Tertullien 1

Tertullien: Contre Hermogene
Eric Osborn. Journal of Theological Studies London:Oct 2000. Vol. 51, Part 2 p. 717-
719 (3 pp.)
Subjects: Nonfiction, Philosophers, Theology, God, Christianity
People: Chapot, Frederic, Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus)
(155?-220?)
Author(s): Eric Osborn
Document types: Book Review-Favorable
Publication title: Journal of Theological Studies. London: Oct 2000. Vol. 51 Part 2.
pg. 717, 3 pgs
Part 2
Source type: Periodical
ISSN/ISBN: 00225185
ProQuest document ID: 64421898
Text Word Count 829
Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?
did=64421898&Fmt=3&clientId=65092&RQT=309&VName=PQD
Abstract (Document Summary)
Osborn reviews "Tertullien: Contre Hermogene" edited by Frederic Chapot.

Full Text (829 words)
Copyright Oxford University Press(England) Oct 2000
Tertullien: Contre Hermogene. Edited by FRtDtRIC CHAPOT. PP. 473. (Sources

Chretiennes, 439.) Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, '999. ISBN 2 204 o6217 o. Paper 258 F.
THE Sources Chretiennes edition of Tertullian's Against Hermogenes provides further
knowledge of this intricate work. It marks the continued recognition (since Fredouille,
1972) of Tertullian's argument and philosophical importance. The author is a pupil of
Fredouille and makes yet another part of Tertullian accessible. Like Clement of
Alexandria and Justin, Tertullian directly confronts philosophy in a way which Irenaeus
does not, yet all are inexplicable without philosophy.
Hermogenes is treated with a respect which Tertullian does not give to the Gnostics. Here
he finds argument with which he can engage, whereas he could see little point in arguing
with Valentinians whose knowledge was above argument and vulnerable only to irony
and parody. The centre of the argument concerns creatio ex nihilo. Hermogenes argued
for matter which was co-existent with God, and for two ultimate first principles.
Tertullian, like Paul, is an uncompromising monotheist. His God is the God who raises
the dead, creates out of nothing, and justifies the ungodly.
The work is valuable because the question of creatio ex nihilo is widely mishandled.
English philosophers like Tennant and Farrer insisted that creation was, at its core,
incomprehensible and that no ladder of intervening powers could help to make it a
scientific relation. They pointed to the two models concerning creation which the Bible
uses, that of the prophet or king who commands, and that of the craftsman who fashions.
Both command and construction were necessary to understand .God's creation of the
world. Irenaeus put this brilliantly when he spoke of the creator as sapiens architectus et
maximus rex. While both command and construction were necessary, one was frequently
neglected in favour of the other. Hermogenes is strong on construction but weak on
command. Basilides was strong on command and weak on construction; his account of
creatio ex nihilo was, as Fantino has shown, unacceptable. For Basilides gives an account
of creation of nothing from nothing by no one. The sole command of the non-existent
being brings what is not into non-existence. The supreme no one produces nothing. Here
we have no doctrine of creation, for nothing has been created.
Tertullian grasped the central issues and saw creation in a philosophical and theological
framework. Too often creation has been treated in a culinary or narrative manner: take
two billion kilograms of matter and two fresh ideas, mix well, and allow to stand. The
complexity of the question must not be overlooked, for creatio ex nihilo takes a different
meaning according to the opponent against whom it is directed. For Irenaeus, creatio ex
nihilo is concerned with the sovereignty and unicity of God, for Theophilus the doctrine
is concerned with a refutation of Platonist metaphysics. For Tertullian, arguing against a
thoughtful dualist, the doctrine concerns the problem of evil and points to one God and a
good world.
In this work Tertullian shows a common characteristic of Christian theology in the second
century. Whatever Justin, Irenaeus, or Tertullian thought about philosophy, they accepted,
perhaps unknowingly, the Platonic or Socratic method. Truth began by disproving the
view which was to be destroyed. Argument was applied without mercy to the opponent's
thought. Having destroyed the opponent, it became possible to put forward, in argued
form, a Christian view. This acceptance of Socratic method by early Christians is most
evident in Justin, who echoes consciously the Apology of Socrates, and his supreme
loyalty to truth. It is present also in Tertullian and Irenaeus, and all the more important
because these writers are not conscious of any dependence on Socrates. As Justin had put
it: `To me it is irrelevant whether Pythagoras or anyone else said a thing, the only thing
that matters is that it is true' (Dial. 6. z To yap AA-qOg ov"rcus Exec).
There is an interesting appendix on painting, for Tertullian criticizes Hermogenes as a

painter on several occasions. Chapot examines Tertullian's attitude to art and finds that,
while he is not consistently iconoclastic, he sees painting as a form of falsification.
All of which suggests that, while Tertullian respects the argument and logic in
Hermogenes, he believes that something of the pictorial element of the Platonic world is
present in Hermogenes' account. Since the Gnostic tradition followed the way of
picturebook Platonism (we might call it Bilderbuch-Platonismus, provided we recognize
that theosophy has sometimes had a creative aesthetic influence), Tertullian's comment on
this point has special interest.
The text shows respect for the edition of Waszink (whose analysis of Tertullian's
argument remains supreme), and only differs when the judgement of Waszink is
considered too daring. Some of the readings of Kroymann are reinstated where they show
a sound intuition. The commentary on the text is detailed and useful. Tertullian's
argument is dense and needs to be set out so that the moves are transparently clear. This
edition may be warmly commended. ERIC OSBORN
Document 3 of 14
Tertullian, First Theologian of hte West

Robert Dick Sider. Church History Chicago:Jun 1999. Vol. 68, Iss. 2, p. 422-425 (4
pp.)
Subjects: Nonfiction, Theology, Christianity
People: Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus) (155?-220?)
Author(s): Robert Dick Sider
Publication title: Church History. Chicago: Jun 1999. Vol. 68, Iss. 2; pg. 422, 4 pgs
ISSN/ISBN: 00096407
Text Word Count 1541
"Tertullian, First Theologian of the West" by Eric Osborn is reviewed.

