Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
If the number of the Trinity still scandalizes you, as though it were not bound together in a simple unity, let me ask: how does the one and only, the singular, speak in the plural -- 'Let us make man in our image and likeness' -- when, being one and singular as you claim, he ought to have said, 'I will make man in my image and likeness'? And further on too, 'Behold, Adam has become as one of us' -- is he deceiving us, or playing games, speaking in the plural when he was one, alone, and singular? Or was he perhaps speaking to angels, as the Jews interpret it, since they too refuse to recognize the Son? Or was it because he himself was Father, Son, and Spirit all at once, that, presenting himself as plural, he spoke to himself in the plural? No -- it is rather because the Son already stood beside him, a second one alongside, his very own Word, and beyond that a third, the Spirit residing in that Word, that he used the plural in speaking: 'Let us make,' 'our,' 'to us.' For with whom was he making man, and to whose likeness was he making him like? To the Son's, indeed, who was one day to clothe himself in manhood; and to the Spirit's, who was to sanctify man. He was speaking, as it were, with ministers and witnesses drawn from the unity of the Trinity. Then again, the Scripture that follows distinguishes between the persons: 'And God made man, he made him after the image of God.' Why does it not say 'his own' image, supposing a lone maker acted with no other being to supply the pattern he worked from? But there was indeed one to whose image he was making him -- namely, the Son's; who, being destined to become man in a truer and more certain sense, had already caused his own image to be called 'man,' at the moment when man was being formed from clay -- an image and likeness of the true one. But how is it written of the earlier works of the world? First, before the Son had yet made his appearance: 'And God declared, Let light come to be, and so it happened' -- this being the Word himself in that moment, the genuine light that gives light to every man entering the world, and, by his agency, the light of the world besides. From there on, however, it is within the Word -- Christ present and directing the work -- that God decreed a thing into existence, and God brought it about: 'And God declared, Let a vault come to be, and God fashioned the vault'; 'And God declared, Let lights come to be, and God fashioned the greater light and the lesser.' Everything else likewise came from that identical one responsible for what preceded -- namely, God's own Word, the agent through whom every single thing was fashioned, apart from whom not one thing came to be. And if this same one is God, as John states -- 'the Word was God' -- then you have a pair: the one who declares, 'let it come to be,' and the one who accomplishes it. But how you ought to take this 'other' I have already stated: in the name of person, not of substance, marking a distinction, not a division. For the rest, even though I hold everywhere to a single substance cohering in three, still, by the sheer necessity of the sense, I must call the one who commands and the one who carries out the command 'another.' For he would not be commanding at all, if he himself were the one doing the thing even while commanding it to be done. Yet he did command -- through him; he would hardly have been going to command himself, were he only one, or have acted without any command at all; for he would never have waited around to give himself an order.