Tertullian — Against Marcion 24

Furthermore, with respect to the repentance which occurs in His conduct, you interpret it with similar perverseness just as if it were with fickleness and improvidence that He repented, or on the recollection of some wrong-doing; because He actually said, It repents me that I have set up Saul to be king, 1 Samuel 15:11 very much as if He meant that His repentance savoured of an acknowledgment of some evil work or error . Well, this is not always implied. For there occurs even in good works a confession of repentance, as a reproach and condemnation of the man who has proved himself unthankful for a benefit.

For instance, in this case of Saul, the Creator, who had made no mistake in selecting him for the kingdom, and endowing him with His Holy Spirit , makes a statement respecting the goodliness of his person, how that He had most fitly chosen him as being at that moment the choicest man, so that (as He says) there was not his fellow among the children of Israel . 1 Samuel 9:2 Neither was He ignorant how he would afterwards turn out. For no one would bear you out in imputing lack of foresight to that God whom, since you do not deny Him to be divine, you allow to be also foreseeing; for this proper attribute of divinity exists in Him.

However, He did, as I have said, burden the guilt of Saul with the confession of His own repentance; but as there is an absence of all error and wrong in His choice of Saul, it follows that this repentance is to be understood as upbraiding another rather than as self-incriminating. Look here then, say you: I discover a self-incriminating case in the matter of the Ninevites, when the book of Jonah declares, And God repented of the evil that He had said that He would do unto them; and He did it not. Jonah 3:10 In accordance with which Jonah himself says to the Lord, Therefore I fled before to Tarshish; for I knew that You are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger , and of great kindness, and repentest You of the evil .

Jonah 4:2 It is well, therefore, that he premised the attribute of the most good God as most patient over the wicked , and most abundant in mercy and kindness over such as acknowledged and bewailed their sins , as the Ninevites were then doing. For if He who has this attribute is the Most Good, you will have first to relinquish that position of yours, that the very contact with evil is incompatible with such a Being, that is, with the most good God. And because Marcion , too, maintains that a good tree ought not to produce bad fruit; but yet he has mentioned evil (in the passage under discussion), which the most good God is incapable of, is there forthcoming any explanation of these evils , which may render them compatible with even the most Good? There is.