Required reading
Ante-Nicene Fathers (Volume 3) (Available from Amazon or free here) - Read 'Against Hermogenes'.
My summary
This week we read an argument from Tertullian against the teaching of Hermogenes, in particular his teaching that matter is eternal.
Tertullian sums up the situation at the beginning of the book: 'He [Hermogenes] does not appear to acknowledge any other Christ as Lord, though he holds Him in a different way; but by this difference in his faith he really makes Him another being,—nay, he takes from Him everything which is God, since he will not have it that He made all things of nothing. For, turning away from Christians to the philosophers, from the Church to the Academy and the Porch, he learned there from the Stoics how to place Matter (on the same level) with the Lord, just as if it too had existed ever both unborn and unmade, having no beginning at all nor end, out of which, according to him, the Lord afterwards created all things. '
Tertullian argues against Hermogenes using arguments based on:
(i) logic;
(ii) Scripture.
What grabbed me
I appreciated the discussion of evil and its relation to God. In particular Tertullian's firm affirmation of God's goodness: 'On the very threshold, then, of this doctrine, which I shall probably have to treat of elsewhere, I distinctly lay it down as my position, that both good and evil must be ascribed either to God, who made them out of Matter; or to Matter itself, out of which He made them; or both one and the other to both of them together, because they are bound together—both He who created, and that out of which He created; or (lastly) one to One and the other to the Other, because after Matter and God there is not a third. Now if both should prove to belong to God, God evidently will be the author of evil; but God, as being good, cannot be the author of evil. '
Although logic may lead us in the direction that God is the author of evil, Scripture does not.
Next week's reading
Read 'Against the Valentinians'.
Now it's your turn
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.
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