In the twenty-first chapter of his On the Prescription of Heretics, Tertullian concludes an argument for who has the right and authority to interpret Scripture. And he thus infers:
As a former lawyer, Tertullian draws on legal terminology (praescriptio) to indicate who has the right to a legal claim (so Gaius 4.130-133). Tertullian has argued that Scripture belongs to the apostles and those who succeeded them. So, by contrast, heretics who teach a non-apostolic faith do not have the authority or right to teach the Scripture. They do not teach the Rule of Faith. They propose, instead, other rules (see ch. 26, 20).
Tertullian will thus claim: “We have the Apostles of the Lord as our authorities, who not even themselves chose to introduce anything on their own authority, but faithfully handed on to the nations the rule received from Christ” (Prescription, 6, 43).
On first reading, Tertullian appears highly fideistic and unwilling to debate with those who differ from apostolic churches. Indeed, his rejection of both Greek philosophy and the teaching of Basilides, Valentinus, Apelles, Marcion, and Hermogenes seems to lead in that direction. Indeed, Tertullian in this treatise famously proclaims, “What then hath Athens in common with Jerusalem?” (Prescription, 7).
Prescription Against Gnostics
Three responses are in order. First, Tertullian himself writes detailed, meticulous responses to Marcion, Praxeas, Valentinus, Hermogenes, and Apelles. These books, especially Against Marcion, are voluminous, detailed, biblical, and focused. Indeed, he may have written the majority of these books after his Prescription. So that either suggests that Tertullian means something other than fideistic retreat or he shortly changed his mind after writing.
I do not believe it is the latter but rather the former. And to understand why I make this claim, we need to consider who Tertullian means by heretics and what they taught.
First, he calls heretical any group that divides from the visible church due to the root of the heresy. And among groups that have visibly split are those who follow Basilides, Valentinus, and others often called Gnostics. While their beliefs are complex, there are very specific ways they contradict the Rule of Faith that Tertullian holds and that seems clear in a straightforward reading of Scripture.
They speak of the creator as a Demiurge, who fell from the Pleroma, an abortive child of Sophia, one of the great powers in this gnostic cosmology. The creator is born of ignorance and passion, and Christ (another power) came from the Abyss, the true Father, to set things right by freeing our spirits from our flesh. So there is no resurrection of the dead, and there is not one God who created heaven and earth. Further, Christ himself is the spirit, but Jesus the one who had flesh either is an adopted body or some other entity that is not directly Christ. So there is not one Lord Jesus Christ.
In exegesis, Basilides and Valentinus would use biblical words like wisdom, truth, Christ, and so on to refer to powers in their cosmological system, given to them by special illumination (hence, Gnostics) that is not available to others. Tertullian, like Irenaeus before him, likens this to grabbing random sentences in a poem and reorganizing them to mean something entirely different than the order and sequence of the original poem (Prescription, 39).
Therefore, the possibility of looking at the text and arguing back and forth did not really exist. These Gnostics had secret knowledge, which meant they could unlock the physical meaning of the text with secret knowledge about Powers, Aeons, and other spiritual beings; they thus did not care about the historical sequence of the text. And further, they denied the one God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one Lord Jesus Christ who came in the flesh, and the goodness and resurrection of the flesh.
In light of this, Tertullian quite literally cannot argue by exegesis with this select group that he speaks of. They do not accept his text as given, nor his exegesis as plausible, and they in fact think he cannot illuminate the text’s meaning because he lacks special gnosis given by illumination which is, more or less, an ornate Platonic myth that one cannot discern from Scripture alone. So it is not as if Tertullian is against debating Scripture—he does this all the time; but rather, he recognizes that it is impossible with this group of Gnostics.
Prescription Against Marcionites
Second, he also writes against Marcionites like followers of Marcion himself or of a splinter group associated with Apelles. Again, they proposed a different creator who was either evil or simply lacked clemency and mercy. They rejected portions of the New Testament and the Old Testament as a non-authoritative record. They apparently also had docetistic tendencies. In any case, they did not have one God who is creator of heaven and earth, whose Son is the one Lord Jesus Christ; and who became incarnate for us and for our salvation.
