Tertullian of Carthage. Now Carthage is on the northern tip of what is today known as Tunisia, I think. Not a country you hear much about, but if you can picture North Africa in your mind eye, you have Egypt, and then next to it, Libya, and then next to it, Tunisia. I guess I'm pronouncing that right. I read it more than I actually heard it pronounced. So that's it. And on the northern tip, there's this town that I don't think it's really a town much today, but in the 200s it was the foremost Roman town in Africa. It was the largest, most important Roman town in Africa. I'm sure you all remember learning in geography that Italy looks like a boot, and if you can imagine Italy's rear back to kick something, it looks like it's about to kick. Carthage. It's just aimed right at the toe of that boot. So if you look at it on a map, you can kind of see. It's far west when you think about Jerusalem and Constantinople and even Rome. It's west of all of those things. So it was a little bit of an outlier on the Roman Empire. It was more toward the edge than the center. But it was a bustling, large, important city of that day. And that's where Tertullian was born. But before we really get into Tertullian's life, I want to kind of paint a little bit of a broader picture for you here so that you see the world that he was born into, what he was hearing as he grew up, what he was learning after his conversion, and even before his conversion that would cause and shape his life. First off, I want you to consider his opponents. He remembered the opponents of Irenaeus were the Gnostics. Well, along with Irenaeus, Tertullian was an opponent of the Gnostics. He did write works opposing Gnosticism. But more than that was a group called the Monarchians. So monarch like a king, M-O-N-A-R-C-H, and then just add I-A-N on the end of that, Monarchians. If you've read a lot of church history or some more of the technical doctrines and heresies throughout time, you may have heard it referenced as Sibelianism. One of its first proponents was a man named Sibelius. Once again, I'm not as concerned as you knowing all the names and dates as I am you knowing the substance of it, but in case you run across something in your reading one day and you hear Sibelianism, that's what they're talking about. It was also known as Monarchianism. And what they did is, basically, there was a two-fold attack on the Trinity by this group, by the Sibelians, or the Monarchians. They attempted to redefine the Trinity by either, there was two ways they went about doing this, either they would say that only the Father was divine, and that Jesus was born fully human, not divine, and at His baptism He was infused with divinity by the Holy Ghost and became divine. And so that's the first heresy, the first false way that they would get around this idea of the Trinity. If you've ever had discussions with non-Christians, or even maybe somebody who claimed to be a Christian who has a problem with the Trinity, we all have a problem wrapping our mind around it, right? And so many people have gone outside of Orthodoxy, outside of the Scriptures, and tried to come up with these theories as to how it could work. Well, this was one of the ways that they did it. They said only the Father was divine, that Jesus was not divine, and that at His baptism, the Father by His Spirit infused Him with some divinity, which then allowed Him to become the Son of God. Well, that was a heresy, obviously. That's not true. The other way they went about it is a way that you've probably heard of, because it is alive and well in denominations today, and that is the idea of modalism. Modalism is that there's one God, but He simply takes on different modes. So there's one person in the Godhead. There's not three persons they would teach. But there's only one person. And sometimes He looks like God the Father, and sometimes He looks like God the Son, and sometimes He looks like God the Holy Spirit. But it's not three persons. It's only one person. And He's simply changing masks, if you will. At the creation, He was the Father. At the Incarnation, God the Father became man and looked like a man. At the Day of Pentecost, He took on the form of the Spirit. But it was never... I don't know what they do with Jesus' baptism. You have all three at the same time. But this was the way of them trying to get around the truth of the Trinity of three persons and one substance. They said, there's only one, and there's only one person, and He simply takes on different modes. And therefore this became known as modalism. So this was an important mindset in the world at that day, as Christianity was still hammering out what they believed about the Godhead, and what true biblical Christianity was in reference to that. And the word Trinity, to this point, had never really been used. One of the things we're going to learn, I'll go ahead and give you a sneak peek. One of the things we're going to learn about Tertullian is he was the first one to use the word Trinity in describing the Godhead of three persons in one substance. So, not to say that the idea of the Trinity didn't exist in Christianity. I believe it did, but it hadn't been hammered out. It hadn't been articulated very well. So this was his opponents. This is who Tertullian came to write against, were these Sibelians or Monarchians. Now, what about the world? We already mentioned that in the 3rd and 4th centuries, that is in the 2 and 300s AD, northern Africa became a fertile field in the advancements of Christian doctrines. There was an important school in Alexandria that was writing and teaching many Christian leaders, and Carthage between Tertullian and the man we're going to talk about next week, Cyprian, who both came from Carthage. Northern Africa, from Egypt to what is now Tunisia, was producing more influential productive Christian thinkers and writers and teachers than really anywhere else in the world at this point. So we started with