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| Divine Strictures on Various Heretics Descried in Various Passages of Prophetical Scripture. Those Who Assail the True Doctrine of the One Lord Jesus Christ, Both God and Man, Thus Condemned.
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Chapter XXIV.—Divine
Strictures on Various Heretics Descried in Various Passages of
Prophetical Scripture. Those Who Assail the True Doctrine of the One
Lord Jesus Christ, Both God and Man, Thus Condemned.
For when Isaiah hurls denunciation against our
very heretics, especially in his “Woe to them that call evil
good, and put darkness for light,”7269
he
of course sets his mark upon those amongst you7270
who preserve not in the words they employ the light of their true
significance, (by taking care) that the soul should mean only
that which is so called, and the flesh simply that which is
confest to our view, and God none other than the One who is
preached.7271
Having thus Marcion
in his prophetic view, he says, “I am God, and there is none
else; there is no God beside me.”7272
And when in another passage he says, in like manner, “Before me
there was no God,”7273
he strikes at those
inexplicable genealogies of the Valentinian Æons. Again, there is
an answer to Ebion in the Scripture: “Born,7274
| 7274 John i. 13. Tertullian’s quotation is, as
usual, in the singular, “natus.” | not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will
of man, but of God.” In like manner, in the passage, “If
even an angel of heaven preach unto you any other gospel than that
which we have preached unto you, let him be
anathema,”7275
he calls attention
to the artful influence of Philumene,7276
| 7276 Comp. de
Præscr. Hæret. c. xxx. p. 257,
supra. |
the virgin friend of Apelles. Surely he is antichrist who denies that
Christ has come in the flesh.7277
By declaring that
His flesh is simply and absolutely true, and taken in the plain sense
of its own nature, the Scripture aims a blow at all who make
distinctions in it.7278
In the same way,
also, when it defines the very Christ to be but one, it shakes the
fancies of those who exhibit a multiform Christ, who make Christ to be
one being and Jesus another,—representing one as escaping out of
the midst of the crowds, and the other as detained by them; one as
appearing on a solitary mountain to three companions, clothed with
glory in a cloud, the other as an ordinary man holding intercourse with
all,7279
one as magnanimous, but the other as timid;
lastly, one as suffering death, the other as risen again, by means of
which event they maintain a resurrection of their own also, only in
another flesh. Happily, however, He who suffered “will come
again from heaven,”7280
and by all shall He
be seen, who rose again from the dead. They too who crucified Him shall
see and acknowledge Him; that is to say, His very flesh, against which
they spent their fury, and without which it would be impossible for
Himself either to exist or to be seen; so that they must blush with
shame who affirm that His flesh sits in heaven void of sensation, like
a sheath only, Christ being withdrawn from it; as well as those who
(maintain) that His flesh and soul are just the same thing,7281
or else that His soul is all that
exists,7282
but that His flesh
no longer lives.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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