And like Valentinus, Marcion publicly left the visible churches in Rome to found his own discrete group—which is what heresy meant early on. So both left visible apostolic churches, and Marcionites did not affirm the whole of apostolic Scripture, emending, rewriting, and pointing to contradictions across the two Testaments to promote their version of Christianity. So again, Tertullian does not believe he can debate them since they do not accept the apostolic Scriptures in whole, deny the one God and father of the one Lord Jesus Christ. They instead propose another God and a Christ distinct from the flesh of Jesus.
Much more could be said, but I believe this should make us more sympathetic to why Tertullian argues that the Scriptures of the apostles and prophets do not belong to either group. And therefore, they can have no debate over the meaning of the Rule of Faith. It belongs to the Church of the apostles, claims Tertullian.
Rule of Faith
The last reason is likely the most important for our purposes, and it is because the Rule of Faith amounts to a direct summary of the main points of Scripture. And so for the next moments, I want to quote and comment on Tertullian’s quotation of the Rule of Faith, which will be virtually identical to Irenaeus’s but with some interesting emphases:
Now the Rule of Faith—that we may here at this point make our profession of what we maintain—is unquestionably that wherein our belief is affirmed [1] that there is but ONE GOD, the Selfsame with the Creator of the world, Who produced all things out of nothing through His Word (per uerbum suum) sent down in the beginning of all things;
[2a] that this Word is called His Son, Who in the Name of GOD was seen under divers forms by the patriarchs, was ever heard in the prophets, and lastly was brought down by the Spirit and Power of GOD the Father into the Virgin Mary, became Flesh in her womb, and being born of her lived as Jesus Christ;
[2b] that thereafter He proclaimed a new law and a new promise of the Kingdom of Heaven, wrought miracles, was crucified, and on the third day rose again, was caught up into the heavens, and sat down at the right hand of the Father;
[3] that He sent the Vicarious Power of the Holy Spirit to lead believers;
[4] that He will come with glory to take the saints into the enjoyment of life eternal and of the heavenly promises, and to adjudge the wicked to fire perpetual, after the resurrection of both good and bad has taken place together with the restoration of their flesh.
This Rule, taught (as it will be proved) by Christ, admits no questionings amongst us, save those which heresies introduce and which make heretics. (Prescription, 13, pp 53–54).2
According to Tertullian, Christ taught this rule through his apostles or his own person. And further, Tertullian claims that this rule marks the teaching of all Apostolic Churches.
A number of important elements appear in this Rule. First, Tertullian emphasizes that there is only one God who is the selfsame as the creator. God is one absolutely (unum omnino Deum), and there is no other God but the creator (nec alium praeter mundi conditorem). In other words, with the strongest possible affirmation, Tertullian unites the God of Jesus Christ with the creator of heaven and earth. The creator is not a second-tier being, born from Sophia or any other gnostic myth of Powers and Aeons. He is one, and there is no other.
Second, Tertullian speaks of God’s creation through the Word as a creation “from nothing” (de nihilo). A philosopher named Hermogenes had challenged Christians in Carthage by claiming that matter was eternal like God. Here, and in his later writing Against Hermogenes, Tertullian emphasizes that nothing came into being apart from God’s creation through the Word. It was creation ex nihilo.
Third, Tertullian emphasizes that the Word manifested in diverse forms to the patriarchs of old and became incarnate by the Spirit. The first position rebuffs the teaching of Praxeas that the Word has no personal existence; but if the Word pre-existed in the Old Testament manifestations, then he did have a personal existence. This likewise pushes back against Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament. And it further emphasizes that Christ, the single subject, took flesh to himself against various groups who denied it.
Fourth, Tertullian underscores the resurrection of the flesh against those who believe salvation is entirely spiritual, speaking of “the restoration of their flesh.” The bodily resurrection is an obvious teaching in the Bible (see 1 Cor. 15), and here Tertullian will use the word flesh not only for the Incarnation (see John 1:14) but also for the resurrection.
