The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 1

I. Formulation of the Dogma of Endless Torment

TERTULLIAN ¹ (C. A.D. 160-240), brilliant and versatile of mind, and master of the Latin tongue, was born in a heathen home at Carthage. He received a liberal Greco-Roman education at Rome, including thorough legal training in Roman jurisprudence and forensic eloquence, and attained eminence as a legal consultant. Returning to Carthage, at about the age of forty, he was attracted by the martyr courage and life of holiness of the Christians, and embraced the Christian faith with all the fiery ardor of his tempestuous temperament. He considered that he had passed from darkness to light, and had no patience with those who fell short of his ideals, spurning any recognized compromise. CFF1 948.2

Tertullian was first a catechist, then a priest (c. A.D. 192), and finally bishop of Carthage. Doubtless he was the most conspicuous writer of his time, and the first theologian to write in Latin. He was the “great founder” ² and father of Latin theology. Having a legally trained mind, he was able to make the Latin tongue, with its characteristic precision, the language of the church. He put Christian thought into Latin, thus laying the foundation upon which Cyprian and Augustine built. He prepared the language for the labors of Jerome, who brought forth the Latin Vulgate, which placed the Western churches on a parity with the East. Thus the Carthaginian School profoundly influenced Christianity for centuries. CFF1 948.3

A voluminous writer, Tertullian was author of numerous apologetic, theological, polemical, and ascetic works in Latin and some also in Greek. He was a powerful reasoner and a born fighter, being constantly engaged in controversy. He was preeminently the polemicist of his generation. And according to Jerome he had a “sharp and vehement temper,” and was the fearless champion of Christianity against pagans, Jews, and heretics. He had many adversaries—the Monarchians, who denounced his prophetism while he assailed their views on the Godhead; the pagans, whose practices he exposed and condemned; the Jews, whom he answered; and the Gnostics, some of whose views he shared, though repudiating others. CFF1 949.1

1. TERTULLIAN’S ESPOUSAL OF MONTANISM

A few years after Tertullian became a priest, his views underwent an important change. As a reaction against the scandalous laxity in the discipline of the Roman Church under Zephyrinus, Tertullian’s rigorous and often eccentric views led him first to sympathize with and then to espouse the moral austerities and enthusiasms of the Montanists. ³ He joined them about the year 199. It is supposed that he was driven to them by the envy and abuse of the Roman clergy. ⁴ CFF1 949.2

Following this lapse, his writings—about sixteen pre-Montanist and twenty-two Montanist, according to Neander’s classification—became more intense, some of them saturated with Montanist phraseology. In fact, he was the great theologian of the movement, which he called the “New Prophecy,” while advocating and systematizing the principles that led to the doctrines of celibacy, asceticism, and penance. CFF1 949.3

The Montanists, it should be added, claimed to be restoring primitive Christianity, whereas the Manichaeans were attempting to reconstruct Christianity. The former condemned drunkenness, gluttony, and lust. Driven to despair by the laxity and drift of the church, they became fanatical in zeal for purity and separation, exalting virginity and celibacy as a reformatory reaction. CFF1 950.1

They lived under the vivid impression of the final catastrophe of the end of the world, and of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, as manifested in their own prophets and prophetesses. They forbade flight in persecution and protested against the growing institutionalism and secularism of the church. (They were formally condemned by Zephyrinus, bishop of Rome.) CFF1 950.2

2. FIRST TO FORMULATE DOGMA OF ENDLESS TORMENT

Under Tertullian the smoldering fires of Immortal-Soulism blazed out, and its Eternal-Torment corollary was projected. He well knew that though the leading Platonic philosophers held “the soul to be immortal” the “crowd” derided the notion, supposing that nothing will survive after death. And, Tertullian observes, sometimes the “wise, too, join with the vulgar crowd in their opinion.” Then he adds, “There is nothing after death, according to the school of Epicurus. After death all things come to an end, even death itself, says Seneca to like effect.” ⁵ So Immortal-Soulism was by no means universal among the pagans. And it encountered opposition. CFF1 950.3

Tertullian was apparently the first to formulate the doctrine of “traducianism”—the transmission of the soul by propagation from parent to child. To him the soul is “distinct from the body” and is intrinsically “immortal.” But more than that, it receives “death by punishment in immortality.” And it was Tertullian who first affirmed that the torments of the lost will be coequal and coexistent with the happiness of the saved. ⁶ And he openly declared a relish for their torture. In dealing with future punishment he introduced a language entirely foreign to Scripture, its source being in this new doctrine. CFF1 950.4