Clement in Rome, and really we know in the very, very beginning after the apostles, they were going out from Jerusalem into other places of the world, and then we talked about the men who went to Smyrna in Turkey, and then last week we talked about Irenaeus who went all the way out to France. So you see the borders kind of advancing here. But at this point in Christianity, over the next couple of hundred years, Northern Africa is going to play a critical part in the way that God chose to advance His Church and the doctrines of Christianity. Not only in this period in history, but when we look back at Christian history as a whole, these 200 years here, from the 200s to the 400s, it's hard to overemphasize just how important it was that these doctrines were becoming hammered out. For the next 1600 years, the Church would live and die, abide by what was coming out of Northern Africa in this time period. God used these men in this area of the world in an incredible way during this period of time. And then what about his resume before we get into the nitty-gritty of his life, where he was born, all of that? When we talk about Tertullian in the past tense, as we look back on history, he's widely considered the first great writer of the church in Northern Africa. So, like I said, we've already had men in Rome and Smyrna and Gaul, but now we have it moving to Africa and he's the first. When we think of African theologians, if you've done a little bit of study into early church history, you probably think of men like Augustine or Athanasius. I don't know that Tertullian is the first one that comes to your mind. Maybe it is, it wasn't for me, but he was the first one. And his writings influenced Augustine greatly a couple hundred years later. His writings influenced Cyprian, obviously, who was actually his understudy, and Athanasius later on. And so these other men who maybe superseded him in their prominence, Probably, speaking under the providential workings of God and his hand, probably wouldn't have been the men they were had it not been for Tertullian and his writings. He was the first great writer of the church in Northern Africa. He's known as the father of Latin theology, because he was the first church father to write in Latin. Up to this point, they were mostly writing in Greek. Tertullian writes in Latin, which as we know for the next thousand plus years becomes kind of the status quo religious language for Christianity. So many important works over the next thousand years are going to come and go through that language of Latin, and he was the first one to write using that language. He's been called the father of orthodoxy. I don't know how you have a father of orthodoxy when we're talking about orthodoxy in the biblical sense, but when you talk about orthodoxy in the sense of the Trinity and the hypostatic union, the fact of Christ having a divine nature and a human nature, Tertullian really was the first one to to string these out, to articulate these, to put them into words, to define them clearly. This is what we mean, this is what we don't mean. And to explain it in that way. And so in that sense, he's been called the father of orthodoxy. And with Irenaeus was a major opponent of Gnosticism, which was so strong in the world at this time. So those are some of the influences he had, not only on the church of his day, but on the church throughout history that was to come. So what about his wife? He was born to a pagan family, like most of these early church fathers were. Irenaeus was a little bit of an outlier in that he was born to a Christian family, but Tertullian was born to a pagan family. Not a whole lot is known of his early life, much like many of these men, except for what we glean from his writings, what we gather, kind of read between the lines in a lot of what he said, and from what we can understand, his father was probably a Roman centurion. And so he was born into a pagan family, but an influential, educated, upper class pagan family, if you want to put it that way. We mentioned that Carthage was the foremost Roman African city. And as a young man, he received a solid education in Greek, Latin, and the classics. So he wasn't like Who was it? Justin Martyr that went to the best schools that the world had to offer? It wasn't like that, but he received a good education. His family was well enough to do that he could study Greek, he could study Latin, he could study the classics, and he could actually be competent in the world of education at that time. We know that from a young age, and this followed him into his older life, and it was, as it is for all men, both a good thing and a bad thing. Depending on the times and circumstance, he had from a young age a fiery nature and a fighting spirit. Fiery nature and a fighting spirit that drove him to throw himself into whatever he did with all that he had. And so this fiery nature and this fighting spirit, you can understand, you can imagine as a young man what it drove him to do with the youthful lusts and being an unconverted man with a little bit of affluence. You can imagine what it did to him after he was converted and the zeal that he was able to carry that over. And then we're going to see toward the end of his life once again, it kind of drove him to some errors as well. So this nature followed him throughout his life it seems. But early on in his life, While we said that it drove him to throw himself into whatever he did, what he did was generally a lifestyle of willful sin and wanton pleasure, according to his own writings. That he was just given over to all of the sinful activities that a young man in a large Roman city with a little bit of money and influence could do. And he did it with vigor. Yes, sir? Are you doing a conference call? I am not. Is there someone who would like me to? She told me she was like, I don't want to hurt your feelings would it be okay if I didn't listen in tonight? I just want to go to