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| Christ's Nativity Both Possible and Becoming. The Heretical Opinion of Christ's Apparent Flesh Deceptive and Dishonourable to God, Even on Marcion's Principles.
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Chapter
III.—Christ’s Nativity Both Possible and Becoming. The
Heretical Opinion of Christ’s Apparent Flesh Deceptive and
Dishonourable to God, Even on Marcion’s Principles.
Since6970
you think that this
lay within the competency of your own arbitrary choice, you must needs
have supposed that being born6971
was either
impossible for God, or unbecoming to Him. With God, however, nothing is
impossible but what He does not will. Let us consider, then, whether He
willed to be born (for if He had the will, He also had the power, and
was born). I put the argument very briefly. If God had willed not to be
born, it matters not why, He would not have presented Himself in the
likeness of man. Now who, when he sees a man, would deny that he had
been born? What God therefore willed not to be, He would
in no wise have willed the seeming to be. When a thing is distasteful,
the very notion6972
of it is scouted;
because it makes no difference whether a thing exist or
do not exist, if, when it
does not exist, it is yet assumed to exist. It is of course of
the greatest importance that there should be nothing false (or
pretended) attributed to that which really does not exist.6973
| 6973 If Christ’s
flesh was not real, the pretence of it was wholly wrong. | But, say you, His own consciousness (of the
truth of His nature) was enough for Him. If any supposed that He
had been born, because they saw Him as a man, that was their
concern.6974
Yet with how much
more dignity and consistency would He have sustained the human
character on the supposition that He was truly born; for if He
were not born, He could not have undertaken the said character without
injury to that consciousness of His which you on your side attribute to
His confidence of being able to sustain, although not born, the
character of having been born even against! His own
consciousness!6975
| 6975 It did not much matter
(according to the view which Tertullian attributes to Marcion) if God
did practise deception in affecting the assumption of a humanity which
He knew to be unreal. Men took it to be real, and that answered every
purpose. God knew better: and He was moreover, strong enough to obviate
all inconveniences of the deception by His unfaltering fortitude, etc.
All this, however, seemed to Tertullian to be simply damaging and
perilous to the character of God, even from Marcion’s own point
of view. | Why, I want to
know,6976
was it of so much importance, that Christ
should, when perfectly aware what He really was, exhibit Himself as
being that which He was not? You cannot express any apprehension
that,6977
| 6977 Non potes dicere
ne, etc. | if He had been born and truly clothed
Himself with man’s nature, He would have ceased to be God, losing
what He was, while becoming what He was not. For God is in no danger of
losing His own state and condition. But, say you, I deny that God was
truly changed to man in such wise as to be born and endued with a body
of flesh, on this ground, that a being who is without end is also of
necessity incapable of change. For being changed into something else
puts an end to the former state. Change, therefore, is not possible to
a Being who cannot come to an end. Without doubt, the nature of things
which are subject to change is regulated by this law, that they have no
permanence in the state which is undergoing change in them, and that
they come to an end from thus wanting permanence, whilst they lose that
in the process of change which they previously were. But nothing is
equal with God; His nature is different6978
from the condition of all things. If, then, the things which differ
from God, and from which God differs, lose what existence they
had whilst they are undergoing change, wherein will consist the
difference of the Divine Being from all other things except in His
possessing the contrary faculty of theirs,—in other words, that
God can be changed into all conditions, and yet continue just as He is?
On any other supposition, He would be on the same level with those
things which, when changed, lose the existence they had before; whose
equal, of course, He is not in any other respect, as He certainly is
not in the changeful issues6979
| 6979 In exitu
conversionis. | of their
nature. You have sometimes read and believed that the
Creator’s angels have been changed into human form, and have even
borne about so veritable a body, that Abraham even washed their
feet,6980
and Lot was rescued from the Sodomites by
their hands;6981
an angel, moreover,
wrestled with a man so strenuously with his body, that the latter
desired to be let loose, so tightly was he held.6982
Has it, then, been permitted to angels,
which are inferior to God, after they have been changed into human
bodily form,6983
| 6983 See below in
chap. vi. and in the Anti-Marcion, iii. 9. | nevertheless to
remain angels? and will you deprive God, their superior, of this
faculty, as if Christ could not continue to be God, after His real
assumption of the nature of man? Or else, did those angels appear as
phantoms of flesh? You will not, however, have the courage to say this;
for if it be so held in your belief, that the Creator’s angels
are in the same condition as Christ, then Christ will belong to the
same God as those angels do, who are like Christ in their condition. If
you had not purposely rejected in some instances, and corrupted in
others, the Scriptures which are opposed to your opinion, you would
have been confuted in this matter by the Gospel of John, when it
declares that the Spirit descended in the body6984
of
a dove, and sat upon the Lord.6985
When the said
Spirit was in this condition, He was as truly a dove as He was also a
spirit; nor did He destroy His own proper substance by the assumption
of an extraneous substance. But you ask what becomes of the
dove’s body, after the return of the Spirit back to heaven, and
similarly in the case of the angels. Their withdrawal was effected in
the same manner as their appearance had been. If you had seen how
their production out of nothing had been effected, you would have known
also the process of their return to nothing. If the initial step was
out of sight, so was also the final one. Still there was solidity in
their bodily substance, whatever may have been the force by which the
body became visible. What is written cannot but have
been.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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