And to sustain it he confessedly altered the sense of Scripture and the meaning of words, so as to interpret “death” as eternal misery, and “destruction” and “consume” as pain and anguish. “Hell” became perpetually dying, but never dead. In other words, death was simply another phase of endless immortal life. It was immortal suffering, without relief by ultimate cessation; perishing, without ever being destroyed; slaughtered, but never succumbing to oblivion. It was permanence of life under the death penalty. Tertullian was the first to formulate the concept of universal Innate Immortality and Endless Torment into a coordinated system. CFF1 951.1

3. PERSECUTION FORMS BACKGROUND OF RETRIBUTIVE TORMENT

A tempest of violent persecution broke upon the church in the mid-second century. The fires of religious fanaticism burst into flame, with imprisonment, torture, and death. In this baptism of blood the African Church received her full share. Christians were thrown to the wild beasts, and burned as human torches. Church assemblies were deprived of their places of worship. CFF1 951.2

This persecution, raging in the reign of Septimius Severus, was most active at the height of Tertullian’s career. Tertullian’s Apology to the Roman rulers demanded a cessation of the persecutions of this martyr age, with equal rights and freedom of religion for Christians—the first plea for religious liberty as an inalienable right. Here again Tertullian’s legal training was observable in its judicial style. CFF1 951.3

The principles of the gospel, of course, forbade vengeance here on earth on the part of Christians. But the vehement spirit of Tertullian impelled him to regard the retribution of Hell for such, as endless and unmitigated in the world to come. Hell would be a hideous field of carnage, a “perpetual slaughter” (aeterna occisio). So Tertullian’s fierce, vindictive spirit found solace in the contemplated eternal agonies of the lost. And within two centuries, under the powerful influence of Augustine, Tertullian’s fantastic assertions came to be generally accepted. CFF1 951.4

4. INFLUENCED BY STOIC “PHILOSOPHY” WHILE REJECTING ITS “THEOSOPHY.”

Tertullian was influenced by the principles of Stoic philosophy in its later form, as is seen in his theological slant, though he had no patience with Gnostic theosophy. And he was the first Christian writer in whom both Gnostic principles and Roman law appear together as determining elements. He held a dualistic concept of opposing principles—light and darkness, life and death, animate and inanimate, through all eternity—holding evil to be an eternal fact and a philosophic necessity, much like the Dualism of Manes of Persia. CFF1 952.1

5. CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS DIVERSIFIED WRITINGS

As to Tertullian’s diversified writings, genius is stamped upon his works. In his Apologeticus (Defense of Christianity), about A.D. 197, addressed to the Roman officials, he maintains that Christians are good citizens, refusing divine honors to the emperor because they are monotheists. His polemical treatise, De Praescriptione Haereticum (Prescription Against Heretics), sets forth the Catholic principles of tradition and authority. Here he denies to all heretics the right to interpret Scripture. The Bible, he holds, is the possession of the church, to whom alone truth is handed down in succession from Christ and the apostles. ⁷ CFF1 952.2

His De Anima (A Treatise on the Soul) presents Tertullian’s speculations—on the origin, nature, and destiny of the human soul. He maintains a certain corporeity of the soul—without appeal to, and in conflict with, Holy Scripture, and sometimes clashing with Plato. And his work, De Resurrectione Carne (On the Resurrection of the Flesh, c. A.D. 208), intended as a confutation of the heresy that denied the resurrection of the body, maintains his theory of Immortal-Soulism and Endless Torment in all its baldness. These two works are vital to our quest. CFF1 952.3

Thus Tertullian’s capitalization upon the Platonic dogma of universal Innate Immortality gave tremendous impetus to the horrific doctrine of punishment as “eternal life in hell.” Tertullian, with his vivid imagination, became its great initial, third-century advocate. And despite his Montanist defection, and despite his strange hallucinations, he left a lasting immortality impress upon the church of all succeeding centuries. He pushed Immortal-Soulism forward with a power far surpassing Athenagoras, who spearheaded it. CFF1 953.1

6. STILL HELD TO MAJOR PROPHETIC OUTLINE

Strangely enough, Tertullian remained a rather remarkable expositor of Bible prophecy, holding that Christ is the “stone” that is to smite the symbolic image (of Daniel 2) of the nations. ⁸ The appearance of the Antichrist, or Beast, and Man of Sin, was, he held, drawing near. Rome’s continuance delayed Antichrist’s appearance, ⁹ and “Babylon” symbolized Rome. ¹¹ Rome’s breakup would be the signal for the terrors of the end, with the millennium following the resurrection of the dead. (For a comprehensive account of Tertullian’s interpretation of the outline prophecies, see L. E. Froom, Prophetic Faith, volume 1, pages 256-260.) CFF1 953.2

And Tertullian still held to the two advents, ¹³ with the resurrection at the Second Advent, not at death. ¹⁴ CFF1 953.3