sleep. I guess so. She changed her mind. She's convicted. They have that liberty. That's right. It took a while. All right, so as a young man in Carthage, he gave himself over to a lifestyle of willful sin and wanton pleasure. And then as a young adult, his parents and he recognized that he had a quick wit, good oratory skill, a sharp mind, and so he went to Rome to study law. His parents said, you ought to go to Rome, the center of the universe as it were, and study law. So, he goes to Rome, and what does he find in Rome? You can imagine a man, fiery nature, given over to wantonness and a lifestyle of sin. Where would be the first place he would go? Colosseum. Be entertained. Watch the show. So off he goes to the Colosseum, and week after week, year after year going to the Colosseum, something starts to stand out to him. And that is there is this group called the Christians who are constantly being killed in the Roman Colosseum. And he sees their witness as they suffer silently and peacefully, many times with prayers and singing. He sees that they don't give up their faith, that year after year Christians continue to be brought and thrown in, and it never seems like this religious movement dies out, but only seems to be growing stronger. And year after year he begins to be convicted of his own godlessness, his own faithlessness, his own self-righteousness. And through that witness of the suffering Christians, we don't know the details of it, report of himself is that he was dramatically converted around the age of 40. So at around 40 years old now, he's been in Rome for probably 15-20 years, and God, by his account, saves his soul, and he's converted. After his conversion, he immediately rejects his licentious way of life, and throws himself with the same vigor of his sin into service, and self-denial, and studying the scriptures, and growing to understand Christian theology. And therefore, brought him to return to Carthage. So he goes back to Africa, goes back to Carthage where he came from, and from there he begins to write vigorously and defend Christianity fearlessly against the Jews and the heretics, particularly Gnostics and the Monarchians or the Sibelians as they were called. We're going to talk about his works here in just a moment, but he wrote about 30 books in his lifetime, so he was writing very often. Yes, sir? You said he defended Christianity against the Jews. I was reading an article the other day talking about how Luther was this And then you start reading the background, and what they were doing is they were zealously defending the Christian faith against zealous Jews. Jesus was a Jew, but based on the things he said, he would have sounded pretty anti-Semitic too. I began to see that from a different light. It's real easy to arm-chair diversity. I was just so surprised because most early church followers would consider Jewhead. But when you read their writings, that's not what they were saying. They hated Jews. They hated the wicked doctrine. That rejected Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's a good point. So he writes 30 books defending Christianity against heresies. He hammers out these doctrines about the Trinity and about the person of Jesus Christ. And then in one of the more startling twists in all of church history, around 207, Tertullian joined the monetists. And you remember last week we said that was the heresy that the Bishop of Rome was defending. It was that new revelation, that new prophecy that these men and women were actually mouthpieces of the Holy Ghost and were bringing new revelation to the church and that the return of Christ was imminent and therefore they needed to withdraw from the world. almost like the monks later on did, just completely withdraw from society and give themselves over to purity and things of this nature. And Tertullian falls to that. And again, we're not told a whole lot about what the circumstances were that were surrounding that. There's been some speculations about it. One is that that fiery nature and fighting spirit was drawn to that more charismatic movement. Another is that in some of his writings, he seems very disenchanted, disenfranchised with what he saw as half-heartedness among many of the church leaders in the world at that time. And so maybe he thought that this was an extreme to the other side. Yes, sir. It was called Montanism. So M-O-N-T-A-N. I-S-T is Montanist. So for one reason or another, whether it was that he so disliked what he saw as half-heartedness and maybe he thought these guys were really zealous, they were going all the way out, they were really removing themselves from the world, but for one reason or another, he He converts to that, for lack of a better term. He begins to espouse those teachings as well. Now he wrote from 196 to 212. Again, I don't want to bore you too much with dates and things of that nature. So basically for the last five years of his writing, he was writing from more of a Montanist perspective. So if you read his works, you'll begin to, and I haven't read all of his works from beginning to end, but from what I read from a lot of people who have, you'll begin to see the shift and you can kind of see where the break was in his writings as he really begins to lean more in that direction. However, as so often happens with people who split away from the church, he figured out he couldn't get along with the Montanists and agree with everything they had to say either. And so he branched off again and began his own little splintered off movement, which came to be known as Tertullianism. And there was a Tertullianist group, church, if you want to call it that, 200 years later in Carthage, it was recorded by another writer. And so this splintered off segment that Tertullian took, ended up actually, in many ways, outlasting the Montanists themselves. And maybe because it had his name to it. I don't know. I'm just speculating there. And then the end of his life, very little