Copyright American Society of Church History Jun 1999
Tertullian, First Theologian of the West. By Eric Osborn. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1997. xxii + 285 pp. $59.95 cloth.
It is the "specific aim" of this book "to analyze Tertullian's arguments and thereby clarify
his meaning" (xv). Osborn has evidently also wished to show that in Tertullian "the
Western mind . . . finds its first Christian _expression" (255). But Osborn's most
distinctive achievement is his reconstruction of the thought of Tertullian in a way that
plays upon the creative tension between historical and systematic theology. On the one
hand, Tertullian's thought is elucidated against the backgrounds both of classical
(especially Stoic) thought and of the competing ideologies of early Christianity. On the
other hand, the structure of the book is determined by the categories of systematic
theology, a structure that facilitates Osborn s attempt to show that Tertullian's theology is
essentially a theology of the cross: the "strife of opposites"-a Stoic image that dominated
Tertullian s conceptual landscape-apparent in the antitheses of "Saving History" finds
resolution in the cross, where the saving events have been summarized and perfected in
Christ.
Osborn directs his reader first to the problem of Christian faith and knowledge, to which
he devotes three chapters (2, 3, and 4). In each chapter Osborn attempts to elucidate by
setting in its context one of three famous formulae: "What has Athens to do with
Jerusalem?" (De praescriptione); "It is to be believed because it is 'inept"' (de carne
Christi); "the soul is naturally Christian" (Apologeticum).
Osborn sees the first of these formulae as a puzzle, and shows how Tertullian surprises
the reader by going beyond the answer apparently invited-that is, "nothing whatever." If
Jerusalem does not need Athens it is "because it has included and gone beyond it" (44).
Nowhere, indeed, has Jerusalem included and surpassed Athens more decisively than at
the point where one seeks the grounds of belief, for in place of the classical "conditions
for faith" the church offers the "rule of faith," the regula fidei. It is here, on the question
of the "criterion of truth," that we find "the central point at which Tertullian assimilates
Greek philosophy into Christian theology" (38-39). Osborn admits that "it was a
strikingly different kind of canon [that is, criterion]" (46), but believes that Tertullian
dissolves the boundary between the classical criterion of truth and the Christian rule of
faith "when he speaks of the scriptures as presenting a cognitive impression which
compels belief" (47)Ha point he enlarges in chapter 4, where he describes faith as
recognition, a conception derived from the Stoics, and based on the notion of the
"naturally Christian soul" (77-83).
The paradox "credible because inept" has at its heart the mystery of the cross, and Osborn
must be commended for placing the famous phrase in its context, where the passive
periphrastic, pudendum est, emphatically declares the obligatory nature of the divine
shame: the transcendent God of glory who created humankind can, by the law of
opposites, restore the race only through the most humiliating subjection. It is the divine
impropriety that justifies faith: "What is at issue here is . . . whether God . . . became man
. . . in a way which is apt and therefore untrue, or . . . inept and therefore true" (62-63).
The argument of the book proceeds to Tertullian's doctrines of God (chap. 5) and of the
Trinity and the nature of Christ (chap. 6). In my view there is no discussion throughout
the book more illuminating than this latter chapter on Tertullian's Trinitarian theology and
his Christology. Osborn convincingly shows that Tertullian's formulations derived from
the philosophical concepts of Stoicism. He notes that the tension inherent in the
contrasting language of trinity and unity reflect Tertullian's love of opposites; but he is
particularly effective when he demonstrates that the "plurality" of God is a plurality
necessitated by the Stoic category of "relative disposition." It is this category that makes
possible for Tertullian the distribution of the unity into a Trinity defined by status,
substantia, and potestas (quality, substance, and power). It is, similarly, the Stoic doctrine
of mixture that helps Tertullian visualize the two natures of Christ as neither juxtaposition
nor amalgam, but a total blending, a "combination .. . understood as equivalent to
'unconfused union,' [which] becomes the usage of Nestorius" (142).
Subsequent chapters consider Tertullian's doctrines of prayer, the Bible, sin, the church,
and his eschatology. There is much here to tantalize the reader: for example, the view that
the later doctrine of original sin cannot be attributed to Tertullian (167), that in Tertullian
there is a "marked variation in the culpability of the human will" (170), and that for
Tertullian, the millenarian, "there are differences in the order of resurrection, early or late,
into the millennial delight of the saints," for "within the thousand years, the saints will
rise sooner or later according to their deserts" (217). One chapter (9) that breaks into the
sequence expected of the categories of systematic theology adds a delightful and useful
dimension by submitting the humor of Tertullian, "the laughing Stoic" (xv, 183), to
precise philosophical analysis.
In spite of some excellent discussion in these later chapters, there are disappointments.
Given the general hypothesis that Tertullian's thinking is fundamentally controlled by his
view of reality as a structure of opposites, one recognizes Osborn's rationale for
elucidating Tertullian's hermeneutics as a response to Marcion and his book of Antitheses.
But a fuller discussion of crucial passages in the De Spectaculis, the De praescriptione
and the De resurrectione mortuorum would have raised urgent questions about the canon
of Scripture, and about the meaning and role of allegory in Tertullian's exegesis, as well
as the degree to which Tertullian anticipated later exegesis based on the theory of the
"four senses of scripture." Ultimately, to find the key to Tertullian's exegesis, one must, I
suspect, appeal much more insistently to classical rhetoric than Osborn has done.
Likewise, Osborn's primary interest in the philosophical problems that underlay
Tertullian's ethics tends to minimize the role of sociological issues-issues that divided
church and world-in shaping Tertullian's ethical system. Indeed, it is surprising that the
De spectaculis receives, no extended consideration in the entire book.
Though the work is fundamentally a theological study, church historians will want to note
some opinions offered, usually with minimal argument, on crucial problems: for example,
the opinion that Tertullian registered a remarkable change in the Christian attitude toward
the Jews (118-19); that the bishop against whom Tertullian fulminated in the De pudicitia
was the Roman Callistus, not the bishop of Carthage (175-76); that Tertullian, even in his
radical Montanist period, never left the church (176-77); and that "Tertullian indicated the
most decisive step in early Christian ecclesiology [in affirming a church] ordered on lines
parallel to Roman provincial government" (182).
In the age of the computer, the production of a book must be a cooperative effort between
the author and the press. Copyeditors should know the difference between restrictive and
nonrestrictive clauses, and the function of the comma in clarifying the distinction. They
should also be able to catch a sentence too hastily skimmed from the keyboard: "The
human race is summed up, 'that is to refer back to the beginning or to revise from the
beginning' (Marc. 5.17.1), reformed (Marc. 3.9.5) and restored (pat 15.1)" (17-18).
Further, computer wizardry justifies an editorial policy that insists on a complete set of
full indexes. This book has three indexes: a subject index; citations from Tertullian; and
citations from the Bible. The latter two are excellent, and appear to be virtually without
error or omission. The subject index is quite inadequate, for it is both incomplete and
inconsistent-Clement of Alexandria is listed but Cyprian is not; Plutarch receives a single
reference (in spite of frequent allusions in the book), but Proclus, to whom a decisive
reference is made in the text (141-42), is omitted. Regrettably, and inexcusably, there is
no index of classical citations; such an index would perhaps have corrected the
troublesome habit in the text of too often citing classical authors without any supporting
reference. Moreover, the frequency and (for the reader's comprehension) the great value
of the Greek words and phrases cited in the text call for an index of Greek words.
A final word of commendation. Theology may no longer be the queen of the sciences, but
Osborn has demonstrated in this book that theology can be the most humane of
disciplines. Here Tertullian rubs shoulders not only with Irenaeus and Augustine, Hans
Kung and Karl Rahner, but also with Blake and Byron, Gerard Manley Hopkins and T. S.
Eliot, while images are drawn from the world of music to illustrate the early progress of
Christian theology. Moreover, throughout the book one never loses sight of Tertullian the
man: it is appropriate that the well-ordered sequence of systematic theology should be
interrupted to enjoy briefly the humor of Tertullian; also that the final pages of the book
should seek those qualities of Tertullian's mind that appeal today (255-58). Finally,
Osborn creates a welcome "comic relief" from, and a very humane perspective upon, the
high seriousness of his subject by a light but pervasive humor, as when he paraphrases
the descriptive sentence from the Apocalypse: "The Laodiceans were neither hot nor cold,
but drastically indigestible" (22).
Robert Dick Sider Dickinson College, emeritus
Document 4 of 14
Religion booknotes
Lawrence S Cunningham. Commonweal New York:Nov 6, 1998. Vol. 125, Iss. 19, p.
32-35 (4 pp.)
Subjects: Nonfiction, Biographies, Religious fundamentalism, History, Theology,
Christianity
People: Muggeridge, Malcolm, Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens
Tertullianus) (155?-220?), Dominic of Sora
Author(s): Lawrence S Cunningham
Document types: Book Review-Comparative
Publication title: Commonweal. New York: Nov 6, 1998. Vol. 125, Iss. 19; pg. 32,
4 pgs
ISSN/ISBN: 00103330
Cunningham reviews "The Trinity and Paschal Mystery" by Ann Hunt, "Tertullian: First
Theologian of the West" by Eric Osborn, "Church Reform & Social Change: Dominic of
Sora and His Patrons" by John Howe, "Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography" by Gregory
Wolfe and "Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity" by Bruce Bawer.
Copyright Commonweal Foundation Nov 6, 1998
The Trinity and Paschal Mystery by Ann Hunt
Liturgical Press/Glazier, $19.95,198 pp.
Karl Rahner complained that Christians profess a trinitarian faith in their creed and
liturgy but live as if they were pure monotheists. Part of this problem derives, Rahner
thought, from the overly speculative treatment the Trinity received at the hands of
theologians. Since Rahner wrote that critique there has been a veritable flood of books
reconsidering the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of the Christian mystery. These books
have come from Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformed theologians. Indeed, most
advanced theological courses and seminars now begin with the Trinity in their ordo
doctrinae and not in the more philosophically rooted doctrine of the One God.
Hunt's book is a close look at four theologians who have begun their theological
reflections on the Trinity with a consideration of the Paschal Mystery: the passion, death,
and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Each of these theologians focuses on a different aspect
of this mystery. F.X. Durrwell, an Alsatian Redemptorist, begins with Christ's
Resurrection. Ghislain Lafont, a French Benedictine, starts with the death of Christ. Hans
Urs von Balthasar, the Swiss polymath, is famous for his aesthetic meditation on Christ's
descent into hell. Finally, the provocative English Benedictine, Sebastian Moore, presents
a psychological reconstruction of what it meant for the disciples to grasp in faith the fact
that Jesus was raised from the dead. Hunt judges each theologian's fidelity to the biblical
message, appropriation of the theological tradition, and methodology. Though all root
their reflections in the Paschal Mystery, each gives distinct and nuanced interpretations of
this central Christian event. What all of these theologians have in common is their
unwillingness to consider the biblical material as "empirical residue" (she borrows the
term from Bernard Lonergan), yet each judges the biblical material the necessary starting
point for any serious trinitarian theology. Hunt is quite good at the difficult task of
summarizing the views of these theologians, especially those of the ever prolix von
Balthasar.
Hunt passes judgment on these thinkers after differentiating their work according to
categories set out by Bernard Lonergan. She sees each coming to grips with a culture in
which the older theological terminology and philosophical presuppositions seem
attenuated. She further notes that their somewhat idiosyncratic efforts toward articulating
a postmodern construction of things are similar to certain Reformed and Orthodox
writers.
Hunt's book is not for the theologically timid. Those who have a broad theological
culture, however, will find this a cogent, well-written work. I recommend it for serious
students of theology.
Tertullian: First Theologian of the West
by Eric Osborn
Cambridge University Press, $59.50, 285 pp.
Tertullian (A.D. 160-225) coined the word Trinitas (in his treatise against Praxeas) to
describe the triune character of the Godhead. He was a brilliant master of rhetoric, a
profoundly original thinker, a fierce moralist, and a devastating polemicist. He loved
paradoxes as well as the seeming contradictions of the Christian faith. At a time of
persecution he held the Cross as a standard, fiercely defended the Rule of Faith, and, in
the judgment of Eric Osborn, was a more original thinker than Augustine, that other great
Roman African.
Osborn's book is not a biography (for that we must still rely on Timothy Barnes's classic
1981 study), but a close examination of Tertullian's theology. Armed with a mastery of
both the Tertullian corpus and the secondary literature, Osborn is not shy about
expressing his own judgments. He agrees with Barnes that Tertullian was probably not a
lawyer. He argues, against the conventional wisdom, that Tertullian never left the
Catholic church even though he was very much attracted to the Montanist New Prophecy.
He brilliantly defends Tertullian's biting polemical style by showing how satire, scorn,
and laughter were rhetorical topoi widely used in his day. Where Tertullian is wrong,
Osborn says so, and where his philosophical background (in Stoicism) colors his
theology, Osborn shows us. This book has some especially good chapters on Tertullian's
rejection of Marcion's desire to separate the Old and New Testaments while restricting
even the latter to a truncated version of Luke.
Osborn organizes his chapters around the twin themes of the strife of opposites
(Tertullian has a debt to Heraclitus) and perfection in Christ, since it was a cardinal
principle for him that what God made, God remade in Christ. Like his younger
contemporary, Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian had a comprehensive doctrine of all things
being recapitulated in Christ.
This highly readable and comprehensive work is a model of how historical theology
should be done.
Church Reform & Social Change: Dominic of Sora and His Patrons
by John Howe
University of Pennsylvania Press, $37.50, 220 pp.
Dominic of Sora (d. 1032) is a minor figure in church history. Born in Foligno, he entered
the monastic life, trained on Mount Subasio in Umbria (where much later Francis of
Assisi would keep a hermitage), and spent the rest of his life wandering through central
Italy as a founder of monasteries, a sometime hermit, preacher in parishes, and reformer
of the clergy. Howe, in this highly technical work of medieval history, untangles
Dominic's life to demonstrate how a charismatic religious reformer of the eleventh
century worked at a level beneath that of popes, emperors, and learned canonists. The
casual reader should not be put off by the long footnotes or the somewhat tedious
disentangling of patrons and their families; in the midst of these technicalities, there is
much to be learned.
Medievalists will pass judgment on the reliability of Howe's research (I am a consumer of

this scholarship, not a producer!). Those interested in medieval history in general will be
instructed by a number of Howe's observations. First, there is a fine discussion of the role
of hermits in early medieval reform. Second, these hermits served an important social
function: they attracted people; they provided hospitality for the traveler; they developed
economically marginal land; and they provided models of sanctity.
I was most impressed by Howe's argument about the wide understanding the early
medieval monks had of the Rule of Benedict. His thesis, held by others, is that these early
monastics formed "textual communities" (the phrase is Brian Stock's) which felt no need
to follow Benedict's Rule ad litteram (Benedict probably did not mean his own "little rule
for beginners" to be so observed). I can only lament that Howe was unable to reconstruct
what Dominic's horarium was like. These monastic communities evidently developed
their own customs as need and circumstance arose.
Dominic's houses are now mostly gone, absorbed by other orders, left in the backwaters
of Italian ecclesiastical life with the rise of the Cistercians and the great abbeys like
Monte Cassino. What remains are the memories of Dominic in some of the hill towns of
central Italy and some curious devotional practices involving the draping of snakes on his
statue on his feastday by local serpari. They may be enacting, Howe indicates, memories
of when the people of the Marsican area of Italy in ancient Roman times were renowned
for their snake-handling abilities. Who knows if this quaint practice (also known in
Sicily) goes back far in history, since the practice can only be traced to the seventeenth
century.
Howe's study will be of most interest to serious students of medieval history. Amateurs
will benefit from reading it if they have any interest in how different ages have struggled
to reform the church.
Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography
by Gregory Wolfe
Eerdmans, $35, 462 pp.
I have a soft spot in my heart for Malcolm Muggeridge (190>90) because he once said
something nice about my first book-in Esquire, of all places. The book was about Saint
Francis of Assisi. Beyond that episode, what I knew of him was that he wrote the book,
based on a television documentary, that vaulted Mother Teresa to international celebrity;
that he appeared on William F. Buckley's "Firing Line" to excoriate the contemporary
world and its vices; that he converted to the Roman Catholic church in his dotage; and
that somewhere in my distant past I gave a positive review to the collected essays he
published under the title Jesus Rediscovered.
It was only through a reading of Wolfe's sympathetic biography that I have learned the
details of Muggeridge's peripatetic, messy, and varied life. To his everlasting credit, while
a journalist in Moscow in the thirties, Muggeridge exposed Stalin's genocide in the brutal
attempt to collectivize agriculture in the Ukraine. Trendy Leftists of the day turned a
stone face against his reportage. Like many of his contemporaries, he served in British
intelligence during the war. Subsequently, he became editor of Punch and a "talking
head" on BBC radio and television. During all of these various adventures, he was a
persistent philanderer (as was his wife Kitty). Wolfe duly catalogues his many affairs.
What I did not known was that Muggeridge, with his searching mind and errant moral
life, was haunted by religious questions from his earliest days. He was kept from total
disaster by his long friendship with the Anglican theologianpriest Alec Vidler. During the
war years he was so despondent that he even made a desultory attempt at suicide. Wolfe
is quite good in keeping Muggeridge's religious quest a constant theme amid the
somewhat tedious accounts of travels, financial woes, free-lance writing, reporting, and
editorial assignments. Indeed, Muggeridge's spiritual quest is the most compelling part of
this book.
Those religious instincts found _expression in his documentaries on Mother Teresa and
Saint Paul, as well as in his keen interest in the writings of Augustine, Pascal, Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn. Muggeridge's fascination with Augustine's Confessions
began in his young adulthood and continued throughout his life. Indeed, more than once,
Wolfe describes Muggeridge's approach to Christianity as "Augustinian." Muggeridge
experienced a constant battle between an active libido and a near disgust at physicality.
Wolfe's biography is a generous tribute to a person whom he clearly admires. My most

