Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh 2

If some sect actually exists with God, it owes more to Epicurus than to the prophets, and then we will learn what the Sadducees hear from Christ. Christ came to uncover everything hidden from the beginning, to direct doubts, to complete what was foretold, and to embody what was preached; above all, to prove the resurrection of the dead not only through himself but in himself. Now we face new Sadducees, partisans of that same opinion. They admit only half a resurrection—the soul's alone—because they despise the flesh, just as they despise the Lord of the flesh. No other heretics begrudge the bodily substance its salvation except those who follow a rival divinity. That forces them to recast Christ so he will not be recognized as the Creator of flesh; they go wrong about his flesh first. Some deny it any reality at all, following Marcion and Basilides; others assign it a unique quality of its own, following the heresies of Valentinus and Apelles. Consequently they exclude the salvation of the very substance of which they deny Christ is a part—certain that this substance carries the decisive warrant of the resurrection, since the flesh has already risen in Christ. That is why we published On the Flesh of Christ, proving his body solid against the phantom theory and human against the special-quality theory; the very nature of that flesh identifies him as both Man and Son of Man. By proving him fleshy and bodily, we also bar the way to any God but the Creator, because we display a Christ in whom God is recognized exactly as the Creator promised. Once the God who authored the flesh and Christ who redeemed it are established, the resurrection of the flesh follows necessarily. Fittingly so. And this is essentially how we say a debate with heretics must be opened. Proper order always demands that we start from first principles, settling first from whom a thing is said to come before we ask what it is. Heretics, conscious of their weakness, never proceed in good order. They strain to smuggle in a rival divinity against the God known to all the world by the testimony of his works—equally prior in the sacraments and more manifest in the preaching. Under the pretext of a more urgent cause, namely human salvation above all, they begin with the resurrection because the flesh's resurrection is harder to believe than one God. Once they have treated it, stripped of the strength of proper order and loaded with scruples, they depreciate the flesh rather than honor it, and so gradually adjust the sense of that rival divinity through the very shaking and alteration of hope. For each person, cast down or displaced from the degree of hope he received from the Creator, easily inclines toward the author of another hope, even to the point of adopting him. Through a diversity of promises, a diversity of gods is insinuated. We see many entangled this way: they are tripped up on the resurrection of the flesh before they are tripped up on the unity of divinity. Therefore, as far as heretics go, we have shown the wedge we must use to meet them; and the meeting has already taken place on its own ground—concerning the one God and his Christ against Marcion, and concerning the flesh of the Lord against four heresies—in preparation for this greatest question. So now I treat the resurrection of the flesh alone, as if it were uncertain with us, while it stands certain with the Creator. Many are unskilled; most are doubtful and simple in their faith; many more need to be instructed, directed, and fortified, because this very point defends the unity of divinity. Just as denying the flesh's resurrection shakes that unity, so vindicating it establishes it. I believe the salvation of the soul calls for no retraction. Nearly all heretics, whatever their system, do not deny it. Let one Lucanus attend to it—though he does not spare this substance either, dissolving it according to Aristotle and substituting something else as if a third thing were to rise, neither soul nor flesh, that is, not a human being but perhaps a bear, by Lucanus. He, too, has from us a full treatment of the entire state of the soul, which we especially guard as immortal; we acknowledge only the flesh's failing and most strongly assert its restoration. We have brought the material into orderly form, postponing anything elsewhere only when the collision of causes required it. For just as it is customary to give a foretaste of certain things, so it is necessary to delay, provided the foretasted things are completed with their proper body and the delayed things are delivered under their proper name.