Commenting on Tertullian’s anthropology and how it relates to the nature of Christ’s own humanity, E. Jerome Van Kuiken wrote:
Tertullian’s Anthropology
Against the heretics, Tertullian insists that the Creator is the one true and good God, who made the first humans as good, psyschomatically unified beings. Their souls imaged God through the rational ordering of their emotions and physical urges. Despite possessing all the knowledge and power needed to remain obedient to God, they freely chose to heed Satan’s seductions and thereby inflicted a double bondage on all their offspring from birth onwards: the external enticements of evil spirits and the internal affliction of a sinful ‘second nature (allia natura)’ with its irrational impulses towards evil. This sinful nature, however, has not superseded the original, divinely created good nature; it has only shrouded it. Thus all humanity is a mixture of inherent goodness and adherent evil (De Anima 16, 39-41).
It is this sinful human nature which Christ assumed, but in the act of its assumption he purified it. Against the heretical claims that if Christ took our flesh, then his flesh must have been sinful, Tertullian rejoins, ‘By clothing himself with our flesh he made it his own, and by making it his own he made it non-sinful’ (On the Flesh of Christ, 16). The implication is that Mary’s flesh, from whence Christ derived his humanity (On the Flesh of Christ, 17-23) was sinful. Tertullian repeats Irenaeus’ typology whereby the Virgin Mary’s vivifying faith in the angel’s words remedies the Virgin Eve’s fatal faith in the serpent’s words (On the Flesh of Christ, 17. Cf. Against Heresies, 3.21.10). He also, however, accuses Mary of unbelief in her Son during his earthly ministry (On the Flesh of Christ, 7). The sinlessness of Christ’s humanity, then, is due not to his mother but to God’s own incarnating action. Again like Irenaeus, Tertullian connects the Virgin Birth with body Adam’s prelapsarian formation rom virgin soil and Christians’ regeneration (On the Flesh of Christ, 17; 20; cf. 4; De Anima, 40-41). The former parallel indicates how Christ may be fully human apart from being procreated sexually, and it identifies him as the new, sinless Adam, the second founder of the human race; it does not, though, imply that Mary’s flesh existed in an unfallen state, except in the analogous sense of being virginal. The latter parallel signifies a movement from a postlapsarian condition of sinful flesh (our own, in Christians’ case; Mary’s, in Christ’s case) to a new, sin-free life.
Tertullian holds in creative tension three crucial propositions: the sinful condition of flesh generally; the sinlessness of Christ’s flesh as a victory over the former condition; and the continuing reality of the substance of the flesh, which is not abolished in the abolition of its sin. Thus the Carthaginian confesses Christ as the single sinless human, whose soul experienced anger and concupiscence (here simply meaning strong desire) without defilement because they were subject to his rationality (De Anima, 16) ‘neither . . . [was his flesh] sinful, when in it there was no guile’ (ita nec peccatricem in qua dolus non fuit [On the Flesh of Christ, 16]). Yet the marvel is that he is sinless in the very same flesh as ours: ‘For what would it amount to if it was in a better kind of flesh, of a different (that is, a non-sinful) nature, that he destroyed the birthmark of sin’ (On the Flesh of Christ, 16). (E. Jerome Van Kuiken, Christ’s Humanity in Current and Ancient Controversy: Fallen or Not? [London: T&T Clark, 2017, 2019], 130-32)
The above is of theological importance for many reasons, not the least is that (1) it shows that Tertullian did not believe that fallen humanity were totally depraved, contra Reformed theology and (2) is further evidence of the ahistorical nature of the Immaculate Conception, as Tertullian (and Irenaeus) believed Mary was guilty of personal sins and did not believe that Christ’s sinless humanity was the result of Mary being conceived without sin (many RC apologists claim that, for Christ to be sinless, Mary must have been sinless, too). For more on this issue, see:
