IX.] TERTULLIAN ON PRESCRIPTION. 147 later. And again, in graceful language, which gives due weight to the authority of Cyprian, while it refuses to set any uninspired authority on the level of Scripture; but, now, seeing that which thou recitest is not Canonical, with that liberty to which the Lord hath called me, I do not receive the opinion different from Scripture of that man to whose praise I cannot reach, to whose great learning I do not compare my writings, whose genius I love, in whose spirit I delight, whose charity I admire, whose martyrdom I reverence.'t I must not weary you with quotations; but you may take it as a general rule that there is not a Father who, if his own belief is demanded for something not contained in Scripture which he is not disposed to accept, will not reply in some such language as St. Jerome: This, because it has not authority from the Scriptures, is with the same easiness despised as approved.' As we accept those things that are written, so we reject those things that are not written.'§ These things which they invent, as if by Apostolic tradition, without the authority of Scripture, the sword of God smites.'|| You will see, then, that if we were at the desire of the Romish advocates to leave the Scriptures and resort to the Fathers of the early Church for a decision of our controversies, these very Fathers would send us back to the Scriptures as the only guide to truth, the only safeguard against heresy. It is proper to mention the only set-off that I know of that can be made to the otherwise unanimous teaching of the Fathers on this subject-it is Tertullian's treatise on Prescription. And at first sight it might seem that this is opposed to our views, for the main point it is intended to establish is, that we ought not to argue with heretics out of the Scripture, but put them down by an appeal to antiquity or to the authority of the Church. And in reading this tract we recognize, with a little surprise, some of the arguments Roman Catholics are in the habit of employing against us. Now, in the first place, I must observe, that it is a misrepresentation *De Bapt. Cont. Donatt. II. 4, vol. ix., p. 98. + Cont. Crescon. II. 40, vol. ix., p. 430. + In. Matth. xxiii. 35. § Adv. Helvid. of the sentiments of the Fathers, as it would be of any set of men, when arguments which they have used in one controversy are applied to another which was not in their minds when they were writing. Very few people are such cautious disputants as not occasionally to use arguments which prove too much; which, though very effective for the immediate purpose to which they are applied, might on another occasion prove very inconvenient. Not unfrequently at the present day Roman Catholics and Protestants arguing together, use arguments which an infidel might retort with effect against either; or, conversely, men arguing against infidels use principles which a Roman Catholic might be glad to have admitted. Now, on looking into this treatise on Prescription, you will find that nothing could be further from the mind of its author than to inculcate a belief in any doctrine not contained in Scripture. Neither here nor elsewhere does Tertullian show a wish to do so. The doctrines which in this tract Tertullian desires to defend are the most elementary Articles of the Creed, and all lie on the very surface of the Bible. You will find that there was reason in Tertullian's assertion, that it was not possible to dispose of the heretics with whom he had to deal by Scripture arguments: for you can only argue with people on principles which you and they hold in common, and the Scriptures were not common ground between the Church and the heretics of the second century. The Gnostic heretics whom he had in view denied the most fundamental Articles of the Christian faith. Their theories made matter the root of all evil consequently, they could not believe that the Supreme Being, whom they called the Good God, was the Creator of the world-a work which they attributed to some subordinate or even hostile Being. This Being they took to be the God of the Jews, who in the Old Testament had claimed the work of creation as His own; consequently, they held that the Old Testament was contrary to the New, and that Jesus was not the Messiah of the Jewish prophets. They could not believe that Christ had assumed a material body, that He had been really born, or really died, or that there would be any future resurrection of the body. Now, you can IX.] TERTULLIAN ON PRESCRIPTION. 149 well believe that it was labour lost to argue out of the Scriptures with people who held such views as these. You could tell them nothing as to the difference between their teaching and that of the Bible that they must not have known perfectly well before you spoke to them. They were prepared, however, with different modes of meeting the difficulty. They generally claimed to be in the possession of secret traditions of our Lord or His Apostles; for it was in the Gnostic sects that the idea of supplementing or superseding Scripture by tradition first was conceived. They had a number of Gospels of their own containing these traditions, while they rejected some of the most inconvenient parts of our Canonical books. But one sect, the Valentinians, were content with the Church Canon, finding that the allegorical method of interpretation which prevailed in Egypt, the birthplace of that sect, might be used with as much success in eliciting the Gnostic tenets from the Bible, as it had been employed by orthodox interpreters in deriving the doctrines which they believed to be true. You can easily