Category: Ante-Nicene Fathers

Quotes from Church Fathers prior to the Council of Nicea in 325

God did not create out of preexisting matter

It is, however, much more true, that nearly all the heresies allow it an origin and a maker, and ascribe its creation to our God. Firmly believe, therefore, that He produced it wholly out of nothing, and then you have found the knowledge of God, by believing that He possesses such mighty power. But some persons are too weak to believe all this at first, owing to their views about Matter. They will rather have it, after the philosophers, that the universe was in the beginning made by God out of underlying matter. Now, even if this opinion could be held in truth, since He must be acknowledged to have produced in His reformation of matter far different substances and far different forms from those which Matter itself possessed, I should maintain, with no less persistence, that He produced these things out of nothing, since they absolutely had no existence at all previous to His production of them.

Tertullian 
On the Resurrection of the Flesh
Chapter XI

The body makes is possible for the soul to be saved through the sacraments of the Church

And since the soul is, in consequence of its salvation, chosen to the service of God, it is the flesh which actually renders it capable of such service. The flesh, indeed, is washed, in order that the soul may be cleansed; the flesh is anointed, that the soul may be consecrated; the flesh is signed (with the cross), that the soul too may be fortified; the flesh is shadowed with the imposition of hands, that the soul also maybe illuminated by the Spirit; the flesh feeds on the body and blood of Christ, that the soul likewise may fatten on its God. They cannot then be separated in their recompense, when they are united in their service. Those sacrifices, moreover, which are acceptable to God—I mean conflicts of the soul, fastings, and abstinences, and the humiliations which are annexed to such duty—it is the flesh which performs again and again to its own especial suffering.  Virginity, likewise, and widowhood, and the modest restraint in secret on the marriage-bed, and the one only adoption of it, are fragrant offerings to God paid out of the good services of the flesh.

Tertullian 
On the Resurrection of the Flesh
Chapter VIII

God the Word created flesh as an image of his coming in the flesh later in time

For, whatever was the form and expression which was then given to the clay (by the Creator) Christ was in His thoughts as one day to become man, because the Word, too, was to be both clay and flesh, even as the earth was then.  For so did the Father previously say to the Son: “Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness.” And God made man, that is to say, the creature which He moulded and fashioned; after the image of God (in other words, of Christ) did He make him. And the Word was God also, who being in the image of God, “thought it not robbery to be equal to God.” Thus, that clay which was even then putting on the image of Christ, who was to come in the flesh, was not only the work, but also the pledge and surety, of God.

Tertullian
On the Resurrection of the Flesh
Chapter VI

God’s promises are to both body and soul

“And He breathed upon his face the breath of life, and man (that is, the clay) became a living soul; and God placed the man whom He had formed in the garden.” So that man was clay at first, and only afterwards man entire. I wish to impress this on your attention, with a view to your knowing, that whatever God has at all purposed or promised to man, is due not to the soul simply, but to the flesh also; if not arising out of any community in their origin, yet at all events by the privilege possessed by the latter in its name.

Tertullian
On the Resurrection of the Flesh
Chapter V

The Marcionites believe in a resurrection of the soul only

Since there is even within the confines of God’s Church a sect which is more nearly allied to the Epicureans than to the prophets, an opportunity is afforded us of knowing what estimate Christ forms of the (said sect, even the) Sadducees. For to Christ was it reserved to lay bare everything which before was concealed:  to impart certainty to doubtful points; to accomplish those of which men had had but a foretaste; to give present reality to the objects of prophecy; and to furnish not only by Himself, but actually in Himself, certain proofs of the resurrection of the dead. It is, however, against other Sadducees that we have now to prepare ourselves, but still partakers of their doctrine. For instance, they allow a moiety of the resurrection; that is, simply of the soul, despising the flesh, just as they also do the Lord of the flesh Himself.  No other persons, indeed, refuse to concede to the substance of the body its recovery from death, heretical inventors of a second deity.

Tertullian
On the Resurrection of the Flesh
Chapter II

The Platonists and philosophers were wrong about the soul but had vague beginnings of truth

It is satisfactory, however, that the no less important philosophy of Pythagoras and Empedocles, and the Plantonists, take the contrary view, and declare the soul to be immortal; affirming, moreover, in a way which most nearly approaches (to our own doctrine), that the soul actually returns into bodies, although not the same bodies, and not even those of human beings invariably:  thus Euphorbus is supposed to have passed into Phythagoras, and Homer into a peacock. They firmly pronounced the soul’s renewal to be in a body, (deeming it) more tolerable to change the quality (of the corporeal state) than to deny it wholly: they at least knocked at the door of truth, although they entered not. Thus the world, with all its errors, does not ignore the resurrection of the dead.

Tertullian
On the Resurrection of the Flesh
Chapter I

Those who deny his flesh will one day witness him in the flesh

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, or else that His soul is all that exists, but that His flesh no longer lives.

Tertullian
On the Flesh of Christ
Chapter XXIV

Jesus and Christ are the same being

Surely he is antichrist who denies that Christ has come in the flesh. 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. 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…

Tertullian
On the Flesh of Christ
Chapter XXIV