The God of Israel: A Theological Reading of Tertullian's Adversus Marcionem

This dissertation is a historical, literary, and above all theological reading of Tertullian of Carthage’s treatise Adversus Marcionem. In the Introduction, I situate both Marcion of Sinope and Tertullian of Carthage within their respective historical and intellectual context, as well as the context of Tertullian’s treatise. In dialogue with the thought of American philosopher Stanley Cavell, I then offer an account of the kind of theological reading I offer in the dissertation, supplemented by an account of the interpreter’s task in approaching a polemical treatise like Adversus Marcionem.

After a brief Prelude describing Tertullian’s engagement with the mythological figure of Prometheus from Graeco-Roman antiquity, I set out in Part I to provide a detailed sketch of Tertullian’s Marcion. In Chapter 2, I describe Tertullian’s reading of Marcion’s understanding of the Creator-God, the God of Israel. Specifically, I articulate Tertullian’s analysis of how the Creator’s works – creating, legislating, punishing, and revealing – can be said to disclose the Creator’s character as an ineffective, inconstant, and malicious deity. Then, in Chapter 3, I do the same for Marcion’s God, emphasizing Tertullian’s understanding of how Marcion’s Christ reveals a God antithetical to the Creator’s work and character, a God (Marcion claimed) of unadulterated benevolence and love, wholly transcendent from the Creator and the Creator’s world-order.

In Part II of this dissertation, I turn to Tertullian’s God – the Deus Christianorum – and the rhetorical, philosophical, and theological arguments he deploys in the course of Adversus Marcionem both to refute Marcion and to articulate his own understanding God’s oneness and the integrity of the biblical narrative. In Chapter 4 I provide an account of Tertullian’s understanding of the rule of the faith, constellated within the relevant accounts of the same in Tertullian’s predecessors. I argue that, for Tertullian, the rule of faith expressed in a condensed for the metanarrative of salvation in Christ as the interpretive key for an ecclesial reading of the two-testament Bible, the Christian Scripture.

I structure Chapters 5 and 6 in light of Tertullian’s subtle distinction between God’s uniqueness, or singularity (the claim that there is only one God) and God’s unity, or simplicity (the claim that God is one). Chapter 5 addresses the former. I argue therein for a reading of Tertullian’s initial refutation of Marcion’s theological dualism, or ditheism in which his rhetorical training and philosophical learning are taken up into an ultimately theological argument identifying the God who is supremely great with the God revealed in the biblical narrative received and read by the Church. Chapter 6, then, addresses the question of God’s unity, beginning with an account of Tertullian’s understanding of the God of Christians as triune. I then proceed to engage Tertullian’s readings of the Scriptures across the whole of Marc., describing his diverse exegetical strategies with a particular focus on how his “literal” readings of Scripture are ordered to the spiritual understanding of them. For Tertullian, I argue, the unity of the biblical narrative is guaranteed by the unified agency of the one God, who is at once the primary author of that narrative and the primary agent within that narrative, a story that continues in the life of the Church.

Finally, in Chapter 7, I conclude the dissertation by summarizing its findings and providing an account of Tertullian’s understanding of the mutual implication of the flesh of Christ and the body of Scripture. For Tertullian it is Christ, the Word made flesh, Son of God and Son of man, who reveals in all its fullness God’s commitment to and involvement in creation from the beginning to the hoped-for end.