Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] We are forced to repeat certain points again and again, so as to confirm what follows from them. Here too we say the Lord is proclaimed by the apostle as the one who repays according to each side's deserts — either the Creator, or (what Marcion refuses) an equal of the Creator — with whom it is just to repay affliction to those who afflict us, and rest to us who are afflicted, at the revelation of the Lord Jesus coming from heaven with the angels of his power and in flaming fire. But the heretic, by deleting 'flame' and 'fire,' has only put out his own case, lest, of course, he should make this our God. Yet the vanity of his erasure still shows through. [2] For when the apostle writes that the Lord is coming for vengeance, to be exacted from those who do not know God and who do not obey the gospel — who, he says, will pay the penalty of destruction, eternal, cast out from the presence of the Lord and away from the splendor of his strength — it follows that he is bringing in 'flame' and 'fire' precisely because he is coming to punish. So here too, whether Marcion likes it or not, Christ belongs to the God who burns, and that is the Creator's mark — that he also takes vengeance on those who do not know the Lord, that is, on the pagans. [3] For he set them apart separately: 'those not obeying the gospel' — whether sinning Christians or Jews. But to exact penalties from pagans, who perhaps have never even known the gospel, does not belong to that god who is by nature unknown, and who is revealed nowhere except in the gospel, and is not knowable by everyone. To the Creator, however, even a natural recognition is owed, understood from his works, and from there sought out toward a fuller knowledge. It is his prerogative, then, to punish even those who do not know God — since it is not permitted to be ignorant of him. And that very phrase — 'cast out from the presence of the Lord and away from the splendor of his strength' — echoing Isaiah's wording, on that very basis smacks of the same Lord who 'rises up to shatter the earth.' [4] But who is this 'man of sin, son of perdition,' who must be revealed before the Lord's coming, exalting himself above everything called god and every object of worship, taking his seat in the temple of God and proclaiming himself god? On our side, of course, this is Antichrist, as both the old prophecies and the new teach — as the apostle John, who says that already many antichrists have gone out into the world, forerunners of the spirit of Antichrist, denying that Christ has come in the flesh, and dissolving Jesus — namely, in the Creator God. But on Marcion's side, I hardly know whether there even is a Christ of the Creator's. On his view, he has not yet come. Whichever of the two he is, though, I ask: why does he come 'with every kind of power, and signs, and wonders that deceive'? [5] 'Because,' says Paul, 'they refused to embrace a fondness for the truth, so that they could be kept safe, and for this reason he will send upon them a working of deceit,' so that all may be judged who did not believe the truth but consented to wickedness. So then, if Antichrist belongs to the Creator's side too, the Creator will be the God who sends him, to lead astray in delusion those who withheld belief from the truth for their own saving — and to the same one, then, will belong both the truth and the deliverance, since he punishes their refusal of it by handing them over to error; that is, this belongs to the Creator, to whom it is entirely fitting that his very jealousy should deceive by error those he could not win by truth. But if he is not our Antichrist, then, on Marcion's own reckoning, he is the Creator's Christ! [6] And what sense would it make for the Creator's Christ to be sent to avenge his own truth? But even if he grants that this is about Antichrist, I would say just the same: what sense does it make that Satan, an angel of the Creator, should be necessary to him, and be slain by him, if it takes an agent of the Creator to carry out this work of deceit? In short, if there is no doubting that the angel, and the truth, and the deliverance are owed to the one to whom also are owed the wrath, the jealousy, and the sending of deceit against the scornful and the deserters — and even against those who are simply ignorant (so that even Marcion may at last step down and admit that his own god too is 'jealous') — then who has the better claim to anger? [7] I should think: the one who, from the very beginning of things, laid the groundwork for the recognition of himself through nature, through works, through kindnesses, through blows, through preachings, through witnesses — and yet was not recognized; rather than the one who has been brought forward only once, through a single, and that an uncertain, instrument of a gospel — a gospel that does not even openly proclaim a different god! So then, to whomever vengeance belongs, to him also belongs the matter of vengeance — I mean the gospel, and the truth, and the salvation. And it belongs to the discipline of him who bids men work in order to eat, that he also 'commanded that the ox treading out the grain should not be muzzled.'
17. ON THE EPISTLE TO THE LAODICEANS.