Tertullian, Against Marcion 22

How can Antichrist be utterly overthrown unless we are also given ground to demolish his other injections, now that the defense of prescriptions has been relaxed? Let us move on, then, to the very person of God — or rather, to the shadow and phantom that passes for Christ. He must be examined by the very standard by which he is preferred to the Creator. There will certainly be fixed rules for testing the goodness of God. But first I must find and seize that goodness, and only then bring it to the rules. For when I scan the timeline, it is nowhere to be found from the beginning of matter and the entrance of causes. It ought to have been present with them, acting from that point onward, since it had the obligation to act. Already there were death and the sting of death, transgression, and the Creator's own malice (Gen 2:17). Against these the goodness of another God ought to have rushed to help, presenting itself as the first rule of divine goodness — if it proved natural, it would have assisted immediately, right when the cause began. Everything in God ought to be natural and innate, so that it may be eternal, in keeping with his own state; otherwise it would be judged adventitious and alien, and therefore temporal and foreign to eternity. So too a perpetual, constant goodness is demanded in God — one stored and ready in the treasury of natural properties, preceding its own causes and materials, embracing each first occasion, not despising or abandoning it, if indeed it came first. Finally I must also ask here: why did his goodness not operate from the beginning, just as we asked why he himself was not revealed from the beginning? Why not? The one who was to be revealed through goodness, if he existed at all. It is impossible for God to be unable to do anything, much less to fail to exercise his own natural properties. If those properties are held in check, why do they not run? Then they would not be natural. For even inactivity is unknown to his nature; hence the verdict: if he acts. Thus it will not appear that he was unwilling to exercise goodness, meanwhile sheltering behind the name of nature. Nature cannot be unwilling — it directs itself so that if it ceases, it ceases to be. But the goodness in Marcion's God once ceased from work; therefore it was not natural goodness, which could have ceased at some point, something natural things are not permitted to do. And if it is not natural, it is no longer to be believed eternal or equal to God. Because it is not eternal, since it is not natural — a thing that finally guarantees no perpetuity for itself, neither from the past nor promised for the future. For just as it did not exist from the beginning, it certainly will not exist at the end. It is able not to be at some time, just as it once was not. Therefore, since it is established that the goodness of that God ceased from the beginning — for it did not free man from the beginning — and it ceased by will rather than weakness, the will that suppressed that goodness will be exposed as the end of malice. What is more malicious than refusing to benefit when you can, than torturing utility, than allowing injury? The whole eulogy of the Creator will be rewritten onto the one who abetted the Creator's savagery by delaying his own goodness. For whatever is not done lies in whose hand? It is already charged to him when it is done. Man is condemned to death for tasting one little tree; from then on transgressions advance with punishments, and all who never knew a blade of grass in paradise already perish (Gen 2:17). And does some better God either not know or tolerate this? If the purpose was that he might be found better by contrast, how much worse must the Creator be judged? It is enough that he is malicious in this scheme, who also willed that the Creator be burdened, admitted his operations, and held the world in vexation. What verdict will you pass on a doctor who feeds the disease by delaying aid and stretches out the danger by prolonging the remedy, so that he may cure more precious or famous cases? Such a sentence must also be pronounced on Marcion's God: the permitter of evil, the favorer of injury, the pimp of grace, the betrayer of benignity — which he did not immediately display for his cause. He would have displayed it if he were good by nature and not by acquisition, if he were optimal by genius and not by discipline, if he were God from eternity and not from Tiberius — indeed, what is truer, from Cerdo and Marcion. Now that God has outdone Tiberius, so that divine goodness might be dedicated on earth by his empire.