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13 - Tertullian's enduring question

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2010

Nicholas Wolterstorff
Edited by
Terence Cuneo
Nicholas Wolterstorff
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Terence Cuneo
Affiliation:
University of Vermont
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Summary

TERTULLIAN ON THE RELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN TO PAGAN LEARNING

“What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens,” asked Tertullian in memorable, bitingly eloquent words:

the Church with the Academy, the Christian with the heretic? Our principles come from the Porch of Solomon, who himself taught that the Lord is to be sought in simplicity of heart. I have no use for a Stoic or a Platonic or a dialectic [i.e., Aristotelian] Christianity. After Jesus Christ we have no need of speculation, after the Gospel, no need of research. Once we come to believe, we have no desire to believe anything else; for the first article of our faith is that there is nothing else we have to believe.

Tertullian's aim, in his Prescriptions against Heretics, was to persuade his readers to stay away from heresies. Just before the passage quoted he had been inquiring into the root of these “doctrines of men and of daemons.” Philosophy is the root – that repository of “worldly wisdom, that rash interpreter of the divine nature and order.” Heretics are “equipped by philosophy.” “From philosophy come those fables, those endless genealogies and fruitless questionings, those words that spread like cancer,” that we find in the heretics. Heresies are “generated for itching ears by the ingenuity of that worldly wisdom which the Lord called foolishness.…” Lift a heretic and you'll find a philosopher.

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Inquiring about God , pp. 283 - 303
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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