Required reading
Ante-Nicene Fathers (Volume 3) (Available from Amazon or free here) - Conclude 'The Apology'.
My summary
This week Tertullian completes his defence of Christianity.
We hear about:
(i) the real origin of supposed 'Roman' gods;
(ii) the stupidity of forcing faith;
(iii) Christian's prayer for rulers;
(iv) emperor worship;
(v) the suffering of Christians;
(vi) the crimes committed by non-Christians;
(vii) Christian practices;
(viii) Christians and natural disasters;
(ix) Christians being free from crime;
(x) the adoption of theology from Christianity by the Romans;
(xi) the reasonableness of the resurrection in comparison to some Roman theology;
(xii) the willingness of Christians to suffer.
What grabbed me
It is always amazing that a person would willingly suffer: 'Therefore God suffers that we thus suffer; for but very lately, in condemning a Christian woman to the leno rather than to the leo you made confession that a taint on our purity is considered among us something more terrible than any punishment and any death. Nor does your cruelty, however exquisite, avail you; it is rather a temptation to us. The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed. Many of your writers exhort to the courageous bearing of pain and death, as Cicero in the Tusculans, as Seneca in his Chances, as Diogenes, Pyrrhus, Callinicus; and yet their words do not find so many disciples as Christians do, teachers not by words, but by their deeds. That very obstinacy you rail against is the preceptress. For who that contemplates it, is not excited to inquire what is at the bottom of it? who, after inquiry, does not embrace our doctrines? and when he has embraced them, desires not to suffer that he may become partaker of the fulness of God’s grace, that he may obtain from God complete forgiveness, by giving in exchange his blood? For that secures the remission of all offences. On this account it is that we return thanks on the very spot for your sentences. As the divine and human are ever opposed to each other, when we are condemned by you, we are acquitted by the Highest.'
With so much gained from being a Christian, it is not surprising that we are willing to die because of our faith.
Next week's reading
Read 'On idolatry'.
Now it's your turn
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.
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