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| From Parables Tertullian Comes to Consider Definite Acts of the Lord.
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Chapter XI.—From Parables
Tertullian Comes to Consider Definite Acts of the Lord.
From the side of its pertinence to the Gospel, the
question of the parables indeed has by this time been disposed
of. If, however, the Lord, by His deeds withal, issued any
such proclamation in favour of sinners; as when He permitted contact
even with his own body to the “woman, a
sinner,”—washing, as she did, His feet with tears, and
wiping them with her hair, and inaugurating His sepulture with
ointment; as when to the Samaritaness—not an adulteress by her
now sixth marriage, but a prostitute—He showed (what He did show
readily to any one) who He was;819
—no benefit is
hence conferred upon our adversaries, even if it had been to such as
were already Christians that He (in these several cases) granted
pardon. For we now affirm: This is lawful to the Lord
alone: may the power of His indulgence be operative at the
present day!820
At those times,
however, in which He lived on earth we lay this down definitively, that
it is no prejudgment against us if pardon used to be conferred on
sinners—even Jewish ones. For Christian discipline dates
from the renewing of the Testament,821
| 821 Comp. Matt. xxvi. 28, Mark xiv. 24, Luke xxii. 21,
with Heb. ix. 11–20. | and (as we have
premised) from the redemption of flesh—that is, the Lord’s
passion. None was perfect before the discovery of the order of
faith; none a Christian before the resumption of Christ to heaven; none
holy before the manifestation of the Holy Spirit from heaven, the
Determiner of discipline itself.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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