Word: tertullian
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...church fathers such as Irenaeus, Tertullian and Augustine hashed out Christian orthodoxy (and thereby some of the pressing philosophical questions of their day), their investigations inevitably spilled over into the hereafter. A centuries-long battle over the nature of human identity was waged in terms of whether the inhabitants of paradise would consist of body as well as soul. (The orthodox answer, confounding all heresies, remained yes.) If the virtuous soul departed the body at death and had to wait until Christ's Second Coming to reunite with it at the Resurrection, what did it do in the meantime...
...Christian centuries that followed were more plainspoken. Tertullian reflected the mind of many early church fathers when he pronounced, in the 3rd century, that women were "the devil's gateway...
...modern cosmography and anthropology, the church began promoting instead increasingly reason-divorced myth-dogma, e.g., the immaculate conception and bodily assumption of St. Mary. At least the implication was "Here is myth for myth's sake, it's good for your souls," a kind of return to Tertullian's "Credo quia absurdum." Now suddenly there is a new obsession with narrow historicity, and the Pope seems ready to jettison whatever and whoever did not "actually happen." It looks like a watershed: either much more will have to be dumped, or a return to a crude fundamentalism...
...permissiveness, moving, in the words of one historian, "from never to sometimes to whee!" The early Greeks condemned it because it was considered detrimental to the order of the state, the ancient Egyptians because it was thought to make men effeminate. Summing up the view of the early church, Tertullian in the 3rd century A.D. denied that a dice player could be a Christian, because dicing made him too worldly. But most of the time through the succeeding centuries, the church had sins larger than gambling to worry about. Both champions and foes saw in it a certain obsessive, hysterical...
...church: the Trinitarian doctrine of three persons in one God. The word Trinity is not in Scripture, although the idea is there in Paul's reference to "the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit." Tertullian, in the 3rd century, was apparently the first to formulate the term trinitas, giving theological definition to the idea...