serious reservation has to do with Wolfe's conviction that Muggeridge stands with G. K.
Chesterton and C. S. Lewis as England's greatest Christian apologists of the century.
Wolfe sees Muggeridge as a nice counter-balance to the romanticism of Lewis and
Chesterton. A good point, but a minor one. Still, Muggeridge certainly lacked
Chesterton's capacity for the memorable phrase (Auden called GKC the greatest aphorist
of the century). Try to think of one memorable line written by Muggeridge. Second,
Muggeridge did not have the reflective character of a C. S. Lewis. Lewis's deceptively
simple prose was rooted in a lifelong habit of thinking things through, in a deep level of
scholarly attainment, and from a fund of personal tragedy. Finally, neither Chesterton nor
Lewis ever sounded like cranky curmudgeons when they excoriated the ills of the world.
Try to think of what writing by Muggeridge you would hand to a person seriously
interested in the claims of Christianity. Muggeridge's life was interesting and richly
varied. Wolfe gets that right. However, his claim for Muggeridge's lasting significance is
a bit of a reach.
Stealing Jesus:
How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity

by Bruce Bawer
Crown, $26, 340 pp.
Bruce Bawer makes one central point in this book with which I am in complete
agreement. He argues that certain conservatives and fundamentalists have appropriated
the word "Christian" so that, in common parlance, the term has come to mean a very
specific brand of Christianity. When one hears the phrase "Christian music," for example,
it is Pat Boone, not Bach, that comes to mind. "Christian" has become, as it were, a code
word.
Apart from that helpful insight, Bawer's book is very disappointing. He distinguishes, in
his opening pages, "legalistic" from "nonlegalistic" Christians. Legalistic Christians are
those evangelicals and fundamentalists who have strong traditional creedal and biblical
teachings. "Nonlegalists" are liberal Protestants of various stripes who represent the once-
upon-a-time "mainline." (Bawer deals mainly with Protestants; his few excursions into
Roman territory are almost always wrongheaded.)
The bulk of this book is devoted to criticizing the usual suspects (Pat Robertson, Jim
Bakker, Ralph Reed, James Dobson, and a whole gaggle of other televangelists,
preachers, and political pundits on the right) and contrasting their pinchbacked version of
things with such historic figures as the late Harry Emerson Fosdick and contemporary
nonlegalists such as Marcus Borg (of Jesus Seminar fame) and, God help us, the ever
fatuous Bishop John Shelby Spong. Bawer is also partial to the later work of Hans Kung,
who seems to be the only Catholic theologian he knows.
Bawer deals with a subject that has been treated too many times and, in some instances,
by people who have the wit to ask why such religiosity shows such staying power. Bawer
plows along chronicling the dim theories of Charles Dobson, Frank Peretti, Pat
Robertson, et al. Such a picture of a good-and-evil religious universe allows Bawer to
sympathize with the blasphemous ACT UP disruption of Mass at Saint Patrick's
Cathedral while being scandalized at some rough language used by Christian Coalition
members at the 1992 Republican Convention.
The tendentious nature of this book was all the more disappointing to me because I have
read Bawer's literary criticism in the New Criterion with great profit. This present work,
born, I suspect, from the perceived rough treatment gays receive in "legalistic" church
circles, is too angry, too polemical, and too one-sided to be taken seriously. The author's
snobbishly condescending description of worshipers in a little church in Georgia who, as
he sniffs, listen to country music and don't read books, might have given the whole thing
away: why can't they be liberal, educated, tolerant, and socially conscious just like Bruce
Bawer? El
[Author Affiliation]
Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the Universiti of Notre Dame.
Document 5 of 14
Tertullian, First Theologian of the West

J M Rist. Journal of Theological Studies London:Oct 1998. Vol. 49, Part 2 p. 820-822
(3 pp.)
Subjects: Nonfiction, Theology
Author(s): J M Rist
Publication title: Journal of Theological Studies. London: Oct 1998. Vol. 49 Part 2.
pg. 820, 3 pgs
Part 2
ISSN/ISBN: 00225185
Rist reviews "Tertullian, First Theologian of the West" by Eric Osborn.

Copyright Oxford University Press(England) Oct 1998
Tertullian, First Theologian of the West. By ERIC OSBORN. Pp. xxi + 285. Cambridge
University Press, 1997. ISBN 0 521 59035 3. L40/$59.95.
'His Heraclitean love of opposites is a complex thing, ranging from a stylistic tic, which
may infect those who read him, to his wide, inclusive humanity' (p. 256).
So Osborn on Tertullian; so perhaps more or less accurately Tertullian on Osborn. Here

we have a modern Tertullian, at times a Tertullian doing philosophy of religion in the
manner of Kretzmann or Plantinga or Geach: showing, that is, that the propositions which
flow from the rule of faith-the existence of the Christian God as the criterion of truth-are
intelligibly defended, indeed must be developed with an inexorable casuistry. Osborn's
strength lies in his ability to present Tertullian from the inside, to reproduce his paradoxes
while at the same time explicating them, to shadow his style, above all to show him as a
man who loved not just controversy but argument. Osborn finally erases-we may hope for
ever-the picture of Tertullian as the patron saint of fideism. Athens is not opposed to
Jerusalem, except in its perverts, nor is it a substitute for Jerusalem, though Jerusalem
must subsume its legitimate concerns.
This is Tertullian the theologian as proto-analytic philosopher, philosophy, as Osborn

normally sees it, being characterized less as systematizing or visionary metaphysics than
as argument; and as he tries to work through Tertullian's arguments generously, we see
how radically Tertullian differs, in Osborn's view, from the Gnostics, for 'Like all
theosophy, Gnosticism presents philosophy without argument, which is like opera
without music ...' (p. 23).
Tertullian now appears as a man who-in the manner of hellenistic and Roman thinkers-
has adopted a criterion of truthChrist and him crucified (p. 2)-and has tried to make sense
of the world in the light of that truth (pp. 37-47). Yet the criterion is itself paradoxical:
God is humiliated yet glorious, weak yet omnipotent. With his own love of paradox and
at times wickedly humorous, even throw-away style-few one-liners could disperse some
of the von Balthasar froth as deftly as Osborn's comment on page 199 (with note)-it is
sometimes difficult to place Osborn in relation both to Tertullian himself and to the
dazzling array of contemporary thinkers (Rorty, Davidson, Williams, Wittgenstein, etc.)
whom he constantly cites and whose wisdom, if such it be, he tries to enfold into his
narrative. An example from the very last sentence of the book: 'For we have learned, from
the pragmatists, that the one worthwhile intellectual enterprise is to speak as though we
are not rehearsing [note the "persuasive" language] a previously written script'. I very
much doubt if that is quite what Osborn believes, paradoxical though it sounds: the real
pragmatist has no fixed beliefs at all-except in the desirability of getting apparently
appropriate action-and it would be a rare (and unwise) theologian who was always afraid
of repeating past truths out of a mere fear that they have been uttered before. Again, in
presenting Tertullian's materialism, Osborn seems too quick to sympathize with recent
popular proposals in the philosophy of the mind: so we read (p. 255) that 'his [i.e.
Tertullian's] Stoic materialism has interest because of the non-reductive physicalism
which is so plausible at present ...'. But this non-reductive physicalism has little (at
present) to do with the discoveries of physics-- and much to do with a dread of mind-
body dualism-when it posits a new sort of 'matter' for which there is little empirical
support; some would say that dual-aspect theory is little more than a seductive if
desperate sleight of hand.
Meanwhile back at Carthage what sort of Tertullian has Osborn found? He is an arguer, a
fierce controversialist, an exposer of Valentinian fantasies, a source-as is widely
recognized-both for the later doctrine of original sin (pp. 164-67) and most importantly
for later trinitarian and christological orthodoxy (pp. 116-43). He probably never broke
formally with the `Great Church', ever more critical though he became of its 'psychic' or
mediocre majority as his Montanist predilections grew stronger. But there is more
uncertainty about Osborn's constant identification of Tertullian both as Heraclitean (p.
104 etc.)-is this a bit of a hangover in Osborn's mind from Justin (cf. p. 3)?-and as Stoic
(pp. 8, 11, 27, 35, etc.). ('Stoic' is the largest entry in the subject-index.)
Although in broad terms there should be no quarrel with such characterizations, when it
comes to details we may wonder in what precise sense it is right to use them. Tertullian's
'Heracliteanism' would seem to be little more than a name, a love of paradox and
antinomy and something like the belief that war is the father of all things. Tertullian's
Stoicism, however, is real but problematic, and Osborn may have been unwise in relying
so heavily on Spanneut. As an example of 'Stoic' difficulties I single out his treatment of
Tertullian's materialist account of the soul (pp. 214-15). Tertullian regards the soul now as
incorporeal, now as 'physical'. Osborn thinks this indicates the lack of a `clear, consistent
psychology in early Christian thought'. Presumably so, but what about Tertullian in
particular? Is he consistently Stoic, and if so of what sort? And if not Stoic, then what?
Here and generally, a more exact account of what Tertullian has done with what sort of
Stoicism would much increase our understanding.
Osborn tries and eventually fails to empathize with Tertullian's rigorist ethics and (inter
alia) his 'sectarian' attitude-in Weber's language-towards penance and sinning after
baptism, though he admits the relentless logic of the analysis. He recognizes too
Tertullian's real problem with the Old Testament. Refusing Marcion's wish to junk it,
Tertullian is left with defending 'Deuteronomic' savagery (p. 101). But what alternative
was available to him? Lacking a theory of the development of theistic understanding not
only from the Old Testament to the New, but within the Old Testament itself, he could
presumably only allegorize (in Stoic mode?) or accept the atrocities of God. But
Tertullian-as Osborn realizes intellectually but not emotionally-enjoyed those atrocities
and waited in joyful hope for them to be justly visited on the persecutors, and not only the
persecutors. For all Osborn's admirable attempt to get inside Tertullian's language and
concepts, he fails-not least through humour and good nature-to empathize with his sheer
brutality and scriptural vengefulness.
Osborn occasionally makes rash remarks about Platonism (as on p. 38-where we lack a
working distinction between faith and belief-and p. 141, where more needs to be said
about the Platonist history of asunchutos henosis), and at times he follows older and
erroneous views-especially those of Dodds-about the 'magic' of the later Neoplatonists.
Nor can he always resist an inaccurate jibe at Augustine. But he has written the most
interesting book I have read on Tertullian: a very good book which with six months more
work-in a second edition-could be a great book.
Document 6 of 14
Tertullian, First Theologian of the West

T D Barnes. Theological Studies Washington:Sep 1998. Vol. 59, Iss. 3, p. 552-553 (2
pp.)
Subjects: Nonfiction, Theology, Literary criticism
Author(s): T D Barnes
Document types: Book Review-Mixed
Publication title: Theological Studies. Washington: Sep 1998. Vol. 59, Iss. 3; pg.
552, 2 pgs
ISSN/ISBN: 00405639
Text Word Count 296
Barnes reviews "Tertullian, First Theologian of the West" by Eric Osborn.