is known. We believe he died somewhere between 220 and 225, but very little is known about him after that. So what about his writings? What about these important works that he wrote from 196 to 212? In that time period, he wrote a number of apologetic, theological, and controversial works, centering on the Trinity and the dual nature of Christ. So this is not all he wrote about, but this will be a large theme in his 30 books. If you start to read through them, you're going to see these are two of the things that he was really honing in on and hammering out. In his writings on the Trinity, he was the first to use the Latin word trinitas, which is where we get our English word trinity from. So like I said, we see the doctrine of the Trinity in the scriptures. John, probably most explicitly, talks about it, of course, as I mentioned, we see it very clearly at the baptism of Jesus Christ. But to actually use that word, Trinity, that's not a Bible word. We got that from Tertullian. He kind of coined, he didn't make up the word, but he used it first to describe the Godhead, the three persons of one substance. And importantly, he's also the one who first used those words. He's the one who made that distinction in unity of saying three persons in one substance. So he gave us that word which came in later Christian creeds that was espoused as orthodox in so many of the later ecumenical councils that are in many of our confessions of faith today. When we talk about God and three persons in one substance, we got that from Tertullian. And that's why even though at the end of his life he seems to have really kind of gone off the deep end, I wanted to include him in this list of influential men in church history. Now we can debate, and I wouldn't debate with you because I'm not convinced one way or the other whether he was truly converted or not, but he was so influential and so important in our understanding of Orthodox Christianity that it's hard to skip him. So by this formulation of three persons and one substance, he gives us the distinction and yet unity, which was what the modalists and the Sibelians were fighting against. They could only see distinction or unity. They couldn't see distinction and unity. And that's what Tertullian wanted to show, that within the Godhead there was distinction of person and unity of substance. And that's the terms that have been used in orthodoxy ever since. The Athanasian Creed, I think, gives us that very clearly. And again, he learned from Tertullian's writings. He garnered a lot of what he put into his teachings and creed from what Tertullian wrote and said. Tertullian wrote some 30 books in all. It's been said the most noteworthy is simply titled Apology. So remember, Justin Martyr wrote a first and a second Apology. So they didn't get too creative with their book names. They just kind of tried to tell you what the book was about. And his Apology was very similar to Justin Martyr's first and second Apologies in that in it he addressed the legal and moral absurdity of persecuting Christians. So he just kind of went through the same list the same way Justin Martyr did. And he said, you're saying that you're persecuting Christians because they're immoral. Well, isn't persecuting them immoral? Isn't beating and killing people immoral? And the legal absurdity of it as well. You think that they're breaking the law, so you break the law in order to punish them for breaking the law. And so he goes through the inconsistencies and the absurdities of what they were doing in persecuting these Christians, both from a moral and a legal aspect. But probably, I would say, most importantly, he wrote a book called Against Praxeas. P-R-A-X-E-A-S, if you're interested in looking that up. Against Praxeas. And that's the book where he affirms and articulates Christ's two natures in one person. That Jesus was both human and divine. Fully, not 50-50, but fully human and fully divine. And it's also in that book that he discusses in length the unity and the distinction of the Trinity. He talks about the inconsistency of modalism. Not to say God is just one person who's in different modes. He talks about the inconsistencies of that, and he sets the concepts of the Godhead in language that has ever since then become normative, become orthodox. A lot of the terminology and phrases that you're used to hearing and reading about the Trinity and about the person of Christ and the hypostatic union comes from Tertullian. And so if you're... Brother Anthony, you've told me before that you've dealt with some Oneness Pentecostals. If some of you are dealing with people who really have troubles with the idea of the Trinity, Against Praxeus would be a good book to go back and read because he deals with that specifically. Now last week we talked about some of the errors, and I said I didn't really think so much that they were errors as they were just misidentifications, misconstruing of what Irenaeus said, Tertullian though had some real errors. I can't defend him on these. These aren't just maybe people misunderstood what he was trying to say, but Tertullian's not the first one of these fathers with errors. We know they were all men, but with maybe some really serious errors that ended up messing up his theological reputation. The first we already mentioned, which is that toward the end of his life, he went off into that New Revelation, that New Prophecy movement, the Montanists, and then split off of that and created his own movement, Tertullianism, and that's a big problem. Also, he's the first Christian writer to recommend prayers for the dead. and offerings to them on the anniversary of their death. So something that became a staple of Roman Catholic doctrine in the years to come was birthed with Pertulli. Now, I made a statement that is one of the more stunning twists in church history that he went off the deep end in this way and I began to I'm just mulling it over ever since I read about