The Bible We Need

I’m on sabbatical this month, finishing the writing for my final doctoral work. While every day’s been spent pouring through books and journal articles, I’ve still been reading a chapter of Tertullian’s Against Praxeas every day or so. They are short chapters. That doesn’t make Against Praxeas devotional material, but that’s how I’ve been treating it. I came across something interesting yesterday.

Tertullian (A.D. 160-220) is the guy who gave the Church the term “Trinity.” Not that he invented the doctrine of the Trinity, but in defending the faith, he added this word to the Church’s arsenal as it described what it read in the Scriptures. Remember this. While the word “Trinity” doesn’t occur in the Bible, it’s scriptural. Sometimes skeptics, atheists, or false teachers will say things like, “the word doesn’t even occur in the Bible, and the doctrine wasn’t invented for over 100 years after the Bible was written.” Notice the word “invented.” He didn’t “invent” the doctrine. In refuting a false teacher, Tertullian used a new word to describe the old faith the Church already believed and confessed from scriptural witness. This strategy is used by people trying to refute your faith in dozens of areas, Church. Learn it and be wise.

Anyway, Tertullian is arguing that the Persons of the Father and Spirit are invisible – they are not made of the stuff of creation (which is where the trait “visibility” is manifested). We, as part of creation, are made to see the visible of creation; God, in His nature, is not of creation and is not, therefore, visible. He allows Himself to be seen and heard in the Bible, of course. The Church has taught that God, temporarily using creation, revealed Himself in the events recorded in the biblical witness. The “temporary” part has one big exemption: the incarnation of Jesus, when the eternally-existing second Person of the one true God, the Son, was united without mixture or degradation to a human nature by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the virgin. This hypostatic union (another bit of phraseology added to the Church’s vocabulary describing that which was already part of the scriptural faith from the beginning) is not temporary, but forever. This Jesus, fully God and man, still exists this way now at the right hand of the Father in heaven. Jesus, eternal Son of God, is now forever human.

Tertullian teaches that it is not the invisible Father and Spirit we see in the Old Testament, but the Son pre-manifesting the humanity He will fully take on in the incarnation (the technical term for this is Christophany).

“…it is the Son Who from the beginning has judged, smashing down the tower of pride and confounding the tongues, punishing the whole world by the violence of the waters, raining down upon Sodom and Gomorrah fire and brimstone – the Lord raining it down from the Lord. For He it always was Who came down to converse with men, from Adam even to the patriarchs and prophets, always from the beginning preparing beforehand in dream and in a mirror and in an enigma that course which He was going to follow out to the end” (all quotes are from section 16 in this posting).

This is pretty standard stuff now (which is why we have a word like “Christophany”), but after this Tertullian gives us something that I think is really helpful.

“Thus also He already at that time knew human affections, as He was going to take upon Himself also man’s substances, flesh and soul, asking Adam a question as though He did not know – ‘Adam, where art thou?’ – repenting that He had made man, as though He had no foreknowledge; tempting Abraham, as though ignorant what is in man; angry, and reconciled with the same persons; and all those things which heretics…seize upon as unworthy of God, ignorant that those things befitted the Son, Who was also going to undergo human passions, both thirst and hunger and tears and nativity itself and death itself, for this purpose made by the Father a little lower than the angels.”

This is helpful. We typically use the word “anthropopathism” to describe the language of human affections displayed in God in the Scripture. Emotions are changes, and this is a problem is you want to affirm the immutability (unchangeability) of God (which I do). This pre-manifestation of the humanity to which the Son would be united makes these anthropopathisms Christ-centered and Gospel-oriented - these revealed emotions/affections in the God of the O.T. are foreshadowings of the human nature of the incarnate Son. Tertullian writes that He did this “with the purpose of laying a foundation of faith for us, that we might more easily believe that the Son of God has come down into the world, if we knew that something of the sort had previously been done.” This seems to me to be as great a contribution to Christian theology as Tertullian’s giving us the word “Trinity.”

This cannot be the manifestation of the Father, Tertullian writes. “How can it be that God Almighty, that invisible One Who none of men hath seen nor can see, He Who dwelleth in light unapproachable, He Who dwelleth not in things made with hands, before Whose aspect the earth trembleth, and the mountains melt as wax, Who graspeth the whole world in His hand like a nest, Whose throne is the heaven and the earth His footstool, in Whom is all space but He not in space, Who is the boundary line of the universe, He the Most High, should have walked in paradise in the evening looking for Adam, should have shut up the ark after Noah had gone in, should have rested under an oak with Abraham, should have called to Moses from the burning bush, and should have appeared with three others in the Babylonian king’s furnace – although it says He was a Son of man?”

All of God’s interaction with humanity as revealed in the Bible is so that we would know “from the beginning the whole course of the divine ordinance has come down through the Son.”

This is not to minimize the Father, but it is the Son Who reveals the Father to us.

“…the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father…no one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God Who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (John 1:14,18).

“Philip said to Him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (John 14:8,9).

Tertullian’s teaching honors the words of the Gospel, showing us a whole Bible that is Christ-centered. We need that Bible.