CHAPTER VI. —THE FATHERS OF THE SECOND AND THIRD CENTURIES
Section 5.—Tertullian.

are only two other writers among those who flourished in the first three centuries to whom we mean to direct attention; and we do so, both because they exerted a considerable influence upon the state of opinion in the church, and because they were intimately connected with the principal schisms which broke the outward unity of the church during this early period, and which occasioned the principal controversies that then took place among those who could with any propriety be called Christians, even as to outward profession. I refer to Tertullian and Cyprian, —the one a presbyter, and the other the Bishop of Carthage; and thus connected with what has been called the North African Church.

Tertullian was the earliest of the fathers whose works are written in Latin. He was a man of very fervid and vigorous mind, though his works are commonly written in a very rough, abrupt, and obscure style. He flourished during the first twenty or thirty years of the third century, and was therefore interme­diate, in point of time, between Clement of Alexandria on the one side, and Origen and Cyprian on the other. He has been regarded as marking a pretty distinct era in the declension of, the purity of evangelical doctrine and evangelical feeling in the early church. Neander[1] says of him, that he “stands on the boundary between two different epochs in the development of the Church.” The leading characteristics of the system or state of things which Tertullian’s works develop, and which he may be said to represent, as he no doubt did much to promote it, are, —first, that it does not, like that of the Alexandrian fathers, indicate the corrupting in­fluence of philosophical speculations; and secondly, that notwithstanding this, it just as fully exhibits defective and erroneous apprehensions of the peculiar principles of the gospel; vehemently inculcates a morose, ascetic, and overstrained morality; and, both in regard to morality and religious worship, it manifests a most exaggerated sense of the importance of mere external things. With respect to Tertullian, as with respect to most of the fathers, there are some difficult and perplexing questions to be settled about the genuineness of some of the numerous and multifarious works which have been ascribed to him; and there is this additional peculiarity in his case, that when any attempt is made to estimate the value of his authority, attention must be given to the question, in some instances not easily decided, whether the particular treatise under consideration was written before or after he left the ortho­dox church, and joined the sect of the Montanists.

With regard to the views of Tertullian upon theological subjects, as collected from the works generally understood to have been written before he became a Montanist, the great general truth is, that he gives less prominence than any preceding writer to the peculiar principles of evangelical truth, and that he teaches some things rather more explicitly opposed to them. He enter­tained orthodox opinions, in the main, on the subject of the person of Christ, though he has made one very awkward statement about the eternity of the Son, which has afforded a handle to Arians, and has perplexed their opponents. But in regard to the offices and work of Christ, even about the atonement of Christ as the ground of a sinner’s forgiveness, there are scarcely any clear, full, and satisfactory statements to be found in Tertullian’s voluminous writings. He has asserted the power of man to do the will of God at least as explicitly, and to all appearance in as unsound a sense, as Clement of Alexandria. And, what is deserving of special attention, he has brought his views in regard to the natural powers of man, and the value and importance of the good works which he is able to perform, and does perform, to bear more explicitly than any preceding writer upon the great subject of the justification of a sinner. Although he has made statements on the subject of the justification of a sinner, which are pretty much in accordance with the general train of scriptural language, he has also made others which are clearly opposed to it. He has asserted the doctrine of justification by works; he has ascribed a meritorious bearing upon the forgiveness of sins to celibacy and almsgiving; and he has attaching to him the dis­credit of being the first to apply the word satisfaction to men’s good deeds in their bearing upon the favor of God and the re­mission of sins; and though he certainly did not employ it in the modern Popish sense, he may thus be said to have laid the foundations of a mode of teaching—of a system of perverting Scripture—which, in the hands of the Church of Rome, has con­tributed so fearfully to the destruction of men’s souls. He taught what may be called the common absurdities and extravagances of the fathers, in regard to angels, demons, and the souls of men departed. And in regard to this last point, it may be worth while to notice that he mentions and recommends—and he is the first Christian writer who does so—prayers for the dead, and offerings to them on the anniversaries of their deaths. He does not, indeed, connect these prayers and offerings, as the Papists do, with the doctrine of purgatory; and it must be admitted that there have been many who advocated the lawfulness of praying for the dead, who did not either defend or practice it in tire way, or upon the grounds, set forth by the Church of Rome. Still the practice in any form involves a clear deviation from the simplicity of Scrip­ture, and is an indication of a state of mind unchastened and superstitious, and likely, —nay certain, as experience proves, —to lead to many other corruptions in the worship of God.

