Word: tertullian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...second time in 1,000 years, Roman Catholicism has closed up shop in the land that gave the church such great names as St. Cyprian of Carthage, Tertullian, the heretic Donatus, the virgin martyrs Perpetua and Felicity. Just concluded is a formal agreement between the Vatican and the government of predominantly Moslem Tunisia that calls for the surrender without compensation of all but seven of the country's 109 Catholic churches, including the vast Cathedral of St. Louis in Tunis. The government will have the right to veto appointments to the Archbishopric of Carthage, but in return guarantees freedom...
...Tertullian condemned the theater as the "shrine of Venus," and it took the church a millennium to change its judgment . . . There have been those whose socks and buskins were as happily quiet under pews as active on the boards. You, sir, are such...