this going on in his life, and then to back it up, this idea that he taught about giving prayers for the dead and offerings to them and things of this nature. And I thought, should it take us by any surprise that the man who first hammered out and so strongly defended and articulated the doctrines of the Trinity and Christ's person and nature, that Satan would have a personal attack to discredit him, to drag him down. And I can't see beyond the veil. I don't know what spiritual warfare was going on there for sure. But it ought to be a warning to us that when we stand for the truth and when we defend the truth, we do in a sense put a target on our back. We do know that the Scriptures tell us that our adversary, the devil, is like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. We do know that the Scriptures tell us that if it were possible, he would deceive the very elect. And so, I don't know what kind of a spiritual warfare he fought throughout his life, but it seems as though, at least to a degree, the enemy got the upper hand toward the end of his life. And what a sad statement that is. So what do we learn from his life and his writings? Well, as I mentioned, the nature of the Trinity and the hypostatic union of Jesus Christ and against Praxeas, that's been invaluable to the church ever since. How many of y'all have seen that funny little YouTube clip about, come on Patrick, you know, where Patrick is talking to the two Irish men about the nature of the Trinity, and finally in the end they just quote the Athanasian Creed about the Trinity, you know. I mean, it's a funny, humorous little clip, and yet one of the reasons it's humorous is because it so accurately reflects the kind of questions that come up when you're talking about the Trinity, and you're trying to make comparisons to, well, it's kind of like an egg, it's kind of like water, none of those work. And so we just keep going back to what Tertullian said. I guess he just said it best. He told us he's three persons and one substance, fully God, fully man. So maybe instead of sending people that YouTube clip, you could send them a link to Against Praxeus, which might be a little bit more in-depth and not quite as humorous, but maybe a little bit more substantive. He also set the groundwork. Again, we're talking in history outside of Scripture. You know, Scripture sets this groundwork. When we're talking about church history, the doctrine being really hammered out and articulated, he was one of the first ones to really articulate the reality and the strength of original sin. When we talk about original sin, which is that in Adam's fall, we sinned all. That's what the early English primers taught. When you learned the letter A, you learned in Adam's fall, we sinned all. And that's the concept of original sin. Not the first sin ever committed, but that when Adam sinned, that guilt was imputed to all of us, as he was our father, he was our federal head, and therefore, our guiltiness before God was in Adam. Tertullian wrote about that in depth. And many times we talk about historical Christian doctrine, we talk about Augustinianism, when we're talking about original sin and the doctrines of grace and things of that nature. We kind of attribute that to Augustine, but once again, Augustine gleaned much of this from Tertullian. That's one of the reasons we can't leave him out of of what we're talking about here, because He first really articulated that outside of just what we see the principles laid in Scripture. He laid it out point by point for us. And thirdly, what we learn not from His writings, but from His life, is that the Church is built on the Scriptures. The Church is built on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets. That's what the Scriptures tell us. Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone. And the faithlessness of one man does not undermine its truth or its authority. So the fact that Tertullian gave us all sorts of fundamental important truths in an articulated way, and then later on in his life fell to heresy and taught some really erroneous bad stuff, We can't say, well, then we can't take anything he said about the Trinity, or about the Hypostatic Union, or about original sin. He must have been wrong about all of it. No, that's not the case. That's not what the Church is built on. The Church isn't built on Tertullian. It's not built on the Church Fathers. It's built on Scripture. And so, as Pastor Michael always famously says, we eat the meat and we spit out the bones. It's like eating a fish. Oh, okay. The historical writers stole that from you? So, do that with Tertullian. Read him like you're reading a man. And as I said, was he a converted man who was strongly deceived and led away toward the end of his life and maybe he had a time of repentance very late on in his life that we never hear about? I don't know. I can't go back and see history that way. Maybe he was a very intelligent, Man who's never truly converted, and yet God used him in a mighty way to give us some of these important truths that have been central and foundational to the church ever since. But either way, I'm not worried about it. He as a man doesn't change the truth of scripture, doesn't change the forward progress of the church, doesn't change the fact that Jesus promised that the gates of hell itself won't prevail against the church of the living God. And so we're confident in that. And the irony of that is that that seems to be the point that he failed on late in his life. He went to new prophecy. He went to this continuing revelation instead of simply resting on the final authority of the scriptures. And so we can learn not just from his life, but from his failing. We can learn what not to do, what not to believe, but to stay true to the scriptures and orthodoxy. So that is what I had for Tertullian of Carthage. Have any other questions or comments on that before we take our halfway break? All right, if not,