hour, had the master of the house known it, he would not have let his house be broken into — in the role of the Creator. How can the Creator possibly look like a thief, he who is lord of the whole man? No one steals or breaks into what is his own; rather it is the one who invades another's property, alienating a man from his own master. Now since he shows us that the thief is the devil — whose hour, had man known it even at the beginning, he would never have been broken into by him — for this reason he bids us be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour we do not expect: not as though he himself were the thief, but rather the judge of those who have not made themselves ready and have not been on guard against the thief. [8] So then, granting that he is the Son of Man, I take him for judge, and in that judge I am defending the Creator; but if it is Christ of the Creator that he is showing under the title 'Son of Man' in this passage, precisely to cast him as the thief whose coming-time we do not know, you already have it established above that no one is a thief of his own property — with the added point that the more he impresses on us fear of the Creator, the more the business he is transacting is the Creator's own. [9] And so when Peter asked whether he had spoken this parable to them alone or to all, he sets before them, and before everyone destined to preside over the churches, the parable of the stewards: whoever treats his fellow servants well will, when the lord returns after his absence, be put in charge of everything; but whoever behaves otherwise will, when the lord returns on a day he did not expect and at an hour he did not know — the Son of Man himself, the Christ of the Creator, not as thief but as judge — be cut off, and his portion set with the unfaithful. [10] So then, either here too he sets forth the lord as judge, and is catechizing his hearer into that Creator, or, if this is meant to be the supremely good god, he too is now confirmed as judge, however much the heretic wishes it otherwise. For they try to soften the sense here, on the score that it belongs to their god, as though it were merely a matter of calm and gentle temperament to segregate a man and set his portion with the unfaithful — as if he had not been called at all, so that he is merely being returned to his prior state! As though this were not itself the result of a judgment! What folly! What will be the outcome for those who are segregated? Is it not the loss of salvation, seeing that they are being segregated from those who will obtain salvation? What, then, is the state of the unfaithful? Is it not condemnation? [11] Or if the segregated and unfaithful suffer nothing, then by the same logic those retained and faithful gain nothing either. But if the retained and faithful do obtain salvation, then necessarily the segregated and unfaithful lose it. This will be the judgment — and whoever intends judgment belongs to the Creator. Whom else am I to understand as the one who beats servants with few or many stripes, exacting from each according to what he committed, except a God who renders to each his due? Whom does he teach me to obey but the one who rewards? [12] Your Christ proclaims: 'I have come to cast fire upon the earth.' Is this the supremely good one, lord of no hell, who a little before had checked his disciples with the harshest rebuke when they wanted to call down fire on that most inhospitable village — when it was that other one who burned Sodom and Gomorrah with a fiery storm, of whom it is sung, 'Fire shall go before him and burn up his enemies,' who through Hosea threatened, 'I will send fire upon the cities of Judah,' and through Isaiah, 'A fire has been kindled in my anger'? Let him not lie about it. If it is not the same one who also sent forth his voice from the burning bush, then let him work out for himself what fire he means to argue for. [13] Even if it is a figure of speech, by this very fact — that he draws the arguments for his meaning from my element — he belongs to me who makes use of what is mine. The comparison of fire will belong to the one to whom the reality of fire belongs. He himself will explain the quality of this fire better, when he adds: 'Do you suppose that I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.' The text actually reads 'sword' — but Marcion has edited it! [14] As though division were not the sword's own work! So then, the one who denied peace also intends the fire of overthrow. As the battle, so the conflagration; as the sword, so the flame — neither fitting for his lord. Finally: 'The father,' he says, 'shall stand split from the son, and likewise the son from the father; the mother set against her daughter, and the daughter against her mother; the bride opposed to her husband's mother, the husband's mother opposed to the bride.' If this battle among kinsfolk was sounded by the prophet's trumpet in these very words, I fear that Micah may have been proclaiming Marcion's Christ. [15] And that is why he was calling them hypocrites — men skilled at reading the face of sky and earth, yet unable to discern that particular time, in which, obviously, he was fulfilling all that had been foretold about him — nor could he have been recognized had he taught otherwise. But who could know the times of one who had nothing by which to prove them? He rightly rebukes them, too, for not judging what is right of their own accord. He had long since commanded this through Zechariah: 'Judge a righteous and peaceable judgment'; through Jeremiah: 'Do judgment and justice'; through Isaiah: 'Judge the fatherless, and do justice for the widow' — charging the vineyard of Sorek precisely with this, that it produced no justice but only an outcry. [16] So then, the one who had taught them to act on command was also the one demanding that they act on their own judgment. The one who had sown the precept was also the one pressing for its overflow. Now how absurd would it be for him to command just judgment while destroying the just judge, God! For as to the judge who casts into prison and does not release from it until the last farthing is paid, they argue, using that as a reproach, that this is the Creator being represented. To this I must respond on the same footing. For on every occasion the Creator's harshness gets flung at him as a reproach, on that very occasion it is his own Christ who is driving men to obey through terror.
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