Copyright Theological Studies, Inc. Sep 1998
TERTULLIAN, FIRST THEOLOGIAN OF THE WEST. By Eric Osborn. New York:

Cambridge University, 1997. Pp. xxi + 285. $59.55.
Osborn has written what is quite simply the best introduction to the thought of Tertullian
in any language. Over a long and prolific scholarly career he has accumulated a large
fund of wisdom, learning, and good sense, all of which he brings to bear on this
notoriously difficult, deliberately provocative, and frequently irritating author. O. cuts
through the surface rhetoric and personal mannerisms to concentrate on Tertullian's "final
vocabulary, the words and meanings which continually recur in his arguments" (xiii),
which he elucidates with a hermeneutic approach that owes as much to Wittgenstein,
Gadamer, and Quentin Skinner as to traditional patristic scholarship. This analysis of the
underlying structures of his thought produces a Tertullian who is a rational, systematic,
and creative theologian and thinker "an intellectual Genghis Khan, who explores the
Bible and classical culture, yet manages to present antiquarian, scientific, medical, and
philosophical material in an original way" (255).
The only weaknesses I have detected concern minor historical matters of peripheral
relevance to the central theme of the book. The first Christian martyrs of Africa were not
tried "near Carthage" (1), but Karthagine in secretario, i.e., in the proconsul's official
residence on the Byrsa. And, although 0. has read, understood, and absorbed what I have
written about Tertullian's relation to his historical milieu, none of his repeated discussions
of the treatise De Pallio ever considers the implications of Georg Schollgen's proof that
its conclusion (6.2) is comprehensible only on the hypothesis that the author possessed
the legal status of an eques Romanus-a fact which gives greater precision to my
presentation of Tertullian as a Christian Apuleius and a man whose social connections
protected him from persecution.
Document 7 of 14
Almsgiving and the kingdom within: Tertullian on Luke 17:21

J Ramsey Michaels. The Catholic Biblical Quarterly Washington:Jul 1998. Vol. 60, Iss.
3, p. 475-483 (9 pp.)
Subjects: Exegesis & hermeneutics, New Testament, Philanthropy
Author(s): J Ramsey Michaels
Document types: Feature
Publication title: The Catholic Biblical Quarterly. Washington: Jul 1998. Vol. 60,
Iss. 3; pg. 475, 9 pgs
ISSN/ISBN: 00087912
Michaels discusses passages in Luke in which Jesus advises people to "Give alms" and
also examines Luke 17:21 as a passage where reckless generosity to the poor is
encouraged. He focuses on Tertullian's interpretation of the latter passage.
! File not found [ProQuest_38521794.pdf]

Document 8 of 14
Rooted hearts/playful minds: Catholic intellectual life at its best

Mary Jo Weaver. Cross Currents New Rochelle:Spring 1998. Vol. 48, Iss. 1, p. 61-74
(14 pp.)
Subjects: Catholicism, Intellectuals, History
People: Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus) (155?-220?), Thomas
a Kempis (1379?-1471)
Author(s): Mary Jo Weaver
Document types: Feature
Publication title: Cross Currents. New Rochelle: Spring 1998. Vol. 48, Iss. 1; pg.
61, 14 pgs
ISSN/ISBN: 00111953
Weaver examines the tradition of the Catholic intellectual life. From Tertullian and
Thomas a Kempis to its modern manifestations, the Catholic intellectual life allows one
to take on the problems of the world through a focus on faith.
Copyright Association for Religion and Intellectual Life Spring 1998
[Headnote]
Is the God of practice different from the God of prayer? A survey of medieval thinkers
makes the answer clear.
A ninth-century Irish poet left us a rather dispiriting ditty about Catholic intellectual life.
Here's what he said:
'Tis sad to see the sons of learning

In everlasting hellfire burning
While he that never read a line
Doth in eternal glory shine.
The notion that the intellectual life is a soul-endangering business has been around for a
long time, echoed and re-echoed in times of turmoil. My own position on this matter is
given away in the title: "rooted hearts and playful minds" means that we can welcome
and explore new (even earthshaking) ideas if we have our feet planted in the riverbed of
tradition. I hasten to add that my view has not been the one routinely expressed in
Christian history. Let me begin, therefore, by reflecting on two famous quotations that
exemplify different aspects of fear in relation to thinking. I will then take a bird's-eye
view of Catholic intellectual life in the middle ages which, I hope, makes clear why many
Catholics look wistfully back to the thirteenth century as a golden age. We can then ask
how certain aspects of medieval theology might help us to think about Catholic
intellectual life today. Let's begin with two theologians who were not happily disposed to
intellectual life, one from the early church and one from the late middle ages.
"What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" asked the third-century apologist Tertullian,
trying to pretend that his strenuous defense of Christianity was in no way indebted to his
classical education.
"I would rather feel compunction than define it," said the fifteenth-- century canon
Thomas a Kempis, eager to show that The Imitation of Christ, rooted in humility, should
not be undermined by scholarship.
Each of these quotations illustrates a major anxiety about Christianity and the intellectual
life: Tertullian feared that Christianity would be corrupted by contact with a non-
Christian system of thought; Thomas a Kempis worried that studying, in itself, would
distract one from the important work of becoming holy. Both writers lived in situations in
which the church was under siege and neither of them could have turned to the
institutional church for clarity or support. Each was concerned to protect the ordinary life
of most Christians. Their sympathy for the life of an intellectual -- someone who reads,
writes, and argues in order to understand ideas- was, therefore, limited. I think they are
both worth considering, however, because the substance of their positions is still with us.
In the contemporary church we still meet the idea that intellectual life should be
sectarian, that is to say, separate from the world around it and confined to its own
enclave. In addition, we occasionally find the view that the world of ideas is unnecessary
because it competes with and may well sabotage the world of grace.
Tertullian: Brandishing the Sword of Condemnation
Tertullian, a Roman citizen living in Carthage, was the most important Western
theologian before Augustine. A natural talker and a quick-witted lawyer who loved to
argue, Tertullian was a well-educated man who knew history, archeology, medicine,
literature, and Greek philosophy. I think of him as an arrogant and ambitious man who
knew where he was going until he stumbled onto Christianity.
Like many Roman citizens, Tertullian went to the local games, to the entertainments
devised by the emperors to keep the people amused. But, he was not amused. Tertullian
was deeply moved by the heroic deaths of Christian martyrs who were at the mercy of
lions, bears, wild boars, and gladiators. They did not scream and cry, but accepted death
with an eerie kind of joy, willing to suffer because their Lord had suffered to redeem
them. Here was a phenomenon that made absolutely no sense, something that all
Tertullian's education and strapping powers of reason could not explain. The courage of
the martyrs was, finally, so mysterious and compelling that Tertullian, an impetuous man,
joined this new religious movement. When he reflected as a Christian on the
persecutions, he saw their political power: far from obliterating this new religion, they
only gave witness to the wonder of Christianity and the constancy of its adherents. Later
he would write the mantra of martyrdom: "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the
church."
Tertullian, a natural zealot, was not given to laxity. As he saw it, Christianity required
nothing less than total commitment: one could not be both a philosopher (pagan) and a
believer (Christian). Christian life demanded the same dedication as Christian death.
Early into his new Christian life he wrote his Apologeticum, a passionate defense of
Christianity that contains his famous question, "what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?"
In his zeal, he wanted to believe that his conversion to Christianity was so total and
complete that he could relinquish his past and scorn his education. Of course, he could
not do that. His status as the founder of Western theology is totally indebted to his
background and training: his brilliance lay in his ability to make distinctions, to use the
logic and reason he learned from classical pagan philosophers. We could say that he was
an intellectual in spite of himself.
Tertullian's views on the usefulness of pagan philosophy may have seemed reasonable to
a community under siege, but finally, they were not realistic, and the early Christian
community did not adopt them. In fact, as the church grew and came to embrace some of
the language and methods of pagan thought, Tertullian's position became increasingly
isolated and sectarian. Not surprisingly, he wanted his new religion to be that way as
well: Christianity, he thought, should be prophetic and counter-cultural; it should have no
commerce with the world. But, Catholicism turned, instead, toward the world: it emerged
from the persecutions with confidence in itself, able to hold its own. Christianity
developed with positive attitudes toward the surrounding cultural realities. In time -
ironically, in part because of Tertullian's work - it learned how to adapt pagan philosophy
to its own ends, and how to welcome new ideas and use them.
Tertullian and his rigid, sectarian view of the church got left behind; but his question -
"what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" - is perennial. If we are going to talk about the
intellectual life, we have to ponder the relationship between ideas and belief. We have to
consider the consequences of opening our minds to outside (even hostile) queries and
ideas, and we have to weigh the outcome of refusing to open our minds to new thinking.
Christianity, at its best, is confident in meeting new ideas and new systems of thought;
but it is also capable of being -- as Tertullian was - fearful and condemnatory.
Thomas a Kempis: Hiding Out in Humility
Thomas a Kempis, a fifteenth-century German canon, lived most of his life in what
would soon become the territory of the Reformation. We remember him because he wrote
one of the great classics of Western devotional literature: The Imitation of Christ is, after
the Bible, one of the most widely read religious books ever written. In an age where
much spiritual writing was deadened by excessive intellectual speculation (about the
nature of the soul, the function of the will, the gradations of virtue and good works), The
Imitation of Christ was refreshingly free of intellectual preoccupation, and quite tuned
into religion as an affective experience.
Thomas a Kempis was more interested in feeling than in thinking, possibly because the
church during his lifetime (1380-1471) was largely unreliable as a spiritual guide. The
institutional church - at its zenith in the high middle ages, the most powerful international
institution history had ever known- had fallen on hard times. Three atrocious periods of
degradation in the history of the papacy followed one upon another throughout Thomas a
Kempis's lifetime: the Avignon papacy ended as he was born, the Great Western schism
lasted until he was thirty-five, and for the rest of his very long life, the papacy was in the
hands of a series of those corrupt, self-aggrandizing men known collectively as the
Renaissance popes. Perhaps it was just not a good time for thinking. The three great areas
of Catholic life - institutional, intellectual, and devotional - were virtually moribund.
Perhaps the best advice was precisely what Thomas a Kempis suggested for his readers:
imitate the virtues of Christ, do not think too much, turn your attention to your inner life,
and let the rest of the world go by.
Let me pause a moment over the "three great areas of Catholic life." John Henry
Newman, in the preface to the third edition of his Via Media, described the life of the
church as a dialectical interplay among the theological, devotional, and hierarchical
elements, all three of which are essential. Similarly, Friedrich von Hugel described the
three necessary dimensions of all vibrant religious traditions as mystical, intellectual, and
institutional, what we might call the devout faithful, the theologians, and the hierarchy.
The Catholic church, then, is comprised of those who pray, those who think, and those
who rule, functions that are by no means mutually exclusive, but which have certain
particular dynamics attached to them.
During the life of Thomas a Kempis, all three of those dimensions were in terrible shape.
The hierarchy - the system that claimed to know and carry out God's will on earth- was
thoroughly worldly and of little use to a simple, pious person trying to lead a good life
and get to heaven. The theologians - the intellectuals whose business was ideas- were
embroiled in divisive arguments among themselves about the future structure of the
church, the nature of theology, and the pathways to holiness. The faithful were left to
languish alone. Since priests were often uneducated and without guidance or support, the
ordinary Christians were dangerously close to superstition in their beliefs and practices
and all too willing to believe in witchcraft.
Thomas A Kempis's spiritual advice to ordinary Christians was, therefore, useful. His
underestimation of intellectual life and his disvaluation of culture, however, are not
hallmarks of good tradition. His understandable points of emphasis do not allow for any
genuine scholarly life within the Christian vocation. Although he, himself, loved to find a
quiet corner in which to read a book, he gives his readers the impression that reading and
thinking are useless and dangerous distractions from the true Christian life of virtue. His
notion that he "would rather feel compunction than define it," challenges us to consider
how the intellectual life fosters the Christian vocation to follow Jesus and lead
transformed lives. Implicitly he asks us to consider the extent to which the life of the
heart is connected to the work of the mind.
The Intellectual Life of the Church Let me put this link between spirituality and
intellectual life - between praying and thinking - in context by looking very briefly at
some important figures in the history of theology, and then turning some of their ideas to
our own time. I am restricting my view to intellectual history, and a bird's-eye view at
that. These short, impressionistic pictures of the work of Anselm, Abelard, Bonaventure,
and Aquinas are meant to help us raise some rhetorical questions about Catholic
intellectual life and to give us a general basis for discussion.
Anselm (1033-1109) was a Benedictine monk, a native of northern Italy, prior of the
abbey of Bec (in Normandy), and eventually archbishop of Canterbury. When he was
asked to describe theology, he came up with the phrase fides quaerens intellectum, faith
seeking understanding. In the theologian, he argued, the intellect moves to understand
what has been placed before it by way of revelation or religious experience. What does
that mean? How is a theologian supposed to understand faith? May he or she put
questions to it? Can one expect to find contradictions in it? If there is an apparent
conflict, how should it be settled? In Anselm's day, perhaps it was enough simply to
explain a point of belief - to write treatises on, say, the Incarnation, that enabled a newly
converted people, or an emerging literate upper class to understand more deeply the
substance of their faith. For our purposes, Anselm can be an exemplar of the first impulse
of medieval theology: education and explanation. We start with the presumption of belief
and seek to deepen our understanding of it.
A generation after Anselm we find Peter Abelard (1079-1142), the great intellectual light
of the Cathedral school of Paris, remembered today more for his affair with Heloise than
for his theology. Abelard introduced something new into the theological project and saw
it as a method for asking questions. Using Aristotelian logic and dialectics, he argued that
the business of theology was to raise questions about anything touching faith.
Theologians could query dogma, morals, spirituality, liturgical practice, and church
structure; they could inquire about the nature of God, the redemptive work of Jesus, and
the influence of the Holy Spirit in Christian life. For Abelard, faith is still seeking
understanding, but in a whole new way. "By raising a doubt," he said, "we arrive at an
inquiry, and by inquiring, we grasp truth."
But in raising questions in search of truth, Abelard uncovered something that other people
had ignored: contradictions. Since "faith" was handed down by way of the Bible and
tradition, through Scripture and commentaries over a thousand-year period, it was
possible to find in "faith" a host of contradictory opinions. The early Christian fathers and
other authorities wrote on all parts of the Bible and gave their opinions on various aspects
of Christian life, but as those writings came from different times and places, they were
often at odds with one another. Abelard made those differences visible, literally. He
printed biblical texts and posed a question about them. He then lined up on one side all
the fathers who agreed with the point, and on the other side, all who disagreed. His most
famous book, Sic et Non (Yes and No) challenged theologians to decide the outcome by
way of logic and argument. Abelard's way of doing theology, therefore, was different
from Anselm's, more concerned with posing questions than with crafting explanations.
It is easy to see why not everyone roused themselves to embrace Abelard's new method.
His contemporary, Bernard of Clairvaux (10901153), the founder of the Cistercian order
and a major religious reformer, was so scandalized by Abelard's work that he had it
condemned and burned. Bernard's eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs, his great
vision of the relationship between God and the soul, says that love is meant to return to
its origins. Our relationship to God is an intimate one, sensuous and satisfying. Secure in
this relationship, Bernard loved the church as a bridegroom should love his bride, with a
fierce, protective passion. Abelard's path was not the mystical one and Bernard had little
use for it. Bernard and Abelard embody the classic conflict between the contemplative
monk and the university professor: on the one hand the silence of the cloister or the desert
and on the other hand the loquacity of the lecture hall or the city. If monks, perhaps, talk
too little, intellectuals may talk too much. Bernard was deeply scandalized by activist
clerics more preoccupied with intellectual virtues than with moral ones. This new
direction in theology was so contradictory to what he stressed in his Cistercian reforms of
monasticism that he felt obliged to get Abelard condemned by a synod of French bishops.
It is also possible to see their conflict as one between an ecclesiastical authority figure
and one who worked, not outside, not against the church, but without keeping an eye at
all times on what the hierarchy was thinking.
Moving to a new generation, we find Bonaventure (1221-74), a young Franciscan friar,