Rule of Faith as a Pattern of Words
I make these four observations not only to show how the Rule of Faith contradicted the rules of Basilides, Valentinus, and others, but also to make a point about concepts and judgments in creedal statements like this one. David Yeago in a 1994 article, “The New Testament and the Nicene Dogma: A Contribution to the Recovery of Theological Exegesis,” argued that the Creed of Nicaea used post-biblical concepts to express biblical judgments about God and Christ.
We see a similar reality here with Tertullian. When he speaks of creation de nihilo (elsewhere as ex nihilo), he draws on biblical teaching like John 1:3: “all things came into being through the Word, and apart from the Word, not one thing came into being which had come into being” (author’s translation; πάντα διʼ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὃ γέγονεν). If all things were made through him, then nothing but God existed before creation. Hence, God through his Word created without pre-existing matter, ex nihilo. So this concept of ex nihilo renders a biblical judgment about creation in updated language.
While the rest of the Rule remains stable, Tertullian can follow up the Rule’s confession that there is only one God with “and there is no other but the creator” (nec alium praeter mundi conditorem). Here, Tertullian uses more words to express the same judgment in order to ensure that someone cannot say: yes, there is one God, but he is not the creator of heaven and earth—that is an aborted child of Sophia who fell from the Pleroma whose name Yaldabaoth. Well yes, likely Tertullian does not need to add the extra line here, but one can see even by doing so, Tertullian understands that this is the same Rule of Faith that everyone affirms.
Importantly then, the Rule of Faith is not as fixed as the Nicene Creed, for instance. It is a set of four or five judgments about God, Christ, the Spirit, and redemption. The various expressions of the Rule of Faith all agree. But sometimes there are fewer words or more words, depending on the context. For example, Irenaeus wrote an exposition of the whole Bible, beginning in Genesis, called On the Apostolic Preaching. It represents the Rule of Faith in long form.
So this leads us to a crucial point: the Rule of Faith represents a pattern of reading Scripture to know its major emphases: God, Christ, Spirit, salvation. It can be short, as many of the baptismal creeds of the second and third centuries are; or it can be an entire treatise such as is found in Irenaeus’s On the Apostolic Preaching.
It is, in the New Testament’s language, the deposit given by the apostles (1 Tim. 6:20; 2 Tim. 1:12, 14), a form of teaching (Rom. 6:17), and a pattern of sound (or health-giving) words (2 Tim. 1:13). This is partially Tertullian’s point in Prescription 25–27 and elsewhere. In short, the Rule of Faith was thought to be both contained in Scripture and given by the apostles in their regular oral teaching. Hence, Paul can tell the Thessalonians: “So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter” (2 Thess. 2:15, RSV). The traditions taught by both word and letter are one, but the media differ.
To summarize, Tertullian’s Rule of Faith represents a standard second- and third-century way to summarize apostolic teaching. It may have had an oral source, but it nevertheless describes the written word. And it therefore provides insight into how early Christians read Scripture as a story about one God and Father who created heaven and earth through his only Son, the Word, who in these last times became Incarnate for us and for our salvation; and of the Spirit who spoke through the prophets and guides the redeemed who look forward to the resurrection from the dead.
Further Resources
See my articles: “How Tertullian Tried to Settle a Church Dispute over Veiling Virgins”
“Scripture and Trinitarian Theology: David Yeago’s Argument”
1 My translation of Praescriptio 21.1–2: “Hinc igitur dirigimus praescriptionem: si Dominus Christus Iesus apostolos misit ad praedicandum, alios non esse recipiendos praedicatores quam Christus instituit, quia nec alius patrem nouit nisi filius et cui filius reuelauit, nec aliis uidetur reuelasse filius quam apostolis quos misit ad praedicandum utique quod illis reuelauit.”
2 Unless otherwise noted, I am using this translation: Tertullian, On the “Prescription” of Heretics 13, in Tertullian: On the Testimony of the Soul and On the “Prescription” of Heretics, trans. T. Herbert Bindley (London: SPCK, 1914). I modified the format and added numerals to clarify the various points of confession. For a free version of the Latin text, see https://www.tertullian.org/latin/de_praescriptione_haereticorum.htm.
