Quotes About Tertullian

On the brink of mystery, the spirit of man is seized with giddiness. Mystery is the abyss which ceaselessly attracts our unquiet curiosity by the terror of its depth. The greatest mystery of the infinite is the existence of Him for whom alone all is without mystery. Comprehending the infinite which is essentially incomprehensible, He is Himself that infinite and eternally unfathomable mystery; that is to say, that He is, in all seeming, that supreme absurdity in which Tertullian believed.

then Tertullian is saying that several of the original New Testament books still existed in his day, well over a century after the time of their writing.

Because the concept of the Trinity is not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament (the term was coined by one of the oldest and most formidable church fathers, Tertullian of Carthage, early in the third century C.E.), it was neither widely adopted nor universally construed by the early Christian communities.

The nature of rumor is well known to all. It was your own poet who said: 'Rumor, an evil surpassing all evils in speed.'

Indeed heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy

Too many are, as Tertullian saith in another case,[29] more tender of their reputation than their salvation: who are more ashamed to be thought ignorant, than careful to have it cured.

Tertullian, speaking of the assemblies of the church, saith, coimus in cætum et congregationem, ut ad Deum quasi manu facta precationibus ambiamus orantes, hæc vis Deo grata est—we meet in the congregation that we may by our fervent prayers environ God, as an army doth a castle, and this holy fore with which we assault heaven pleas eth him.

The soul whose bosom lust did never touch Is God's fair bride; and maiden's souls are such.

Trinity. It wasn't until the third century that Tertullian (150–240), sometimes called "the founder of Western Christian theology," first coined this word Trinity from the Latin trinitas, meaning "triad," or trinus, meaning "threefold." Again, the word itself is not found in the Bible; it took history awhile to find a proper word for this always-elusive "rubber band.

I see only one solution," said St. Augustine. "The penguins will go to hell." "But they have no soul," observed St. Irenaeus. "It is a pity"" sighed Tertullian.

I'm now reading Tertullian, Cyprian, and others of the church fathers with great interest. In some ways they are more relevant to our time than the Reformers, and at the same time they provide a basis for talks between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

As for the horde of minor gods who respectively watched over every stage of life and work, 'we believe that the angels carry out their duties,' said Tertullian (An., 37, 1).

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?" One of Augustine's fellow Christian Africans, Tertullian, had posed that question in the third century. His meaning was all too clear. What do Plato, Aristotle, and the rest really tell us about wisdom and salvation, compared with the Bible and Christianity? More than a century later, Augustine bleakly answered: Not much.

To be fair, no eyewitness account or papyrus diary entries survive, and one wonders whether professional jealousy played a role. After all, no one was calling Tertullian the Father of Anatomy.

Later orthodox theologians would have found this view completely inadequate. In stressing that the Father was "greater" than the Son, Tertullian articulated a view that would later be deemed a heresy. Theology, in these early years of the formation of Christian doctrine, could not stand still. It progressed and got more complicated, sophisticated, and refined as time went on.

But," thought Durtal, "seeing that there are so many more things betwixt heaven and earth than are dreamed of in anybody's philosophy, why not believe in the Trinity? Why reject the divinity of Christ? It is no strain on one to admit the Credo quia absurdum of Saint Augustine and Tertullian and say that if the supernatural were comprehensible it would not be supernatural, and that precisely because it passes the faculties of man it is divine. "And—oh,

Tertullian speaks the mind of the Latin Fa thers when he says: "The guilt being removed, the penalty is removed also. Thus man is re stored to God according to the likeness of him [i. e. Adam] who in days gone by had been [created] to the image of God.

Now then, you dogs, whom the apostle puts outside and who yelp at the God of truth, let us come to your various questions.

Custom without truth is error grown old." —Tertullian, third-century theologian

The nature of rumor is known to all.

For God would in nothing fail to endow a being who was to be next to Himself with a liberty of this kind.

One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans ... read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa.

By Tertullian's time, the catholic (universal) church was recognized as a collection of any churches that had an affection for each other based on a shared theology passed down from apostolic times.

Tertullian argued that the Bible is often difficult to interpret. Obscure passages must be interpreted by those which are plain.