whose approach to theology was significantly different from both Anselm's and Abelard's,
though indebted to both. Bonaventure was a brilliant scholar who followed Abelard as the
major theologian at the university of Paris and was more than willing to use Abelard's
scholastic methods of debating to delve into contemporary theological questions. As a
disciple of St. Francis of Assisi, however, and the minister general of his order, he felt
that speculative theology had no value for salvation unless accompanied by humility, a
virtuous life, and growth in prayer and contemplation. He had neither Abelard's chutzpah
nor his arrogance. For all his brilliance and intellectual prowess, Bonaventure believed
that any fool's love for and knowledge of God might well surpass that of any humanly
wise man. He recognized the limitations of the theological project, therefore, and more
importantly, in an intractable tangle, he revered and privileged mysticism.
With these three early medieval theologians, we have three different approaches to the
highest form of Catholic intellectual life in the Middle Ages. Although there is some
overlap among them, let us imagine three ways of doing theology: one can craft cogent
explanations, or argue one's way through contradictions, or find one's way to God
through mystical prayer. In addition, in the works and lives of these thinkers, we find two
different approaches to the newly discovered works of ancient Greek philosophers:
Abelard was willing to rush headlong into Aristotle's work while Bonaventure was more
cautious. What is needed is a fearless intellectual who can handle Greek philosophy and
also understand the mystical impulse from deep within himself. Thomas Aquinas (1225-
74), a Dominican friar, was as mystical as Bonaventure and as enthusiastic about
Aristotle as Abelard. Using newly discovered texts of Aristotle, willing to read and
understand the thought of Islamic intellectuals like Averroes (1126-98) and Avicenna
(980-1037), or Jewish theologians like Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), refusing to
privilege Aristotle over Plato, or vice versa, able to raise questions and to work out
complex explanations, willing to spend as much energy writing a hymn as he did meeting
metaphysical objections to his positions, Thomas worked out a masterful synthesis of all
theology. His life, dedicated to the production of the Summa contra Gentiles and the
Summa Theologiae was a testament to the power and necessity of intellectual work in the
church. Yet, before his death, with his work still unfinished, he said, "All I have written
seems to me like so much straw compared with what I have seen."
Like Tertullian, Bernard, and Bonaventure, Thomas knew by experience that theology as
a science was not salvific of itself and that the proud theologian was a living
contradiction in terms. Like Thomas a Kempis, Aquinas knew that in practical terms it
was certainly better to feel compunction than to define it in accurate theological
terminology, but he refused to let himself be trapped into an either/or situation. He was a
both/and Catholic thinker who knew how to stress intellectual values when doing
theology and when defending the faith against "Gentiles" of several varieties; but he
knew from his monastic experience that speculative knowledge of divinity was relatively
worthless when compared to the theology of mystical experience brought about by
faithful attendance in choir, private insistent prayer, and, above all, by the gift of the Holy
Spirit to the devout soul. In his own times, Thomas was known for his "novelties" in
theological speculation. He was not afraid of the present or the future, not fearful about
reading Christian or pagan thinkers, but he fully grasped the linkage between spirituality
and the intellectual life and wanted to use all of his God-given powers in explicitly
defending and living the faith "once and for all delivered to the saints."
Intellectuals at Prayer
How does Thomas Aquinas help us to think about contemporary Catholic intellectual
life? Not, as some conservatives assert, by slavishly imitating the methodology or
structure of his Summa Theologiae, but by extracting the principles of his scholastic
method in order to produce sermons, lectures, and books worthy of the twenty-first
century. I find in Thomas a good model for modern times for three reasons. First, he
grounded himself thoroughly in all the great sources and thinkers of the past (the Bible,
the fathers of the church, Plato, Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides). Second,
he immersed himself in the controversies of his own age at a variety of levels in order to
engage the best minds of the time. Third, he remained utterly faithful to the daily life of a
canon regular and to indefatigable meditation on Holy Scripture. Put another way, he
knew how to combine his faith and his work, he was able to hold the disparate aspects of
unresolved problems in creative tension, and he was alive to the agitated controversies of
his own day.
Thomas knew how to combine faith and work or, as we might say, theory and practice.
The great Catholic theologians of the twentieth centuryKarl Rahner, Hans urs von
Balthasar, Jacques Maritain, Romano Guardini, John Courtney Murray, David Tracy,
Bernard Lonergan, to name a few - have or had a well-developed inner life as well as a
blazingly intelligent approach to the theological problems of the post-Kantian, post-
Newtonian world. It is fascinating to find this linkage between theory and practice in
modern theologians precisely because modern universities tend to separate theory from
practice and then jettison practice. "Real" mathematicians don't do applied math, English
professors prefer literary theories to literary texts. Religious studies departments tend to
distinguish themselves from departments of theology because they have uncoupled the
theory and practice of religion. As I sometimes tell my students, "we don't believe
anything, we're just interested in people who do."
Yet, the ability to combine belief and intellectual work is one of the hallmarks of a
Christian intellectual. It means that, with a grounded faith, we can look at anything
without fear. Karl Rahner addressed the enormous problem of belief and unbelief in the
modern world, and wrote compelling books on silence, the inner life, and prayer. Unlike
medieval theologians who were lionized by their intellectual peers, Rahner did his work
in a relatively hostile environment where theology was not a respected dialogue partner.
In the modern university, theology is sometimes perceived as an arcane way of shoring
up a dying subculture, a discipline with a territory of credibility limited to the realm of
the emotions. Yet, Rahner aspired to make theology respectable in a modern, secular
world even as he made it insightful and functional for believers.
Rahner's project is similar to the one that Thomas attempted within a culture of belief,
with this major difference. Aquinas could begin from the assumption that everyone
believed in God. Rahner knew from the outset that he could not begin with God - the
traditional starting point of theology - but had to find a first move that everyone could
understand. So, he began from human experience and transformed the theological
enterprise in the twentieth century. I cannot explain Rahner's work as such, but I think it
is important to see him as one who knew how to combine theory and practice. He was
grounded in his own beliefs and, like Aquinas, was fearless in looking at new or
threatening ideas. For Thomas those ideas came from ancient sources and Islamic
philosophers. For Rahner, they came from the post-Enlightenment philosophy and post-
war bewilderment and hostility to the very notion of God's existence. He did not retreat
into piety, and he did not pretend that he could find the clues to solve these problems in
the methods and assumptions of earlier systems.
Thomas knew how to hold the disparate aspects of unresolved problems in creative
tension. I think Aquinas knew that he did not have to settle the difficulties of his age for
all times, and understood that it was possible to be up against something so intractable
that it might not come into perceivable contact with resolution until he was dead and
gone. In this light we can focus on important Catholic thinkers who were under clouds of
suspicion in their own lifetimes. John Courtney Murray, Teilhard de Chardin, and John
Henry Newman were all insightful intellectuals whose work was misunderstood and
whose voices were silenced by religious authorities. Perhaps because they were both
daring and obedient to ecclesiastical authority, they are sometimes cited approvingly by
thinkers on opposite sides of contemporary issues.
John Courtney Murray, perhaps the greatest American Catholic intellectual, was a
doctrinally conservative, politically liberal Jesuit who set out to tackle the enormously
difficult problem of religious freedom in the twentieth century. Those born after 1960
may not remember a Catholic church that was hostile to American values of church/state
separation and that would have preferred American Catholicism to be activated within a
theocratic system rather like that of medieval Europe. The acceptance of religious
freedom as found in the American system of government - The Declaration of Religious
Freedom - that was shepherded through the second Vatican council by John Courtney
Murray, was a hard-won and remarkable victory. The notion that American soil was a
fruitful place for the growth and embellishment of Catholicism was not a welcome view
in the 1950s, and for some years prior to the council, Murray's work was considered so
dangerous that he was forbidden to publish any more on the subject.
About the work of Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and John Henry Newman I will only
say that, like Murray, each of them was too optimistic about the church's ability to
welcome conflicting new ideas. Unlike Murray, neither of them lived to see his ideas gain
general acceptance within the church. Teilhard's synthesis of science and theology
advanced a new cosmology that horrified the institutional church in the 1940s and '50s.
His ideas about the designs of God, the spiritual nature of the human race, and the
interactive nature of the universe seemed too radical in his time and, like theologians
before him, he was silenced. Today, as theologians tackle the religious significance of
quantum mechanics and chaos theory, Teilhard's works are often seen as prophetic.
Newman's ideas for a Catholic university, his thoughtful reflection on the possibility of
belief in an agnostic age, and his work on the development of doctrine were frightening
to ecclesiastical leaders in the nineteenth century. Pope Pius IX, who called himself "the
prisoner of the Vatican" and acted rather like Tertullian brandishing the sword of
condemnation against the outside world, wanted no part of them. Newman was ignored.
He was able to hold on to his integrity because he was committed to the dialectical
process between theological and political aspects of the church. Taking the long view, he
could afford to be patient under duress. His great statement of principle, found in The
Idea of a University, is this:
a believer is sure, and nothing shall make him [or her] doubt [so that] if anything seems
to be proved by an astronomer or geologist, or chronologist, or antiquarian, or
ethnologist, in contradiction to the dogmas of faith, that point will eventually turn out,
first, not to be proved, or secondly, not contradictory, or thirdly, not contradictory to
anything really revealed, but to something that has been confused with revelation.
Newman, in other words, thought that truth could not contradict truth. If it often seemed
to do so, he counseled patience in the moment.
Let me say more about the silencing of theologians and the patience demonstrated by
Murray, Teilhard, and Newman. Intellectual life in the American Catholic church,
including theological speculation, is no longer easily silenced. Partly because theology is
increasingly the province of lay thinkers rather than priests, it is not an easily controlled
discipline. Also, American Catholics no longer believe in the old hierarchical principle
that the institutional church is always right. Finally, American Catholics in general do not
cozy up to the idea of silencing people. I must part company with the very models I just
held up for admiration when I say that I do not think we should tolerate the silencing of
theologians. Catholic thinkers must give serious attention to institutional authority when
that authority collides with their intellectual conclusions. But, if the church has a right to
silence a theologian, that right cannot be exercised willy-nilly every time someone raises
a query. In the last twenty years, the Vatican has often acted in a high-handed manner that
is not only unjust to the theologians, but also undermines legitimate authority and
compromises the church's integrity with its members. The best thing to say about the
attempts to silence priests like Hans Kung, Charles Curran, Edward Schillibeeckx,
Leonardo Boff, Richard McBrien, and most recently Tissa Balasuriya, is that it may have
precipitated a new dialogue on due process and the legitimate aims of intellectual life and
religious authority. One of the lessons we can learn from the women's movement within
the church and from the nervous over-reaction of the Vatican to issues like women's
ordination, is, in Leonard Swidler s phrase, that we need to replace the old adage -"Roma
locuta, causa nita" -with a new one, "Roma locuta, causa stimulata."
Let me return for a moment to the three dimensions of a vibrant religious tradition that I
mentioned earlier. As Catholics, we all have obligations to piety and to a life of prayer, or
as Vatican II would have it, we all have vocations to holiness. The general life of the
faithful in the church has made its way through the centuries within a dialectic between
those whose job it is to guard the traditions, and those whose job it is to push the
envelope. Meriol Trevor, characterizing the opposing parties of the modernist crisis,
called them the prophets and guardians; Rosemary Haughton in The Catholic Thing
called them Holy Mother Church and her wild sister, Sophia. In the last several centuries
the popes and Vatican officials have represented a classical notion of order, protecting the
status quo, while the great crowd of mystics, monks, theologians, feminists, intellectuals,
and activists have represented new directions and possibilities. This is the dialectic. This
is the way things happen in the church and have always happened, and if I understand
history correctly, the generative spirit does not come from above, but from below, from
that crowd of witnesses I just mentioned.
What keeps this whole frustrating process Catholic is the willingness to stay in
conversation even when the dialectic gets fierce. Put another way, the stubborn refusal of
the papacy to accept or entertain some new ideas is functional. Its job is to call for
obedience and conformity, whereas the agitating work of intellectuals who keep bursting
out with new questions and ideas is also functional: their job is to be creative and pushy.
Neither of these jobs is better or nobler or more necessarily concerned with the life of the
faithful than the other, and each is quite capable of squelching genuine religious spirit.
Aquinas was a modern thinker in his own world, willing to take on the problems that
were presented to him by his culture and to address them. He was not afraid of big or
dangerous questions. Pressing that confidence into contemporary issues, I believe that
today Thomas would be working on the kinds of questions posed to theology by way of
science (the new cosmology), and that he might well be interested in the issues raised by
theologies of suffering and liberation (feminist and third world theologies). In the realm
of science, he would be reading some of the new physics and be willing to ask about the
kind of cosmic history we are implicated in. He would not be frightened by the post-
Einsteinian universe in which nature is intrinsically active, fluctuating, open-ended,
surprising, and interactive. I think he would be fascinated - as we should be - about the
ways in which we have to change our ideas about God once we leave the tidy bounded
world of Newtonian physics, i.e., we have to be prepared for a God who is a lot chancier
and more ambiguous than God was imagined to be in a world of fixed physical laws. He
would see to it that theology and Catholic intellectual life in general would acknowledge
that we are involved in a galactic story of great complexity.
I believe that Thomas would also be drawn to theologies from the margins, especially
feminist and third world perspectives. I think he would find the work of Elizabeth
Johnson congenial, especially since he, himself said that "all affirmations we can make
about God are not such that our minds may rest in them, nor of such sort that we may
suppose God does not transcend them." He would welcome, I hope, the opportunity to
purify God-talk that Johnson gives us, and would applaud the intention to guard the
complexity of religious symbols so as to create a greater sense of the mystery of God.
A Last Word
Having made these suggestions, let me conclude by reducing my main point to a

