Lecture 8: Tertullian, Irenaeus, Origen, and Cyprian

The lecture, section by section

1. Getting the map straight

   The patristic period spans the church's first five hundred years, closing around the fall of the western empire in 476. The Council of Nicaea in 325 splits it: fathers before it are ante-Nicene (ante meaning before, not against), those during and after are Nicene and post-Nicene. Within the ante-Nicene period sit the apostolic fathers, the second century apologists, and the polemical fathers, the foundational generations this course lingers over.

2. Alexandria and Carthage

   Four African leaders frame the church's first culture war: Clement and his student Origen in Alexandria, eager to harness Plato as a lesser light pointing to the gospel; Tertullian and his admirer Cyprian in Carthage, insisting with Paul in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 that man's wisdom is foolishness with God. Busenitz sides nearer Tertullian on principle, while warning that both poles carry dangers the rest of the lecture will illustrate.

3. Tertullian, father of Latin theology

   Probably trained in law, Tertullian was the first great father to write in Latin, the language of the western empire's people (nothing sacred about it, whatever later Rome made of it), and when Latin lacked a word he invented one, hundreds of them, including the one we cannot do without: Trinity, three persons, one God. He also pushed forward the recognition of the canon against Marcion's scissors. Yet Rome never sainted him, because at the end of his life, disgusted at worldliness in the mainstream church, he defected to the Montanists for their moral strictness. An explanation, Busenitz says, not an excuse.

4. Irenaeus of Lyon

   A disciple of Polycarp, who was a disciple of John, Irenaeus carried the apostolic chain to Gaul as bishop of Lyon and became the great polemicist against Valentinian Gnosticism in his five volume Against Heresies, even turning the Gnostics' own word demiurge back on them. He testifies that the church received exactly four Gospels, his reasoning charmingly odd (four zones of the world, four winds) but his witness invaluable: while Gnostic gospels multiplied, the true church knew only four.

5. The pillar and ground of the faith

   Irenaeus writes that the gospel the apostles preached was afterwards, by God's will, delivered to us in the Scriptures, to be the pillar and ground of our faith: an early confession of Scripture's final authority. And when he spells out the ancient tradition of the apostles, its content is simply the faith of the New Testament: one God the Creator; his Son Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, rose, ascended, and will come in glory as Savior and Judge. The oral tradition, in other words, is the written tradition; there is no secret second deposit, a point worth remembering when Rome appeals to one.

6. How Mary's elevation actually happened

   A student's question draws a preview: the fathers' references to the virgin are about Christ's birth, not Mary's status. Her elevation begins centuries later, around the Council of Ephesus in 431, where calling Mary the bearer of God was meant to defend the incarnation, that the one born was fully God from conception, and only over time became a claim about her. Jerome pressed her perpetual virginity, though the Gospels name four brothers of Jesus and mention sisters. Busenitz, following Calvin's treatise on relics, traces the engine of it: when the empire forced pagans into the church, the devotion once paid to goddesses found a new object.

7. Origen: brilliantly right and brilliantly wrong

   Origen of Alexandria, Clement's student and successor at the catechetical school, is perhaps the most brilliant of the fathers and something like the father of systematic theology; his On First Principles was among the first attempts to organize Christian doctrine, and his answer to the pagan Celsus a serious apologetic. He professed that the Bible alone is inspired and must ground all Christian thinking. But in practice, Needham observes, Platonism colored everything, and when Origen was wrong he was abysmally wrong.

8. The allegorical hermeneutic

   Origen taught that Scripture has three levels, body, soul, and spirit: the literal, the moral, and the spiritual meaning, with the literal the least important. The method came down a long chain: Greek philosophers allegorizing Homer's immoral gods, Alexandrian Jews applying it to the Old Testament, the Epistle of Barnabas and Clement baptizing it for the church, Origen popularizing it. Its fatal flaw is subjectivity: a hidden meaning not in the text answers to the interpreter, not the author, so the Bible can be made to mean anything. Calvin condemned it as Satan's subtlety, though Busenitz notes Calvin kept a version of it for prophecy, which is where amillennial conclusions come from. Alexandria's allegorical school would collide for centuries with Antioch's literal school.

9. Where allegory took him

   Origen's errors were not small: he taught a universalism in which all, eventually even Satan, would be saved, the very well Rob Bell drew from in Love Wins. Centuries later a council at Constantinople anathematized Origen by name alongside Arius and Nestorius, which is why Rome never sainted him either: Tertullian out for Montanism, Origen out as a condemned heretic. The fathers, Busenitz insists, must be read like any modern author: with patience, respect, and 1 Thessalonians 5's test, holding fast the good and rejecting the rest, never as inspired, whatever Eastern Orthodoxy says of its councils.

10. Cyprian and the unity of the church

    Bishop of Carthage through the Decian persecution, Cyprian charted the mainstream course on the lapsed: restoration, but only upon demonstrated repentance, in some cases only at the point of death. Against Novatian's rival pure church he wrote on the church's unity, including the famous line that no one can have God for his Father who does not have the church for his mother, words aimed at schismatics abandoning the true church for a rival altar, not a charter for Rome. His stricter view that baptism outside the church was void the mainstream declined to follow. Cyprian himself died a martyr by the sword.

11. Purity first, then unity

    Cyprian's legacy frames a tension every generation must hold: Scripture commands both unity and doctrinal purity. Busenitz's rule: purity is the foundation, for unity without truth is only superficial; but the command to unity is real, and dividing over matters that are not core doctrine sins against it. The Novatianist and fundamentalist temptations are the same temptation.

12. Foxe's roll call

    The lecture closes in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, with the King James Bible and Pilgrim's Progress one of the three most influential English Christian books: Timothy, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin, Irenaeus, and Cyprian in their deaths, and young Origen, whose mother hid his clothes to keep him from running to martyrdom beside his father, a roll call running down to Constantine, whose legalization of Christianity would end the age of persecution and begin a very different set of problems.

1. Tertullian invented the vocabulary we still confess with, and then ended outside the church he served. What keeps zeal for purity from curdling into separatism in your own convictions?

2. Irenaeus insisted the apostles' tradition is fully written in Scripture. How would you use his testimony in a conversation with someone who appeals to an unwritten church tradition?

3. Origen made the Bible say beautiful things it does not say. Where are we tempted to prefer an edifying spiritual reading over what the author actually meant, and why is the trade a bad one?