Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] If "god" has become a common noun through the fault of human error—inasmuch as many gods are spoken of and believed in throughout the world—the "blessed God" of our Lord Jesus Christ will nonetheless be understood to be none other than the Creator, who blessed the whole of things: you have that in Genesis; and who is blessed by the whole of things: you have that in Daniel. So if the Father can be called a barren god, it is under no name more than the Creator's; yet he will still be the very "Father of mercies" who is called merciful and compassionate and abounding in mercy. [2] You have that in Jonah, together with the very instance of mercy he granted when the Ninevites pleaded; easily bent, too, by Hezekiah's tears, and ready to forgive Ahab, Jezebel's husband, the blood of Naboth when he begged, and to pardon David at once when he acknowledged his sin—preferring, clearly, the sinner's repentance to his death, out of sheer feeling of mercy. If Marcion's god has produced or pronounced anything of that kind, I will acknowledge him as "Father of mercies." [3] But if he assigns him this title only from the moment he was revealed—as though he became "Father of mercies" only from the point he set about liberating the human race—well, we too deny that he is God from that very point at which he is said to have been revealed. He cannot, therefore, assign anything to one whom he is only then showing to exist, at the very moment he assigns it to him. For only if it were already established that he existed could the title then be assigned to him. What is assigned is an accident, and accidents presuppose the prior demonstration of the very thing to which they attach—all the more so when what is assigned belongs, in fact, to someone else, seeing he had not previously been shown to exist. The more his existence is affirmed by what is assigned him, the more it will be denied him, precisely because that by which it is affirmed belongs to one already shown to exist. [4] So too the New Testament will belong to none other than the one who promised it—not in the letter, perhaps, but in its spirit; that will be its newness. After all, the very one who had carved the letter on tablets of stone also pronounced concerning the spirit: "I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh." And if the letter kills but the spirit gives life, both belong to the one who says, "It is I who bring death, and I who restore to life; I wound, and I am the one who heals." We long ago vindicated the Creator's twofold power—both judge and good—killing by the letter through the Law and giving life by the spirit through the gospel. These things, though different, cannot be made into two gods when they were shown from the start to belong to one reckoning. [5] He also brings up the veil of Moses, with which he covered his face, unbearable to look upon, from the children of Israel. If this was meant to defend the greater glory of the New Testament, which abides in glory, over the Old, which was destined to be done away with, this suits my faith too, which sets the gospel above the Law—and see whether it does not suit it even better. For there can only be something "superimposed" where the thing it is superimposed upon also exists. But when he says, "But the minds of the world were blunted," he certainly does not mean the Creator, but the people who are in the world. For of Israel he says, "To this very day that same veil remains on their heart." He shows that the veil on Moses's face was a figure of the veil on the people's heart, because even now Moses is not perceived by them in the heart, just as then he was not seen in the face. [6] What, then, is still veiled in Moses that could concern Paul, if the Christ preached by Moses—the Creator's Christ—has not yet come? How could the hearts of the Jews still be described as covered and veiled, when the very things Moses preached—that is, concerning Christ, in whom they ought to have understood him—have not yet been made manifest? What is it to an apostle of some other Christ, if the Jews did not understand the mysteries of their own God, unless it be that the veil on their heart pertained to the blindness by which they had failed to see the Christ of Moses? [7] Then again, what follows—"But when it shall turn to God, the veil shall be taken away"—he says this specifically of the Jew, with whom the veil of Moses still lies; who, once he has passed over into faith in Christ, understands that Moses had been preaching of Christ. But how else could the veil be taken away from the Christ of a different god, whose mysteries the Creator could not have veiled, being unknown things of an unknown god? [8] He says, then, that we, with unveiled face—that is, of the heart, which remains veiled among the Jews—beholding Christ, are transfigured by the same image from glory, the very glory by which Moses too was transfigured from the glory of the Lord, into glory. Thus, setting forth Moses's bodily radiance from his encounter with the Lord and the bodily veil arising from the people's weakness, and superimposing spiritual revelation and spiritual splendor in Christ—"as from the Lord," he says, "of the spirits"—he testifies that the whole arrangement of Moses was a figure of the Christ unrecognized among the Jews but acknowledged among us. [9] We know that certain meanings can suffer ambiguity from the sound of the reading or from where the pause falls, when a double sense is possible. Marcion seized on this, reading it thus: "In whom the god of this age"—as