Tertullian — Against Marcion 1.24

But God, as he is eternal and rational, is also, I think, perfect in all things: for you will be perfect as your Father who is in the heavens. Show his perfect goodness too, even though there is enough certainty about an imperfect goodness that is found neither natural nor rational. Now it will also be led over in another order: no longer imperfect, but defective, scanty and exhausted — which, lesser in the number of its matters, is not shown in all. For not all are made safe, but fewer than all — both the Creator’s Jews and Christians. But with more perishing, how is goodness defended as perfect when it is idle in the greater part, some for a few, none for many, yielding to perdition, sharing out ruin?

But if more will not be saved, it will already be not goodness but a more perfect malice. For as the working of goodness is what makes people safe, so of malignity what does not make them safe. But more by not making safe, while it makes few, it will be more perfect in not helping than in helping. You will not be able to refer to the Creator the failure of goodness toward all. For the one you hold as judge you show must be understood as a dispenser of goodness, if at all — not a pourer-out, which you claim for your god. So far do you prefer him to the Creator by this goodness alone. Which, if he professes it alone and whole, ought to have been lacking to no one. But I no longer want to argue Marcion’s god from the greater part of those who perish for imperfect goodness: it is enough that those he does make safe, found of imperfect salvation, show his imperfect goodness — safe as far as the soul, destroyed in the flesh, which with him does not rise.

Where does this halving of salvation come from if not from a failure of goodness? What belonged to perfect goodness but to bring the whole man back into salvation — the whole condemned by the Creator, the whole chosen by the best God? As far as I know, with him flesh is also dipped, and flesh is taken from marriages, and flesh is savaged in confessing the name. But even if sins are charged to flesh, the soul’s guilt comes first and the headship of fault must be ascribed rather to the soul, to which flesh comes under the name of servant. Flesh lacking a soul, then, sins only so far. So in this too goodness is unjust and thus also imperfect, leaving the more innocent substance to ruin — offending by obedience, not by decision. And even if Christ did not put on its truth, as your heresy has it, he still deigned to undergo its image. The very fact that he lied about it owed it something. But what is man other than flesh, if the name of man was allotted by the author to bodily, not soul, matter? And God made man, it says, clay from the earth — not soul; for soul is from the breath: and man became a living soul; who? Surely the one from clay: and God placed man in paradise — what he formed, not what he blew; who is now flesh, not who is soul. So if it is so, with what mouth will you claim the title of perfect goodness, which has failed not only from a special partition of the man to be freed, but from the general property? If grace is full and mercy solid that is saving for the soul alone, this life which we enjoy whole and entire offers more. Whereas to rise in part will be to be punished, not freed.