conceive that men who dealt in such arbitrary fashion with the Bible had no common ground on which the orthodox could battle with them by Scripture arguments. In order to refute the Gnostic pretence of secret traditions, the Churches took pains to establish their own connexion with the Apostles, so as to make it appear that if any such traditions there were, it must be the Churches which had the possession of them. It was with this object that we find pains first taken to trace the successions of bishops; for whatever opinion you may entertain as to the form of Church government in the primitive Church, this, at least, is indisputable, that at the beginning of the last quarter of the second century there were bishops everywhere, and no memory survived that any other form of government had ever existed. Several of the great Churches claimed to be able to give lists of their bishops reaching up to the Apostles' times, and so they conceived that they established their right against the Gnostics to be regarded as the sole possessors of genuine Apostolic traditions. With this explanation you can better appreciate the line taken by Tertullian in his treatise on Prescription, a legal term with which Tertullian, as an advocate, was familiar, his object being to bar the right of these heretics to argue out of Scripture at all. Tertullian begins by refuting the two principles, on one or other of which must rest the Gnostic claim to have a secret tradition unknown to the Church at large. This would imply either that the Apostles did not know the whole truth, or that, knowing it, they did not communicate it to those whom they taught. In disproving these two suppositions, Tertullian, at the same time, demolishes the modern theory of Development, Then complaining that no satisfactory result is arrived at by arguing out of Scripture with heretics, who either did not acknowledge the books received by the Church, or who mutilated and corrupted them, or who distorted their meaning by perverse interpretation, he proposes a shorter method of dealing with them, namely, to deny their right to use the Scriptures at all. The Scriptures had been given, not to them, but to the Churches who agreed in doctrine with Tertullian. Consult any of the Churches to which the Apostolic letters had been written. If you are in Achaia, consult Corinth; if in Macedonia, consult the Church of Philippi; if in Italy, or, like those whom Tertullian addressed, in Africa, consult the neighbouring Church of Rome, and you will find all those Churches agree in maintaining the same doctrine. Now truth is uniform, but it is the very nature of error to be continually assuming new shapes. If the Churches had erred they would have erred after many different fashions. Whence, then, arises this surprising agreement in error? The single point. that the same doctrine is maintained by so many different Churches, situate in distant quarters of the globe, affords a strong presumption of its truth. Where one and the same thing is found among many, this is not error but tradition. And lastly, truth came first, error afterwards we cannot believe that the Gospel was for so many years wrongly preached, so many thousands wrongly baptized, so many miracles wrongly wrought, so many martyrdoms wrongly crowned, and that all this time truth was waiting for Marcion or Valentinus to set her free. IX.] THE ARGUMENT FROM GENERAL AGREEMENT. 151 It Such is the argument of the treatise on Prescription.* is an argument from tradition independent of Scripture; and if we had to own it to be a bad one, Tertullian would be neither the first nor the last who has defended a good cause by weak arguments. But I will not be deterred from saying, that I think the argument, on the whole, a good and successful one, even though Romanists do employ somewhat similar arguments against ourselves. For, first, as I said before, we may believe that tradition could successfully carry the knowledge of the facts stated in the Apostles' Creed through a century without believing that it could carry the doctrine of Pope Pius's Creed through nineteen. Tertullian uses the argument, Where was your religion before Marcion or Valentinus and I think it a good one, even though Roman Catholics do ask us, Where was your religion before Martin Luther? If what Luther or Calvin taught was really as great a novelty in the history of Christianity, and as unlike what had been taught before as what Valentinus taught was when it appeared, we should do well in rejecting it. What we receive we accept, because we believe it to be, not new error, but old truth. And, lastly, the argument from the unity of different Churches, which Tertullian urged with so much force, loses all its power in the hands of Roman Catholics. That a number of different and widely separated Churches, each of which was, a century ago, in direct and independent communication with the Apostles, should now all agree in teaching the same doctrines, affords a strong presumption that those doctrines are Apostolic; but that a number of different Churches who are all in direct communication with the Bishop of Rome, and who are taught that they are bound to submit to him implicitly, and that it is a sin to reject anything which he teaches to them, that these should all agree in teaching the same doctrine proves no more than that the doctrine is Roman. In order that an argument from agreement of witnesses should have any force, it is absolutely necessary that the witnesses should be independent. If a In this argument Tertullian is much indebted to Irenaeus. See, in particular, the beginning of his third book. |