question: is the God of practice different from the God of prayer? I don't think so.
Intellectuals, who are grounded in their faith, can take on problems of piety, history,
politics, and philosophy without fear. When I hear the word faith, I must admit that I
think of Brian O'Lynn in Oliver St. John Gogarty's short poem, "Faith":
Brian O'Lynn as the legends aver
Was crossing a bridge with his wife and his cur.
The bridge it collapsed and the trio fell in:
"There's land at the bottom," said Brian O'Lynn.

Rooted in faith, we can take on the problems of the world. The institutional church,
which seems constantly baffled by the world, will not like what we do, but that does not
mean we should not do it. We should. Catholic intellectual life has a history of daring
visions of the future even as it has reverenced its past. Put another way, when the heart is
rooted in God, the mind is free to play. Free to have fun. Let me end, as I began, with a
bit of doggerel, this time from Hilaire Belloc. Actually, with apologies to Mr. Belloc,
since I want to wrench his quatrain from its papist intentions and make the "Catholic" a
lower-case word.
Wherever a Catholic sun doth shine
There's lots of laughter and good red wine
At least I've always found it so
Benedicamos Domino!
MARY JO WEAVER is a professor of religious studies at Indiana University, where she
has been since 1975. She has published two books on the modernist controversy at the
turn of the century, two more on the women's movement in the American Catholic
Church, and most recently, two books on conservative and progressive American
Catholics at the end of the twentieth century (Being Right: Conservative American
Catholics was published in 1995, and What's Left: Progressive American Catholics
should be out by late 1998). This essay was presented as the keynote address for the 1996
summer institute of Collegium, a grouping of faculty members from Catholic colleges
and universities that meets annually at Fairfield University to talk about ways to enrich
intellectual and spiritual life on the campus.
Document 9 of 14
Ancient & modern

