Bear always in mind that this is the rule of faith which I profess; by it I testify that the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit are inseparable from each other, and so will you know in what sense this is said. Now, observe, my assertion is that the Father is one, and the Son one, and the Spirit one, and that They are distinct from Each Other. This statement is taken in a wrong sense by every uneducated as well as every perversely disposed person, as if it predicated a diversity, in such a sense as to imply a separation among the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit. I am, moreover, obliged to say this, when (extolling the Monarchy at the expense of the Economy) they contend for the identity of the Father and Son and Spirit, that it is not by way of diversity that the Son differs from the Father, but by distribution: it is not by division that He is different, but by distinction; because the Father is not the same as the Son, since they differ one from the other in the mode of their being.
Tertullian | Against Praxeas. in Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. Peter Holmes, vol. 3, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885), 9 (p. 603–04).
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Was this the earliest statement on the Trinity in the post-apostolic church with such clear language and distinctions? I’m really wowed by this.
Connor,
Tertullian’s language is perhaps the most developed of some of the earlier fathers. He’s writing in the very early 3rd century (early 200s). The doctrine of the Trinity is present in the Apostolic Fathers (c. 100–70) but Tertullian gives us our vocabulary. He gives us the noun Trinitas (Trinity). It is amazing but the same is true in Athamasius’ On The Incarnation, which anticipates Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo by 700 years. The language on justification, salvation, and Christ and culture in Diognetus (c. AD 150) could have been written by a 16th-century Protestant theologian.
This is an uncharacteristically anachronistic title… Tertullian predates the AC by 200 years, minimum, but the title gives the impression that Tertullian was interacting directly with it.
The point is that Tertullian anticipated the language of the Athanasian.
I get that, but a clearer title might be useful. The point is actually stronger without the possibility of misinterpreting this to imply that Tertullian was contemporaneous with the AC. It would more clearly show that the AC didn’t just spring up out of the mind of some anonymous latin monk, but actually flows from a centuries old linguistic tradition.