The state of humanity, infected with an impatience that divides it from the Father’s Spirit, rendering it not even an authentic human individual, is for Tertullian the
inheritance of ancestral sin made real in every subsequent phase of human history. It is a hopeless situation, for as we have already seen, there is no possibility but that a disfi gured economy will produce disfi gured individuals. Every soul is born ‘in Adam’, each economically rendered unclean, actively sinful, ‘with its own shame’. From this disfi gured economy there is no escape, save for one cardinal reality: God’s power to transform is stronger than the human ability to distort.99
That which God wills, Tertullian notes, he has authority to effect. The will of God for his handiwork, in the face of its impatience and sin, is evidenced from the beginning: God responds to impatience with patience. So while humanity waged war against God in Eden, and God could rightly have responded in full indigna- tion, Tertullian reads scripture as revealing a more measured reaction:
Whence the fi rst indignation came upon God, thence came also his fi rst patience. For God, content at that time with malediction only, refrained in the devil’s case from the instant infl iction of punishment. Else what crime, before this guilt of impatience, is imputed to man? Innocent he was, and in intimate friendship with God, and the husbandman of paradise.100
So the impatience of humanity is to be met not with fi re and wrath, which might rightly be called upon as its corrective agents. It is met more forcefully with the antithesis of impatience: the patience of God himself in his economic dealings with creation. This is evident, Tertullian makes clear, from the fi rst instance of sin, and so the salvifi c work of the economy is begun already in Eden. It becomes most full, however, in the life of the incarnate Christ.
To culminate in refl ections on Christology is the natural destiny of a Christian anthropology; though one culminates here only because one began here – with the theological witness of the incarnate, resurrected Christ to the stature of man and the cosmos. In Irenaeus this was clear, inasmuch as Christ, the new Adam and true Adam, is seen as both beginning and end of the human economy. The empty tomb, with the God-made-man confessed as rising from it, encompasses the whole of history and defi nes every aspect of anthropological measure. This is no less true for Tertullian, and no less important to a full understanding of his vision of the human. The advancing economy is primarily to be understood as the unfolding of God’s will, the will expressed in the Father’s Son, who is the personal reality of this will and the model for the image present in man. It is the will of this Son, and thus the will of the Father, that the desire and intention of the Father as creator be realized in the economy in which his creation struggles. The Father wills, in the Son and through the Son, that the human handiwork become that which exists according to his intention in the chorus of creation, a chorus which refrained again and again ‘it is good’. This is, in some sense, the primal declaration of God’s
99 So DA 21. 100 De Pat. 5.
desire for the created order. So the will of the Father in Christ is that the economy refl ect and give life to that which is authentically human nature, truly imaging its model. This idea is made clear in an important passage from Tertullian’s De
oratione, dealing specifi cally with Christ’s example of prayer to his disciples. It
is a lengthy text, but one which must be examined in full:
According to this model, we subjoin, ‘Thy will be done in the heavens and on the earth’ – not that there is some power withstanding to prevent God’s will being done, and we pray for him the successful achievement of his will; but we pray for his will to be done in all. For, by fi gurative interpretation of fl esh and spirit, it is we who are ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’, albeit, even if it is to be under- stood simply, still the sense of the petition is the same: that in us God’s will be done on earth, to make it possible, namely, for it to be done also in the heavens. What, moreover, does God’s will mean, but that we should walk according to his discipline? We make petition, then, that he supply us with the substance of his will (substantiam voluntatis suae), and the capacity to do it, that we may be saved both in the heavens and on earth; because the sum of his will is the salvation of them whom he has adopted. There is, too, that will of God which the Lord accomplished in preaching, in working, in enduring: for if he himself proclaimed that he did not his own but the Father’s will, without doubt those things which he used to do were the Father’s will; unto which things, as unto exemplars, we are now provoked – to preach, to work, to endure even unto death. And we need the will of God, that we may be able to fulfi l these duties. Again, in saying, ‘Thy will be done’ we are even wishing well to ourselves, in-so-far that there is nothing of evil in the will of God; even if, proportionally to each one’s desserts, somewhat other is imposed on us. So by this expression we admonish our own selves unto patience. The Lord also, when he had wished to demonstrate to us, even in his own fl esh, the fl esh’s infi rmity by the reality of suffering, said, ‘Father, remove this thy cup’, and remembering himself, added, ‘save that not my will, but thine be done’. He himself was the will and the power of the Father; and yet, for the demonstra- tion of the patience that was due, he gave himself up to the Father’s will.101
Tertullian has allegorized the prayer taught by Christ, to speak directly of the fl esh and soul of the human individual.102 As the Son petitions the Father that the heav-
enly and earthly realms might exist in harmony with the divine will, so Tertullian sees him instructing that the soul (the ‘heavenly’ element in humanity) and the body (the ‘earthly’) come into harmony with the will of the Father expressed in himself. Here this is specifi cally indicated as a will of patience, and the manner of
101 De Or. 4.
102 Cf. our comments on the ‘Our Father’ in the previous chapter on Irenaeus (p. 43), and below on Cyril (p. 155).
living that patience inspires: endurance, suffering, martyric witness, authentic teaching, etc. The cosmic scope of the prayer, which calls the whole of earth and heaven to come into divine concordance, becomes for Tertullian intimately per- sonal, exhorting all the elements of the person to be united to, and expressive of, the creator’s will and design.
