Theopedia

Tertullian

Overview

Tertullian (ca. 155-220s) was an early Christian apologist and theologian from Carthage in North Africa, classified among the early church fathers. Writing mostly in Latin rather than the Greek of most earlier Christian authors, he coined much of the Latin vocabulary later Trinitarian and christological dogma depended on, including trinitas, una substantia, and tres personae.1 Later in life he left the mainstream church for the Montanist movement.2

Life and Ministry

Tertullian was born in Carthage around AD 160 and died sometime between AD 220 and 240.2 He wrote extensively against Marcion, defending the fourfold Gospel and the authenticity of Luke’s Gospel in particular as having been “valid from its first publication” in the apostolic churches, against Marcion’s mutilated version of it.2 Around AD 202 he joined the Montanists, a movement that shared his sense that the wider church’s leadership had grown too settled into the world and too lax in its moral rigor.2

Theological Contribution

Latin vocabulary for the Trinity

Bavinck writes that Tertullian’s “great importance for theology lies in the fact that he introduced a number of terms crucial to later trinitarian and christological dogma, such as trias, trinitas, satisfacere, meritum, sacramentum, una substantia and tres personae, duae substantiae in una persona, etc., none of which occurs in Scripture.”1

His fullest working-out of this vocabulary came in Against Praxeas, written against a modalist opponent who denied any real distinction between the Father, Son, and Spirit. There Tertullian was, in Bavinck’s judgment, “the first to deduce the Trinity of persons from the very being of God rather than from the person of the Father,” correcting Irenaeus, who had worked the other way around.3 The three persons, Tertullian wrote, are “of one substance, of one condition, and of one power: together they constitute one God,” distinct from one another “not in status, but in degree.”3

Chapman traces how Tertullian arrived at persona as his term for what is three in God: through prosopographical exegesis, the grammarians’ and rhetoricians’ practice of identifying which speaker’s “role” (ex persona) a text’s words belong to. Applying this to Psalm 110:1, Tertullian reads the Spirit as a third, distinct speaker: “the Spirit as the third person speaks of the Father and of the Son, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies at your feet.’”4

A subordinate Son

Tertullian’s own Trinitarian theology was not free of the errors his vocabulary would later help the church correct. Bavinck places him, along with Clement, Origen, and Eusebius of Nicomedia, among those who held that “the Father alone is God… the Son is God derivatively, [having] received his nature from the Father by communication” rather than being fully coequal with him. Bavinck traces the same root into later, more developed subordinationism and Arianism.3

Traducianism

Tertullian held that the human soul, like the body, is generated by one’s parents rather than created directly by God at each person’s conception. Hodge writes that “Tertullian in the Latin Church was almost a materialist, at least he used the language of materialism, and held that the soul was as much begotten as the body.”5 This traducianist position stood against the creationism the Greek church had held from the start, and later Latin theology, including Jerome and (with reservations) Augustine, moved away from it.5

Faith and philosophy

Tertullian argued for a sharp separation between Christian revelation and Greek philosophy. Bavinck records his best-known line: “What fellowship is there between Athens and Jerusalem, the academy and the church, Christians and heretics?”1

The ethics of killing and military service

Tertullian held that God’s command “Thou shalt not kill” forbids “every kind of manslaying.”6 Discussing whether a Christian could serve as a Roman soldier, he acknowledged that John the Baptist gave soldiers instructions for how to conduct themselves in service and that a centurion was among the first Gentile believers, but concluded that “the Lord afterward, in disarming Peter, unbelted every soldier.”6

Historical Significance

Like Irenaeus, Tertullian held to premillennialism: he expected “an earthly kingdom of a thousand years after the resurrection,” set in a New Jerusalem descending from heaven as Ezekiel and John had described, in which the saints rise earlier or later “as they deserve” and are rewarded for what they suffered before the millennium ends in the final judgment.7

Tertullian left the mainstream church for Montanism in his later years, yet the Latin vocabulary he supplied, una substantia and tres personae above all, remained foundational for the Trinitarian and christological formulas the wider church went on to adopt.1

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 39. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Bavinck, chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Darron Thomas Chapman, “Formulations of the Concept of Person Prior to Boethius,” in “The Concept of Person in Christian Theology: An Exposition and Defense of a Classical Boethian/Thomistic Definition of Person” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2026), 45-77. ↩

  5. Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. The Origin of the Soul,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 64-75. ↩ ↩2

  6. Ken Magnuson, “15. Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩ ↩2

  7. Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 15, “And They Came to Life and Reigned with Christ a Thousand Years,” 166-177. ↩