Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.5

So let's turn to the questions, all of you—you dogs the apostle kicks out for barking against the God of truth. These are the bones of the arguments you gnaw on: If God is good, knows the future, and has the power to stop evil, why did He let man—His image and likeness, indeed His very substance through the soul’s judgment—slip from obedience to the law into death, tricked by the devil? If He is good, He would not want such a thing to happen; if He foresees, He would not be ignorant of it coming; if He is able, He could drive it away. Under those three conditions of divine majesty, the disaster could not have happened. But it did happen. Therefore, the opposite conclusion stands: God cannot be believed to be good, or prescient, or powerful. To the exact degree that such a thing would not have happened if God were truly good, prescient, and able, to that degree it happened because He is not such a God. So first we must defend these attributes in the Creator—goodness, prescience, and power—since they are the ones called into doubt. I will not linger here; Christ’s own definition leads the way, and the proof starts from His works. The Creator’s works testify to both His goodness—by which He is good, as we have shown—and His power, by which He is so great, and indeed created from nothing. Even if He used some pre-existing matter, as some claim, it still counts as creation from nothing, because those things were not what they are now. Ultimately, He is so great because He is good, and so powerful because He is God—all things are His, which is why He is called omnipotent. What about prescience? It has as many witnesses as there are prophets. What title to prescience could be greater than the Author of all things, who foreknows everything by disposing it and disposes everything by foreknowing it? He certainly foreknew that very transgression; otherwise He would not have entrusted its warning under the threat of death. So if these faculties existed in God—faculties before which no evil could or should have happened to man—and yet it happened anyway, let us examine man’s condition. Perhaps the disaster came through man rather than through God, since it could not come through God. I find that God instituted man as free, possessing his own judgment and his own power. I see no image and likeness of God in him more clearly than the form of that status. He was not expressed toward the uniform God by face and bodily lines, which vary so widely across the human race, but in that substance he drew from God Himself—the soul—he was sealed to the form of God, guaranteeing freedom of judgment and power. The law God then gave confirmed this status. Law would not be given to someone who did not have obedience to the law in his power, nor would the threat of death be attached to transgression if contempt for the law were not also entrusted to man’s freedom of judgment. You find the same pattern in the Creator’s later laws. He sets good and evil, life and death, before man. Nor is the whole order of discipline arranged through precepts by the calling, threatening, and exhorting God in any other way than to address a free and voluntary human being capable of both obedience and contempt.