Peter Jones. The Spectator London:Mar 14, 1998. Vol. 280, Iss. 8849, p. 15 (1 pp.)
Subjects: Rape, Roman civilization, Christianity, Sin
People: Lucretia (Lucrece), Augustine (354-430), Jerome, Saint (347-419?),
Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus) (155?-220?)
Author(s): Peter Jones
Document types: Commentary
Publication title: The Spectator. London: Mar 14, 1998. Vol. 280, Iss. 8849; pg. 15,
1 pgs
ISSN/ISBN: 00386952
Text Word Count 412
Lucretia, a noble Roman woman raped by the son of the Etruscan king of Rome in 509
BC, killed herself over the violation, though she was held blameless by all. St Augustine,
St Jerome and Tertullian differed in their views of the sinfulness of suicide following
rape.
Copyright Spectator Mar 14, 1998
ULTRA-orthodox rabbis have argued that a woman raped by three men should not return
to her husband. This hopelessly liberal approach will do the rabbis' image no good at all.
When the noble Roman woman Lucretia was raped by Sextus Tarquinius, son of
Tarquinius Superbus, the Etruscan king of Rome, in 509 BC, she summoned her family to
tell them what had happened. In her bed was the impress of another man, she said; but
`my body only has been violated. My heart is innocent. Death will be my witness. But
give me your solemn promise that the rapist will be punished.' The men do, and then, as
the Roman historian Livy tells us, `One after another they tried to comfort her. They told
her she was helpless and therefore innocent; that he alone was guilty. It was the mind,
they said, that sinned, not the body; without intention, there could never be guilt.' But
Lucretia is adamant, announcing, 'I am innocent of fault, but I will take my punishment.
Never shall Lucretia provide a precedent for unchaste women to escape what they
deserve.' With that, she stabs herself and falls dead. The men swear to drive out the
Tarquins, and that is the end of Etruscan lordship over Rome and the start of the Roman
republic.
But, as St Augustine (AD 354430) saw, if Lucretia was innocent, why did she commit
suicide? If complicitous, why was she praised? He took the view that purity was a matter
of the will, not the body, and to over-value something as ephemeral as chastity was to
commit the sin of pride. To commit suicide because of it was the ultimate sin, because
one was taking with one's own hand what was God's alone to take. On the other side of
the tradition, Tertullian (AD 160-240) and St Jerome (AD 347-420) praised Christian
women for committing suicide rather than allowing themselves to be raped, and the
emperor Maxentius (AD 283-312) is said to have found it infuriatingly difficult to rape
Christian women for this reason.
Since the ultra-orthodox rabbis clearly believe in a woman's guilt in these circumstances,
it seems feeble of them merely to debar her from her family. They have standards to
uphold! Think of all those men waiting to be led astray! No, they should insist on the
Lucretia option and solve the problem once and for all.
Peter Jones's five-part Learn Ancient Greek starts in the Daily Telegraph on 7 March.
Document 10 of 14
Tertullian and the Church

Dennis E Groh. The Catholic Historical Review Washington:Jan 1997. Vol. 83, Iss. 1,
p. 170 (1 pp.)
Subjects: Nonfiction, Catholicism, Theology
Companies: Roman Catholic Church
Author(s): Dennis E Groh
Document types: Book Review-Unfavorable
Publication title: The Catholic Historical Review. Washington: Jan 1997. Vol. 83,
Iss. 1; pg. 170, 1 pgs
ISSN/ISBN: 00088080
Text Word Count 262
"Tertullian and the Church," by David Rankin, is reviewed.

Copyright Catholic University of America Press Jan 1997
RANKS, DAVID. Tertullian and the Church. (New York: Cambridge University Press.
1995. Pp. xviii, 229. $54.95.) This is quite an old-fashioned book both in the way the
question is conceived and in the way the study is carried out. In its conception, Rankin
wishes to rehabilitate Tertullian's reputation as a contributor to the doctrine of the Church,
despite his Montanist schism which devalued him on this subject among ancient thinkers
and despite the lack of attention modern interpreters have given to his unappreciated
eccesiology (cf. p. 5 and frontispiece). The fact that neither Tertullian nor his
contemporaries have any systematic theology of the Church (pp. 59-60) does not prevent
us from finding two chapters on Tertullian's break from "the church" (Chapters 2 and 3),
or prevent the author from using the heading"Tertullian's Doctrine of the Church" to
inaugurate Part II of the book.
In fact, the self-conscious adaptation of aa lexical approach to these questions" and its
defense by the author do leave the reader wondering why topically related materials are
pulled from various places to "mine" Tertullian's imagery. Furthermore, I would have
thought that a lexical approach might have led the author to the term disciplina, the key
category of Tertullian for nondoctrinal and ecclesiastical matters. However, the term does
not even appear in the index. Exploration of the social and (especially) secular meanings
of Tertullian's ecclesiastical terminology is virtually absent, except for the occasional
vague notion that a term like castra (cf. p. 69 to p. 111) is something of a crossover term.
DINs E. GROH (Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington)
Document 11 of 14

Ferguson, Everett. Church History Chicago:Dec 1996. Vol. 65, Iss. 4, p. 659-660 (2
pp.)
Subjects: Nonfiction, History, Christianity, Theology
Companies: Roman Catholic Church
Author(s): Ferguson, Everett
Publication title: Church History. Chicago: Dec 1996. Vol. 65, Iss. 4; pg. 659, 2 pgs
ISSN/ISBN: 00096407
Text Word Count 560
"Tertullian and the Church," by David Rankin, is reviewed.

Copyright American Society of Church History Dec 1996
Tertullian and the Church. By DAVID RANKIN. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge

University Press, 1995. xvii + 220 pp. $54.95.
David Rankin adds his voice to the argument that Tertullian did not "leave the Catholic
church" when he identified with the New Prophecy (Montanism). Tertullian kept
throughout his Christian life a "high" view of the church and its ministry, and this, not
contempt, led him to be critical of the claims made by some within the Catholic
hierarchy. In his New Prophecy period he did not reject the three-tiered organization of
the church, although in shifting his concern from doctrine to discipline he did shift his
emphasis from authentication by historical succession to authentication by the life of the
Spirit.
Part 1 sets the historical context of the church in North Africa and defines Tertullian's
relationship to the Catholic Church and to the New Prophecy. Rankin's position, in
summary, is that Tertullian carried on his campaign against what he saw as the decreasing
rigor in the church from within the Catholic community as a member of an "ecclesiola-in-
ecclesia." Tertullian was not so much influenced by the New Prophecy as he found there
a congenial "home" for his rigorist views. He received a confirmation on doctrinal and
disciplinary matters from the New Prophecy, but it did not replace for him Scripture,
tradition, and the organized church.
Part 2 studies Tertullian's doctrine of the church. His ecclesiological images were ark,
ship, camp, body of Christ, Trinity, Spirit, mother, bride, virgin, school, and sect. Of the
traditional marks of the church, an exclusivistperfectionist (holiness) view dominated
Tertullian's thought. The concept of a Spirit-filled church and the authority of apostolic
tradition were not mutually exclusive for him.
Part 3 considers Tertullian's doctrine of ministry and office. The terms used for clergy and
laity show a clear distinction between them throughout his career. His statements about
priestly responsibilities in both his "Catholic" and his "Montanist" periods have in
common more a concern for order than any sacralist view of the ministry. Tertullian
describes the various offices in the church with words expressing leadership and
authority, pastoring and nurturing, and a cultic or priestly role. The principal change that
occurred was the Catholic clergy beginning to assume new powers and not Tertullian
repudiating a previous position.
The organization of the book involves some unnecessary repetitiveness. Some details are
to be questioned: for example, the translation of De Baptismo 17.1 omits the important
qualifying phrase, si qui est (p. 202). Indeed, Rankin makes more of the priestly language
for the clergy than I think the texts intend. The overall case for a Tertullian who argues
from within the Catholic Church of his time stands, but there still remain in his thought
those elements (many not considered by Rankin) that have been characteristic features of
sectarian movements throughout Christian history: the legalistic concern with externals of
dress and hair styles; the refusal of government office and military service; the call for
responsible voluntary commitment, seen especially in his rejection of infant baptism;
taking church discipline seriously; the principle that what is not commanded is forbidden;
and the emphasis on the Holy Spirit and eschatology. Tertullian was a champion of a
view of the church that remained a minority view in Christian history, but it was the ideal
he wanted for the whole church.
EVERETT FERGUSON
Abilene Christian University Abilene, Texas
Document 12 of 14

Efroymson, David P. Theological Studies Washington:Sep 1996. Vol. 57, Iss. 3, p. 566
(2 pp.)
Subjects: Theology, Nonfiction, Catholicism
Author(s): Efroymson, David P
Publication title: Theological Studies. Washington: Sep 1996. Vol. 57, Iss. 3; pg.
566, 2 pgs
ISSN/ISBN: 00405639
Text Word Count 362
Efroymson reviews "Tertullian and the Church" by David Rankin.

Copyright Theological Studies, Inc. Sep 1996
TERTULLIAN AND THE CHURCH. By David Rankin. New York: Cambridge

University, 1995. Pp xvii + 229. $54.95.
Rankin, of Trinity Theological College in Brisbane, carries forward into ecclesiology

some recent appreciative scholarship on Tertullian. His thesis is clear, important, and
closely argued: Tertullian maintained throughout his career consistent doctrines of both
Church and ministry. His perfectionist ecclesiology is as characteristic during his
"Catholic" period as it is after his transition to the "New Prophecy". The apostolic
foundation of the Catholic ministry is never repudiated. The claim of a universal
priesthood appears only in order to impose on the laity the disciplinary obligations of the
clergy (e.g. no remarriage after a spouse's death).
R. does not deny that there were shifts in emphasis but accounts for them sensibly.
Tertullian himself, e.g., "was not so much influenced by the New Prophecy, as found
there a congenial 'home' for his rigorous views" (50). On the nature of the Church, a new
situation (the influx of new people, pressures for moral accommodation, and a more
"liberal" penitential process) created new questions and forced greater attention to
discipline than to doctrine. On ministry, "the increasingly presumptuous claims of some
Catholic bishops" seem to have "prompted Tertullian to question the
theologicalecclesiastical framework in which he had previously operated" (169). This last
claim is crucial, and, to this reviewer, exactly right. Some scholars, however, are likely to
want more evidence than R. (and Tertullian) can provide.
R. obviously knows Tertullian well and is fully conversant with relevant English, French,
and German scholarship. The agenda is set by his effort to overcome the earlier,
conventional, textbookish dichotomy between Tertullian's alleged "Catholic" and
"Montanist" periods. While he is fully successful here, the agenda exacts a twofold price.
Those uninitiated into the issues will find themselves left behind by the argument.
Perhaps more important: Tertullian's conception of the Church as a gentile and universal
people "superior" to Israel and "replacing" it, which is a regrettable but important part of
both his and the subsequent Church's ecclesiology and anti-Judaism, goes unnoticed.
Nevertheless, R. has notably contributed to our understanding of Tertullian and the
history of ecclesiology.
David P. Efroymson La Salle University, Philadelphia
Document 13 of 14
Prophecy in Carthage: Perpetua, Tertullian, and Cyprian

Weinrich, William C. The Catholic Historical Review Washington:Jul 1996. Vol. 82,
Iss. 3, p. 494 (4 pp.)
Subjects: Theology, Prophecies, Nonfiction, History
People: Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus) (155?-220?),
Perpetua, Cyprian, Saint
Author(s): Weinrich, William C
Publication title: The Catholic Historical Review. Washington: Jul 1996. Vol. 82,
Iss. 3; pg. 494, 4 pgs
ISSN/ISBN: 00088080
Prophecy in Carthage: Perpetua, Tertullian, and Cyprian by Cecil M. Robeck Jr.

Copyright Catholic University of America Press Jul 1996
Prophecy in Carthage:Perpetua, Tertullian, and Cyprian. By Cecil M. Robeck, Tr.

(Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press. 1992. PD. xii, 329. $29.95.)
The phenomenon of prophecy in the New Testament and early Christian literature has not
always received its due. That imbalance is beginning to receive correction through such
good research as that by David Aune, David Hill, and Christopher Rowland. We may now
also add the name of Cecil Robeck, who in this book undertakes the task of providing a
historical and theological account of prophetic gifts in North African Carthage during the
first half of the third century. Robeck investigates the Passion of Perpetua and the
writings of Tertullian and Cyprian to determine what factors gave rise to the visions and
oracles reported by these authors, what backgrounds account for their symbolism, and
what factors influenced their interpretations and applications. Robeck, wisely (I think),
eschews any attempt to explain psychologically the prophetic gifts mentioned in these
signal figures of early North African Christianity. In his introduction he distinguishes
between "prophetic function" (interpretation, application, and effect on other Christians)
from the "prophetic person," and he makes clear that this book concerns itself only with
"prophetic function" (p. 4). In the conclusion, however, Robeck contends that certain
psychological factors were at work in the visions and oracles and that further work "in
psycho-history and/or psychoanalysis would be helpful." Having read a little of that
already, I am not so sure.
Overall Robeck presents an insightful and balanced analysis of the prophetic material
found in the writings of Perpetua,Tertullian, and Cyprian. He evinces a thorough
familiarity with the primary sources and the secondary scholarship and is judicious in his
own argument and conclusions. While he certainly at times engages other scholars in
debate, a strength of the book is Robeck's concentration on the texts themselves. Since
the author declares himself to be a "lifelong Pentecostal," the overall balance and good
judgment of the book is to be commended. This is a book of good scholarship; special
pleading is on the whole absent.
Robeck's discussion of the visions of Perpetua and Saturus is perhaps the least creative of
his sections. He breaks no really new ground for our understanding of these visions,
although his conclusions, I would judge, are largely correct. I remain, with Robeck, of the
opinion that the Passion of Perpetua is not Montanist and is an example of mainstream
North African Christianity. The chapter on Perpetua's visions of Dinocrates (Pass. Perp.
7) includes a good discussion on the Greco-Roman background of the imagery. Yet, I
think Robeck overemphasizes Perpetua's "anxiety" (pp. 54f.). The discussion of
Perpetua's climbing the ladder (Pass. Perp. 4), although largely fine, has some doubtful
elements. The "two ways" notion in Judaism hardly is the background for the image of
the ladder, and therefore the ladder is not a "symbol of the Christian life itself" (p. 27). It
seems evident to me that the ladder simply symbolizes the martyrdom which Perpetua is
about to undergo. The figure of the Shepherd addresses Perpetua as "child" upon her
arriving at the top of the ladder. Robeck's discussion of this address is meager, although
he does note that the address is in Greek and therefore is a traditional form of address.
Suggestive is Robeck's claim that Christian catechesis based on certain extra-biblical and
biblical books provided the raw material for Perpetua's understanding of her visions.
Tipping his hat to contemporary women's studies, Robeck is disappointingly taken with
the idea of gender transformation in Perpetua's vision of the Egyptian in which she
becomes a man." This transformation is said to be an example of women's empowerment
in the early Church, an idea that almost certainly never occurred to Perpetua herself. That
Robeck fishes in Gnostic waters for adequate background here is indicative that in this
discussion he is astray. That Perpetua, Christian martyr, is a Christ figure seems to me
adequate for explaining this aspect of the vision.
Robeck's discussion of Tertullian is very helpful. One might wish that the section on
Tertullian's understanding of ecstasy were longer. On this Robeck uses only two of
Tertullian's treatises, De anima and Contra Marcionem. However, did Stoic psychology
contribute to Tertullian's understanding? It might be enlightening to find out. Robeck is
concerned to demonstrate that Tertullian's use of prophetic gifts, visions, and oracles, was
for "secondary substantiation," as a secondary witness to that taught in the Scriptures.
Tertullian had a higher regard for"canonical revelation" than for "spiritual revelation."
Generally I concur with that view. However, the phenomenon of ecstasy was not always
affirmed in the early Church. Robeck knows of the anti-Montanist polemics by the
"Anonymous" and others who attacked Montanism because ecstasy was taken to be a
sign of false prophecy. Some discussion of this anti-Montanist argument would have been
appropriate. Also, Robeck's argument that the Montanist oracles in Tertullian consistently
provide "secondary substantiation" to Scripture and the rule of faith is not always
persuasive. Oracle 3, which speaks of the forgiveness of sin, may be based upon Matt.
16:18f, but if so, the biblical text is certainly being interpreted in view of Montanist
severity rather than Montanist severity being derived from the biblical text (pp. 117ff.).
And Oracle 4 concerning the pure seeing visions and hearing secret voices certainly goes
well beyond any Scripture.
Robeck's strongest section is his treatment of Cyprian, if for no other reason than
discussions of Cyprian have often ignored the prophetic in his writings. Robeck divides
the visions of Cyprian between those which confirm ecclesiastical appointments, those
which exhort the confessors, those which exhort to church unity, and those which give
personal guidance to Cyprian. Whether Cyprian represents "a highly pneumatic form of
Christianity" or not, certainly his epistles provide evidence of the ongoing reality of
visions in third-century Carthage. However, although Robeck is fair and clearly attempts
to be judicious in his interpretation, it is in this chapter on Cyprian that Robeck is most
open to the charge of allowing his own Pentecostal beliefs to guide his analysis. Cyprian,
it is claimed, had a concept of prophecy according to which the confessor is semipassive,
the Spirit is the real speaker, the message is given ad hoc, and the message is
spontaneously given from God (p. 173; also 169,170,174, 175). Indeed, Cyprian's
concept of prophecy is like that of Montanus (p. 287 n. 29). Now this is an analysis which
deserves further review. To say that it is the Holy Spirit speaking is not necessarily to say
that the prophet/confessor is not much more than a mouthpiece (p. 173). And spontaneity
may arise out of the demands of the moment as much as from the sudden intrusion of
divine power from above. Robeck-it seems to me-is a little inclined to see everything as
prophecy, for example in his claim that dignatio is virtually a technical term in Cyprian
for a vision. I would think that dignatio is a more encompassing word, which may mean a
vision but may also mean martyrdom or any other happening which reveals the Lord's
glory.
A major theological question percolates through this book, but is never addressed,
namely, the question of the relationship between the prophetic and the apostolic character
of the Church. Montanism raised this issue sharply, as does any ongoing claim to
prophecy. Robeck notes that oracle and vision had to be consistent with the Scriptures.
That moves in the direction of saying that the Church is primarily apostolic and so finds
its foundation in canonical orderings and its "proper" representative in the bishop. It is
the prophet who must be tested. I believe that is exactly the "decision" the Church came
to. That was, however, not the question Robeck put to himself. We are thankful to him for
again putting to us the evidence and the complexity of it.
WILLIAM C. WEINRICH
Concordia Theological Seminary Fort Wayne, Indiana
Document 14 of 14
The Status of Women and Gnosticism in Irenaeus and Tertullian

Timbie, Janet A. The Catholic Biblical Quarterly Washington:July 1996. Vol. 58, Iss. 3,
p. 551-552 (2 pp.)
Subjects: Nonfiction, Women, Exegesis & hermeneutics, Christianity
People: Irenaeus, Saint (120?-200?), Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens
Tertullianus) (155?-220?)
Author(s): Timbie, Janet A
Publication title: The Catholic Biblical Quarterly. Washington: July 1996. Vol. 58,
Iss. 3; pg. 551, 2 pgs
ISSN/ISBN: 00087912
Text Word Count 696
"The Status of Women and Gnosticism in Irenaeus and Tertullian," by Daniel L.

Hoffman, is reviewed.
Copyright Catholic Biblical Association of America July 1996
DANIEL L. HOFFMAN, The Status of Women and Gnosticism in Irenaeus and

Tertullian (Studies in Women and Religion 36; Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Mellen,
1995). Pp. [viii] + x + 240. $89.95.
The impetus for Daniel Hoffman's Ph.D. research, the results of which have now
appeared in revised form, was Elaine Pagels's book The Gnostic Gospels (New York:
Random House, 1979). H. analyzes one chapter of Pagels's book in which she argues that
the higher status of women in gnostic communities, compared to orthodox communities,
is linked to positive feminine imagery in gnostic cosmologies. But H. attempts more than
a critique of Pagels; he fully explores the views of Irenaeus and Tertullian on the role of
women in the church.
Pagels's strongly stated thesis (Gnostic Gospels, 59) is that gnostic ideas were condemned
as heretical because gnostic Christians derived "social consequences from their
conception of God . . . in terms that included the feminine element." H. argues that
female elements are treated negatively in most gnostic cosmologies. The pair God the
Father-God the Mother is rare. What Pagels sees as exceptions (e.g., "destroy the works
of femaleness," Dial. Sav. 144.16-20) H. shows to be the rule, and in this he follows some
early reviewers of The Gnostic Gospels. Kathleen McVey, for example ("Gnosticism,
Feminism and Elaine Pagels," TToday 37 [1981] 498-502) made important points about
the patriarchal nature of most gnostic cosmologies. H. simply adds more evidence from
Nag Hammadi texts that contain antifemale statements. Of course, Gnostics might have
negative views of female cosmic powers yet still allow actual women to have prominent
roles, as Frederik Wisse notes ("Flee Femininity," Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism
[ed. Karen L. King; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988] 203). The more valuable part of H.'s
work is the close examination of the role of women in orthodox and gnostic circles
according to Irenaeus and Tertullian. The primary source in Irenaeus is his account of
Marcus and his sect (Adv. Haer 1). Whereas Pagels (Gnostic Gospels, 60) sees women
celebrating the Eucharist among the Marcosians, H. suggests that the rite was a
reenactment of gnostic cosmogony and, therefore, that the women's roles involved no
priestly status. He shows that the rites of the Marcosians are open to various
interpretations, as is the role of women in those rites. H. also corrects Pagels's statement
(Gnostic Gospels, 59) that Irenaeus' church forbade women to prophesy in church and
demonstrates that Irenaeus has been cited selectively. The same "selective" principles are
apparent in Pagels's use of Tertullian. It is easy to cite Tertullian's description of "heretical
women" (De praescr. 41, quoted by Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, 60): "They have no
modesty; they are bold enough to teach, to engage in argument, to enact exorcisms, to
undertake cures, and, it may be, even to baptize," and to argue that he condemned
Gnostics because they gave women prominent roles, but then one must ignore Tertullian's
challenge to Marcion (Adv. Marc. 5.8): "Let him also prove to me that in his presence
some women prophesied.... If all such proofs are more readily put in evidence by me ...
both Christ and God and the Spirit and the apostle will belong to my God." H. argues that
Tertullian's primary concern is a disciplined life for both Christian men and women and
that "intolerant expressions directed toward women" (p. 182) are rhetorical flourishes
occasioned by his sense of impending crisis.
Hoffman's conclusions echo the points made in early reviews of The Gnostic Gospels.
Second- and third-century orthodox churches allowed women some types of ministry,
though not priesthood. There is no clear evidence of women's leadership in gnostic
groups, when the sources are examined closely. The Montanists did have women leaders,
but the Montanists lacked the distinctive gnostic cosmology; thus, the link between
female leadership and positive female cosmology is lacking. The weakness of H.'s book
lies in the dissertation style: many very lengthy notes are retained but are printed at the
end of chapters to make reading difficult. In spite of this, he builds a convincing case
proving that authors of historical studies intended for nonspecialist readers should be
particularly careful to avoid selective and misleading use of sources. Janet A. Timbie,
Chevy Chase, MD 20815
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