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| The Eternal Home in Heaven. Beautiful Exposition by Tertullian of the Apostle's Consolatory Teaching Against the Fear of Death, So Apt to Arise Under Anti-Christian Oppression. The Judgment-Seat of Christ--The Idea, Anti-Marcionite. Paradise. Judicial Characteristics of Christ Which are Inconsistent with the Heretical Views About Him; The Apostle's Sharpness, or Severity, Shows Him to Be a Fit Preacher of the Creator's Christ.
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Chapter XII.—The
Eternal Home in Heaven. Beautiful Exposition by Tertullian of the
Apostle’s Consolatory Teaching Against the Fear of Death, So Apt
to Arise Under Anti-Christian Oppression. The Judgment-Seat of
Christ—The Idea, Anti-Marcionite. Paradise. Judicial
Characteristics of Christ Which are Inconsistent with the Heretical
Views About Him; The Apostle’s Sharpness, or Severity, Shows Him
to Be a Fit Preacher of the Creator’s Christ.
As to the house of this our earthly
dwelling-place, when he says that “we have an eternal home in
heaven, not made with hands,”5740
he by no means
would imply that, because it was built by the Creator’s hand, it
must perish in a perpetual dissolution after death.5741
| 5741 As Marcion would have
men believe. | He treats of this subject in order to offer
consolation against the fear of death and the dread of this very
dissolution, as is even more manifest from what follows, when he adds,
that “in this tabernacle of our earthly body we do groan,
earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with the vesture which is from
heaven,5742
if so be, that
having been unclothed,5743
we shall not be
found naked;” in other words, shall regain that of which we have
been divested, even our body. And again he says: “We that are in
this tabernacle do groan, not as if we were oppressed5744
with an unwillingness to be unclothed, but
(we wish) to be clothed upon.”5745
He here says
expressly, what he touched but lightly5746
in
his first epistle, where he wrote:) “The dead shall be
raised incorruptible (meaning those who had undergone mortality),
“and we shall be changed” (whom God shall find to be yet in
the flesh).5747
Both those
shall be raised incorruptible, because they shall regain their
body—and that a renewed one, from which shall come their
incorruptibility; and these also shall, in the crisis of the
last moment, and from their instantaneous death, whilst encountering
the oppressions of anti-christ, undergo a change, obtaining therein not
so much a divestiture of body as “a clothing upon” with the
vesture which is from heaven.5748
| 5748 Superinduti magis quod
de cœlo quam exuti corpus. | So that whilst
these shall put on over their (changed) body this, heavenly raiment,
the dead also shall for their part5749
recover their
body, over which they too have a supervesture to put on, even the
incorruption of heaven;5750
because of these it
was that he said: “This corruptible must put on
incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.”5751
The one put on this (heavenly)
apparel,5752
when they recover
their bodies; the others put it on as a supervesture,5753
when they indeed hardly lose them (in the
suddenness of their change). It was accordingly not without good reason
that he described them as “not wishing indeed to be
unclothed,” but (rather as wanting) “to be clothed
upon;”5754
in other words, as
wishing not to undergo death, but to be surprised into life,5755
“that this moral (body) might be
swallowed up of life,”5756
by being rescued
from death in the supervesture of its changed state. This is why he
shows us how much better it is for us not to be sorry, if we should be
surprised by death, and tells us that we even hold of God “the
earnest of His Spirit”5757
(pledged as it were
thereby to have “the clothing upon,” which is the object of
our hope), and that “so long as we are in the flesh, we are
absent from the Lord;”5758
moreover, that we
ought on this account to prefer5759
“rather
to be absent from the body and to be present with the
Lord,”5760
and so to be ready
to meet even death with joy. In this view it is that he informs us how
“we must all appear before the judgement-seat of Christ, that
every one may receive the things done in his body, according as he hath
done either good or bad.”5761
Since,
however, there is then to be a retribution according to men’s
merits, how will any be able to reckon with5762
God? But by mentioning both the judgment-seat and the distinction
between works good and bad, he sets before us a Judge who is to award
both sentences,5763
and has thereby
affirmed that all will have to be present at the tribunal in their
bodies. For it will be impossible to pass sentence except on the body,
for what has been done in the body. God would be unjust, if any one
were not punished or else rewarded in that very condition,5764
| 5764 Per id, per quod,
i.e., corpus. | wherein the merit was itself achieved.
“If therefore any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old
things are passed away; behold, all things are become
new;”5765
and so is
accomplished the prophecy of Isaiah.5766
When also he
(in a later passage) enjoins us “to cleanse ourselves from all
filthiness of flesh and blood”5767
(since this
substance enters not the kingdom of God5768
);
when, again, he “espouses the church as a chaste virgin to
Christ,”5769
a spouse to a
spouse in very deed,5770
| 5770 Utique ut sponsam
sponso. | an image cannot be
combined and compared with what is opposed to the real nature of the
thing (with which it is compared). So when he designates “false
apostles, deceitful workers transforming themselves” into
likenesses of himself,5771
of course by their
hypocrisy, he charges them with the guilt of disorderly conversation,
rather than of false doctrine.5772
| 5772 Prædicationis
adulteratæ. | The contrariety,
therefore, was one of conduct, not of gods.5773
| 5773 A reference to
Marcion’s other god of the New Testament, of which he tortured
the epistles (and this passage among them) to produce the evidence. | If
“Satan himself, too, is transformed into an angel of
light,”5774
such an assertion
must not be used to the prejudice of the Creator. The Creator is not an
angel, but God. Into a god of light, and not an angel of light, must
Satan then have been said to be transformed, if he did not mean to call
him “the angel,” which both we and Marcion know him to be.
On Paradise is the title of a treatise of ours, in which is
discussed all that the subject admits of.5775
| 5775 Patitur. The work here
referred to is not extant; it is, however, referred to in the De
Anima, c. lv. | I
shall here simply wonder, in connection with this matter, whether a god
who has no dispensation of any kind on earth could possibly have a
paradise to call his own—without perchance availing himself of
the paradise of the Creator, to use it as he does His world—much
in the character of a mendicant.5776
| 5776 Precario; “that
which one must beg for.” See, however, above, book iv. chap.
xxii. p. 384, note 8, for a different turn to this word. | And yet of the
removal of a man from earth to heaven we have an instance afforded us
by the Creator in Elijah.5777
But what will
excite my surprise still more is the case (next supposed by Marcion),
that a God so good and gracious, and so averse to blows and cruelty,
should have suborned the angel Satan—not his own either, but the
Creator’s—“to buffet” the apostle,5778
and then to have refused his request, when
thrice entreated to liberate him! It would seem, therefore, that
Marcion’s god imitates the Creator’s conduct, who is an
enemy to the proud, even “putting down the mighty from their
seats.”5779
| 5779 1 Sam. ii. 7, 8; Ps. cxlvii. 6; Luke i.
52. | Is he then the same
God as He who gave Satan power over the person of Job that his
“strength might be made perfect in weakness?”5780
| 5780 Job
i. 12 and 2 Cor. xii. 9. | How is it that the censurer of the
Galatians5781
still retains the
very formula of the law: “In the mouth of two or three
witnesses shall every word be established?”5782
How again is it that he threatens sinners
“that he will not spare” them5783
—he, the preacher of a most gentle god?
Yea, he even declares that “the Lord hath given to him the power
of using sharpness in their presence!”5784
Deny now, O heretic, (at your cost,) that your god is an object to be
feared, when his apostle was for making himself so
formidable!E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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