It is interesting to observe that, in this passage, Tertullian sees the incarnate Christ’s role as chiefl y paradigmatic. He shows through the example of his own life, patience and suffering endurance, the path that all should follow. It is in living human life the way the Son lived human life, that the subhuman reality of a fallen economy is overcome. Christ is the example of a new and better way. With respect to individual characteristics of human living, Tertullian makes, in De
patientia 4, the same point that Irenaeus had previously made in Refutation
2.22.4 with respect to the ages of human life (‘and so Christ passed through every age, becoming a child for children, being an example . . .’). The didactic value of Christ the recapitulator in Irenaeus is mirrored in strong terms. Yet just as Irenaeus insisted that the instructive role of Christ as exemplar only has redemptive value if it is conjoined to a genuine anthropological renewal, overcoming that burden of sin which prevents any pure example from being followed fully, so too does Tertullian link the paradigmatic function of Christ to an ontological framework. This is made clear already later in his same tract on prayer, when Tertullian gives his commentary on the phrase ‘give us this day our daily bread’. First, he notes, Christ gives in personal example an instruction on the value of petitioning God for earthly necessities. If in want of bread, one should ask God that it be provided. But the implication of the petition does not end in the material realm:
For the Lord had issued his edict, ‘Seek ye fi rst the kingdom, and then even these shall be added’ (Matthew 6.33), that we may rather understand, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ spiritually. For Christ is our bread, because Christ is life and bread is life. ‘I am’, he says, ‘the bread of life’, and a little earlier, ‘The bread is the Word of the living God, who came down from the heavens’. Then we fi nd, too, that his body is reckoned in bread: ‘this is my body’. And so, in petitioning for ‘daily bread’, we ask for perpetuity in Christ, and indivisibility from his body (itaque petendo panem quotidianem perpe-
tuitatem postulamus in Christo et indiuiduitatem a corpore eius).103
In what is clearly a eucharistic text, Tertullian has linked the paradigmatic role of Christ as teacher of authentic economy, to a redemption at the level of ontology or nature. Humanity seeks, in Christ, to become one with the body of Christ, attained in Christian life through the eucharistic mystery. That which humanity is, is trans- formed in the life and offering of Christ. The disunion that a misused economy has
rendered universal is transformed into a new reality that is ‘in Christ’ perpetually, indivisible from his body.
How Tertullian understands this bringing together of Christ and the full scope of humanity is not relegated solely, or even primarily, to Christ’s act of forgiving the human race its transgression and offering a renewed moral relationship to the Father. It is, above all, discovered in the incarnational reality of divine union with the human. The Son of the Father interjects himself into the human economy, not as an outside force or messenger (as might be the case with angelic pronounce- ment or prophetic inspiration), but in the most fundamental manner possible: by taking to himself the nature by which the economy is made real. The Son becomes human, effecting human history by becoming that which gives rise to history, and which that history effects correspondingly. It is only in seeing Christ’s function incarnationally, as the coming-together of the human and the divine, that Tertul- lian’s Christology and broader anthropology fi nd their inherent correlates. He is willing, therefore, to insist on this principal feature of an incarnational soteriology even in locations that would seem unlikely candidates for such discussion. This is the case, for example, in his long Apologeticum, where he is surprisingly at his most articulate on the matter. Speaking in the twenty-fi rst chapter in profoundly trinitarian terms, articulating the Son’s union with the Father as substantive (i.e. according to substantia), as a ray from a source of light, he goes on to note:
This ray of God, then, as it was always foretold in ancient times, descending into a certain virgin and made fl esh in her womb, is in his birth God and man united. The fl esh formed by the Spirit is nourished, grows up to manhood, speaks, teaches, works and is the Christ.104
It is as God-and-man-united that the ‘fl esh’ of Christ (and here Tertullian refers to the whole incarnate reality of the Son, not merely the body) is, through the nourishing presence of the Spirit, made redemptive to humanity. It is as incarnate that the Son is ‘the Christ’, the redeemer. This is not an instance of Tertullian attempting a kind of chronology to the existence of the Son, from pre- to cur- rently-incarnational ‘phases’, but his means of articulating how the encountered Jesus, the one who ‘is the Christ’, is at once also ‘the ray of God foretold in ancient times’; that is, ‘God and man united’. The passage is Tertullian’s way of accomplishing that which the evangelist articulates at John 1.1: ‘The Word became fl esh and dwelt among us’ – not a record of the ‘history’ of the eternal Son, but a confession of the incarnational reality of Jesus confessed as Son of God. The virginal birth of this Son, by which he took to himself the human fl esh in which he is encountered and known (he was ‘made fl esh in her womb’), is the surety of his redemptive power.
Tertullian’s implication could not be clearer: it is as human that the Son is known as Christ, that Jesus effects his work as Saviour. The outcome of such an incarnational union in Christ is disclosed later in the same chapter: it is as human that the Son ‘aims to enlighten men already civilised’, and that he is enabled to make this ‘enlightenment’ full and complete. This is precisely because the human life he lives is the human life of the divine Son, and not merely another personal reality bound to the enslaving disfi guration of the economy. ‘Search then’, writes Tertullian, ‘and see if that divinity of Christ be true. If it be of such a nature that the acceptance of it transforms a man, and makes him truly good, there is implied in that the duty of renouncing what is opposed to it as false.’ It is precisely the incarnate divinity confessed of Jesus Christ that allows him to ‘transform’ humanity, to make it a thing ‘truly good’. The divine power of the Father, which is the Son’s from all eternity as a ray from a fi re, is that which makes the personal reality of ‘God and man united’ redemptively capable.