if to point to the Creator, suggesting that "the god of this age" is a different god from the god "of another age." We, on the contrary, say it must be punctuated thus: "In whom God"—full stop, then—"of this age blinded the minds of the unbelieving." "In whom"—that is, in the unbelieving Jews, in whom the gospel remains hidden to some, still under the veil of Moses. For to them, God—whose lips honored him while their heart stayed far from him—had threatened: "With your ears you shall hear and not hear, with your eyes you shall see and not see," and: "Unless you believe, you shall not understand," and: "The cleverness of the clever I will bring to ruin, and the discernment of the shrewd I will cast down to nothing." [10] These threats, at any rate, were certainly not made about hiding the gospel of some unknown god. So then, even granting he is "the god of this age," it is the hearts of the unbelievers of this age that he blinds, because they would not of their own accord recognize his Christ as he is to be understood from the Scriptures. Having taken up the matter within the bounds of the ambiguous punctuation only so far as to keep it from helping my opponent—being content with the victory—I might well have passed over this whole dispute altogether. [11] A simpler answer lies ready to hand: to interpret "the lord of this age" as the devil, who said, as the prophet reports, "I shall make myself equal to the Most High, I shall place my seat above the clouds"—just as the whole superstition of this age is enslaved to him who blinds the hearts of unbelievers, and first and foremost of the apostate Marcion. In any case, he failed to notice the clause that meets him head-on in the very sense of the passage: "For it is God, who commanded brightness to shine forth from the gloom, that has shed his light within our hearts, so as to make radiant the recognition of his glory, present in Christ's own countenance." [12] Whose word bade the light into being? And who was it that spoke to Christ, touching the enlightening of the world, saying, "I have appointed you a light for the nations"—for those, evidently, seated in darkness and beneath death's shadow? To this the Spirit responds in the psalm, foreknowing what was to come: "The light of your face, Lord, has been stamped upon us." Now this "face" of God is none other than Christ the Lord. For which reason the apostle, earlier, names him "the image of God." If, then, Christ bears the very identity of the Creator who spoke the word bidding light into being, then Christ, together with the apostles, the gospel, the veil, and Moses—the whole chain of them—belongs, by the testimony of that closing phrase, to the Creator, the god of this age, and by no means to one who at no time spoke that bidding of light. I pass over here also the other letter, which we hold to be addressed to the Ephesians, but which the heretics address to the Laodiceans. [13] For he says that the nations should remember that at that time, when they were without Christ, strangers to Israel, without covenant and without the hope of the promise, they were even "without God" in the world—albeit, that is, without the Creator. So then, if he says the nations were without God, and it was the devil who served as their god rather than the Creator, it is plain that "the lord of this age" must be understood as the one whom the nations took for a god, not the Creator, whom they did not know. [14] But how could it be that the same treasure is not held to belong to the same one whose vessels our earthen vessels are? For if the glory of God consists in holding so great a treasure in earthen vessels, and the earthen vessels belong to the Creator, then the glory too belongs to the Creator, whose vessels give the flavor of the surpassing power of God—and that power is itself his, since it was committed to earthen vessels precisely so that its surpassing greatness might be proved. [15] Otherwise it will no longer be the glory of some other god, and so not his power either, but rather disgrace and weakness, if his surpassing greatness were captured by earthen and, what is more, alien vessels. But if these are the "earthen vessels" in which he says we suffer such great things, in which we even carry about the "mortification" of God, then God is thoroughly ungrateful and unjust if he is not going to raise up again this very substance in which, for the sake of faith in him, so much is endured, in which the death of Christ is carried about, and in which the surpassing greatness of his power is consecrated. But indeed he goes on to say: "That the life of Christ also may be manifested in our body"—manifestly, just as his death also is carried about in the body. Of what life of Christ, then, does he speak? The one by which we now live in him? [16] And how, in what follows, does he not exhort us toward the invisible and the eternal rather than the visible and temporal—that is, toward the future rather than the present? But if he speaks of a future life of Christ, saying it will appear "in the body," he has openly preached the resurrection of the flesh, while saying that our outward man is being corrupted—not as though by eternal destruction after death, but by labors and hardships, about which he had already said, adding, "And we do not lose heart." For in saying that our inward man is being renewed day by day, he shows both things here at once: the corruption of the body from the buffeting of trials, and the renewal of the soul from the contemplation of the promises.
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