These are the chief things worth noticing in the theological dews of Tertullian, so far as he may be fairly regarded as repre­senting the opinions that then generally prevailed in what was palled the catholic or orthodox church, as distinguished from the heretics or sectaries. Tertullian, however, ultimately joined the sect or schism of the Montanists, and we have now to advert briefly to their principles. Montanus flourished in Phrygia, soon after the middle of the second century; and though he did not deviate materially from the general system of doctrine usually taught by the church, he yet put forth such notions, and adopted such a course of procedure, as to have been justly separated from its communion. His position seems to have been in some measure the result of the reaction occasioned by the incipient attempt to give a more literary and philosophical character to the exposition of Christian subjects. Montanus and his followers professed to take the more spiritual views upon all topics, and even pretended to enjoy the supernatural and miraculous influences of the Holy Ghost. The opinions entertained, and the practices adopted, by Montanus and his followers, are fully stated in Mosheim.[2] I direct attention to them as constituting an interesting feature in the history of the early church, more especially as being the first distinct manifestation of a fanatical spirit among persons who did not deviate materially from the standard of orthodoxy in doctrine, and many of whom, there is reason to think, were possessed of genuine piety. In this point of view, the history of Montanism is interesting, and is fitted to afford us some useful lessons. There is one circumstance which is fitted to make it peculiarly interesting to us, and it is this—that while there have been many subsequent instances, in the history of the church, of much folly and fanaticism manifested by persons who had fair claims to be regarded as possessed of piety, we have seen, in our own day, and in our own country, perhaps a fuller and more complete repro­duction of all the leading features of Montanism, than the church has ever before witnessed.

I do not recollect anything in the history of the church so like Montanism in all its leading features as one remarkable system which we have seen rise, decline, and in a great measure fall, in our own day, though it has not had any distinct or specific name attached to it. In both cases there was, along with a professed subjection to Scripture, and an attempt to defend themselves by its statements, a claim to supernatural and miraculous communications of the Spirit, and a large measure of practical reliance upon these pretended communications for the warrant and sanction of their notions and practices. In both there was the same great and offen­sive prominence of women as the chief possessors and exhibitors of supernatural endowments, and the same perversions of the same passages of Scripture to countenance these pretensions. In both there was the same assumption of superior knowledge and piety, the same compassionate contempt for those who did not embrace their views and join their party, and the same ferocious denun­ciations of men who actively and openly opposed their pretensions, as the enemies of God, and the despisers of the Holy Ghost; and the same tone of predicting judgments upon the community, because it rejected their claims. And, as if to complete the parallel, we find that as ancient Montanism, with all its follies and extravagances, received the countenance and support of Ter­tullian, who, though a man of powerful and vigorous mind, fre­quently appeals with all seriousness and reverence to the visions and revelations of gifted sisters, so the Montanism of our own day received the countenance and support of one noble—minded and highly—gifted man, who might otherwise have rendered im­portant and permanent services to the church of Christ, but whose history now stands out as a beacon to warn men from the rocks on which he struck. These modern exhibitions of fanatical folly, and unwarranted pretensions to supernatural communications, would scarcely have excited so much surprise, or produced so great a sensation, as they did in this country in recent times, if men had been better acquainted with the history of the church, and with previous exhibitions of a similar kind; especially if they had ‘been familiar with the history of ancient Montanism.

Montanism lasted as a distinct, but very obscure and insigni­ficant, sect in Phrygia for two or three hundred years, though it exerted no influence upon the general condition of the church. The pretensions to the miraculous communications of the Spirit, indeed, soon ceased, —the experience of ancient, concurring with that of modern, times, in proving that such pretensions are very short—lived, that they are not easily supported, and uniformly disappear with the decay of the first blaze of fanaticism in which they have originated. The chief purpose to which the ancient Montanists applied their pretended communications of the Holy Spirit was, not the inculcation of new doctrines, but the improve­ment and elevation of the standard of morality, which they alleged that Christ and His apostles had left in an imperfect state. The chief improvements introduced by the Montanists into the moral system of Christianity were these: they made absolute the pro­hibition of second marriages, which were disapproved of, indeed, as we have seen, by other writers unconnected with that sect; they imposed a variety of fasts as imperatively binding at stated seasons; repealed the permission, or rather command, which Christ had given, to flee from persecution; and maintained the unlawfulness of absolving, or readmitting to the communion of the church, men who had once fallen into gross sins.

The last of these notions was brought out more fully by Novatian, about the middle of the third century, and made the ground of a schism. The way in which the errors of the Mon­tanists about the imperative obligation of fasting were received in the church fully proves that up till that time it had been left free, as the Scripture leaves it, to be practiced by individuals according to their own judgment and discretion. And this consideration affords a conclusive objection against the apostolicity of the laws about fasting, which are now, in the Church of Rome, embodied among what are. called the commandments of the church, and which are made binding upon all her subjects, under pain of mortal sin.

ENDNOTES:

[1]  Rose’s translation, vol. 1, p. 199.

[2] In his Church history; and more fully in his Commentarii, Saec. 2, sec. 66, 67, pp. 410-424. Neander’s Hist. Of the Christ. Rel. sec. 5, vol. 2, pp. 176-195, Rose’s translation.