Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] And do not suppose that only the works of the world's making were done through the Son, but also whatever God has since accomplished. For the Father, 'who loves the Son and has given all things into his hand,' has loved him and given to him from the very beginning — since already from the outset 'the Word existed alongside God, and the Word himself was God' — the very one to whom 'all authority' was granted 'by the Father, in heaven and upon earth'; 'the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son' — and this from the beginning. [2] For in saying 'all power,' and 'all judgment,' and 'all things made through him,' and 'all things given into his hand,' scripture allows no exception of time, since 'all things' would not be all if they had not belonged to every span of time. It is the Son, then, who has judged from the beginning — flattening the most arrogant of towers and scattering its tongues, punishing the whole world with the violence of waters, raining fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah, 'the Lord from the Lord.' [3] He it is who has always come down to converse with men, from Adam through the patriarchs and prophets, laying out beforehand, in vision, in dream, in mirror, in riddle, from the very start, the pattern he was to pursue to the end. So it was always God himself, learning by practice, so to speak, to dwell on earth with men — none other than the Word who was one day to be flesh. And he was practicing it so as to lay a foundation of faith for us, that we might the more readily trust that God's own Son had descended into the world, once we already knew that a like thing had occurred long ages earlier. [4] For it was for our sake that these things were both written and done, running down to us across the boundary-lines of the ages. So too he already knew human feelings then, being destined himself to take up the very substances of man, flesh and soul: questioning Adam as though not knowing — 'Adam, where are you?' — repenting that he had made man as though he had not foreseen it, testing Abraham as though ignorant of what was in the man, being offended and then reconciled with the same people — and whatever else the heretics seize on as unworthy of God, to demolish the Creator, not realizing that these things belong to the Son, who was likewise to undergo human sufferings — thirst, hunger, tears, and birth itself and death itself — for which he was 'made a little lower than the angels' by the Father. [5] But the heretics will not even allow that what you make the Father do himself — as if he had lowered himself for our sake — could fittingly belong to the Son of God instead, though scripture says one was lowered by another, not that he lowered himself by himself. What if it is likewise one who was crowned with glory and honor, and another who crowned him — the Father crowning the Son, of course? [6] But how could it be that Almighty God — that invisible one 'whom no man has seen nor can see,' who 'dwells in unapproachable light,' who 'does not dwell in houses made with hands,' at whose sight 'the earth trembles' and 'the mountains melt like wax,' who 'grasps the whole world in his hand as though it were a bird's nest,' for whom 'the sky serves as a seat and the ground as a footrest,' in whom every place exists, while he himself occupies none, who is the outermost boundary line of the universe, the Most High — should have walked in the garden toward evening looking for Adam, and shut the ark's door after Noah went in, and refreshed himself under the oak with Abraham, and called Moses from the burning bush, and appeared as a fourth man in the Babylonian king's furnace — even though there he was called 'a son of man'? And all this in image and mirror and riddle, of course — things that scarcely anyone would credit even about God's own Son, had they not been set down in writing, and perhaps would not be believed of the Father even though they are written, this Father whom these men then drag down into Mary's womb, set up on Pilate's tribunal, and shut away in Joseph's tomb. [7] Hence, then, their error becomes plain. For not knowing that the whole order of the divine arrangement has run its course through the Son from the very beginning, they believe it was the Father himself who was seen and who met with men and who worked and who suffered thirst and hunger — against the prophet who says, 'The eternal God will not thirst nor hunger at all' — how much less, then, will he die or be buried! — and so they suppose that one God, namely the Father, has always been the sole actor in what was in fact done through the Son.