Tag: Deity of Christ / Spirit

Christ is the only God

For the prayer which He has taught us suits, as we have proved, none but the Creator. It is, of course, another matter if He does not wish to be prayed to, because He is the supremely and spontaneously good God! But who is this good God? There is, He says, “none but one.” It is not as if He had shown us that one of two gods was the supremely good; but He expressly asserts that there is one only good God, who is the only good, because He is the only God.

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book IV
Chapter XXXVI

Christ as God awards everlasting punishment or salvation

If so, you have here, O heretics, during your present lifetime, a warning that Moses and the prophets declare one only God, the Creator, and His only Christ, and how that both awards of everlasting punishment and eternal salvation rest with Him, the one only God, who kills and who makes alive.

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book IV
Chapter XXXIV

Christ is equal to God

Christ. “All things,” He says, “are delivered unto me of my Father.” You may believe Him, if He is the Christ of the Creator to whom all things belong; because the Creator has not delivered to a Son who is less than Himself all things, which He created by Him, that is to say, by His Word.

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book IV
Chapter XXV

Christ as very God was beyond all possibility of uncleanness

I will tell you how her faith was this above all: it made her believe that her God preferred mercy even to sacrifice; she was certain that her God was working in Christ; she touched Him, therefore, nor as a holy man simply, nor as a prophet, whom she knew to be capable of contamination by reason of his human nature, but as very God, whom she assumed to be beyond all possibility of pollution by any uncleanness.

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book IV
Chapter XX

Jesus is the source of the Holy Spirit

Now, that the very Lord Himself of all might, the Word and Spirit of the Father, was operating and preaching on earth, it was necessary that the portion of the Holy Spirit which, in the form of the prophetic gift, had been through John preparing the ways of the Lord, should now depart from John, and return back again of course to the Lord, as to its all-embracing original.

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book IV
Chapter XVIII

Christ, the God-man, founded the Church

There come to Him from Tyre, and from other districts even, a transmarine multitude.  This fact the psalm had in view:  “And behold tribes of foreign people, and Tyre, and the people of the Ethiopians; they were there. Sion is my mother, shall a man say; and in her was born a man” (forasmuch as the God-man was born), and He built her by the Father’s will; that you may know how Gentiles then flocked to Him, because He was born the God-man who was to build the church according to the Father’s will—even of other races also.

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book IV
Chapter XIII

The human Christ did the works of God because he was God

Now the work of healing or preserving is not proper to man, but to God. So again, in the law it says, “Thou shalt not do any manner of work in it,” except what is to be done for any soul, that is to say, in the matter of delivering the soul; because what is God’s work may be done by human agency for the salvation of the soul. By God, however, would that be done which the man Christ was to do, for He was likewise God.

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book IV
Chapter XII

Jesus was the fourth figure in the fiery furnace and could forgive sins as both God and man

It was He who was seen by the king of Babylon in the furnace with His martyrs: “the fourth, who was like the Son of man.” He also was revealed to Daniel himself expressly as “the Son of man, coming in the clouds of heaven” as a Judge, as also the Scripture shows. What I have advanced might have been sufficient concerning the designation in prophecy of the Son of man. But the Scripture offers me further information, even in the interpretation of the Lord Himself. For when the Jews, who looked at Him as merely man, and were not yet sure that He was God also, as being likewise the Son of God, rightly enough said that a man could not forgive sins, but God alone, why did He not, following up their point about man, answer them, that He had power to remit sins; inasmuch as, when He mentioned the Son of man, He also named a human being? except it were because He wanted, by help of the very designation “Son of man” from the book of Daniel, so to induce them to reflect as to show them that He who remitted sins was God and man…

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book IV
Chapter X

Christ’s divine nature is incorruptible

The Lord, therefore, wishing that the law should be more profoundly understood as signifying spiritual truths by carnal facts—and thus not destroying, but rather building up, that law which He wanted to have more earnestly acknowledged—touched the leper, by whom (even although as man He might have been defiled) He could not be defiled as God, being of course incorruptible.

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book IV
Chapter IX