steadfast7
Puritan Board Junior
I completely agree with your facts. I think you're missing my point. The one Holy and Apostolic Church has always been faithful to orthodoxy, because there has been an unbroken chain of truth from the Apostles down. If it was challenged, it was from without, not within, for the essential practices and beliefs of the Church have been maintained. The rule of faith, the Trinitarian formula in baptism, the LS, etc, were all preserved. The orthodox would never have yielded on these.Depends on what you mean by orthodox.Did the orthodox ever question the Trinity, once it had been established? That would be a parallel question to ask.
First, the point is that the Trinity was an established doctrine handed down by the Apostles in their teaching. This, later writers argue for. Your statement that the "Church hadn't settled it" sounds more like those that see the doctrine as created by the Church rather than something in the Apostolic faith that had to be clearly articulated.
Second, Athanasius was banned 5 times from his bishopric for defending Nicene orthodoxy because a large and influential segment of the Church became Aryan. The point is that your argument is weak. The Trinity is even more foundational to Christian orthodoxy than Baptism. The same can be said for the humanity and divinity of Christ that were early defended by Iraneus. The same can be said for the Gospel, which, within Paul's own preaching ministry, was being trampled underfoot by the Judaizers.
Along comes Tertullian and others suggesting a different approach to baptism, one of cardinal practices of the Church. He is not branded a heretic for it, nor is there a universal outcry, rather, many believers apply it. How did he get away with it? Probable conclusion: the baptism of infants wasn't one of the practices handed down by Apostolic authority, like the Trinity, the deity of Christ, etc. It's something the Church introduced, but apparently it wasn't on the same level of dogma, or Tertullian would have been shot down immediately.
He doesn't cite apostolic authority for his view because they are silent on the matter, which is my point. If the ad hominem were to stand, it'd be pertinent to see, at least, when his baptismal views coincided with his departure from orthodoxy. Though he eventually went Montanist, was his baptismal tract accepted at the time? was he not a valuable contributor to the Church overall? By your stance, we might need to discard everything he wrote.Not. You are the one "psychologizing" on why Tertullian felt comfortable taking on a doctrine. Why does Tertullian never appeal to Apostolic teaching on the subject to note that his is the view of the Apostles? The aberrant nature of his doctrine of baptism is very germane as is his willingness to later abandon all Christian orthodoxy. If we're going to evaluate the character of a man then the fact that he abandoned Christian orthodoxy wholesale is completely germane to whether he's "held fast" by historical orthodoxy on a particular doctrine.