Tertullian, Against Marcion 5

I have been maneuvering so far as if from a first step and at long range; from now on I will fight at close quarters and with certainty. I see that I must draw certain lines beforehand, lines against which the battle will be joined—specifically, the scriptures of the Creator. Since I will prove from them that Christ belonged to the Creator, so that afterwards, having fulfilled his Christ, I must also lay out the form and, so to speak, the nature of those scriptures themselves, lest they be dragged into controversy when applied to the issues at hand and, mixed up with the defense of those issues, blunt the reader's attention. I therefore adduce two grounds of prophetic speech that our adversaries must recognize from this point on: one, by which future events are sometimes announced as if they had already taken place. For it also belongs to divinity to regard whatever it has decreed as already perfect, because there is no distinction of time with it, since eternity itself directs a uniform state of time; and it is more characteristic of prophetic divination to regard what it foresees as already seen and thus already settled. This demonstrates in every way that a thing is future, as through Isaiah: I gave my back to the whip, my cheeks to the slap, and I did not turn my face from spitting. Whether Christ was speaking about himself, according to us, or the prophet about himself, according to the Jews, the deed was not yet done, yet it sounded as if it had already been accomplished. The other mode is the one by which most things are foreshadowed figuratively through riddles, allegories, and parables, to be understood differently from how they are written. For we read that mountains will drip sweetness, but you should not expect to suck sap from rocks or syrup from cliffs; and we hear that the earth will flow with milk and honey, but you should not believe you will ever make cakes and Samian delicacies from clods of earth. For God did not immediately promise to turn himself into a bird-catcher and a farmer when he said: I will put rivers in a thirsty region and in a desert, boxwood and cedar; and just as he predicts the conversion of nations: the beasts of the field will bless me, sirens and the daughters of the sparrow—not that he will deliver favorable omens from the young of swallows and foxes and those monstrous and fabulous songstresses. What more need I say of this kind? Since even the apostle of the heretics interprets the law that grants the ox treading out the grain an unmuzzled mouth not about oxen, but about us, and adds that the rock that supplied drink was Christ, teaching thereby that the two lines of Abraham's sons ran allegorically, and suggesting to the Ephesians that what was pronounced about man in the beginning—that he will leave father and mother and the two will become one flesh—he recognizes as referring to Christ and the church.