On Modesty

Contents

Reading pages: 1–7 · 8–13 · 14–18 · 19–22

1. 1Tertullian laments the decay of modesty and attacks a bishop's edict forgiving adultery and sexual immorality after penance, defending his New Prophecy view that such sins, like second marriage, exclude from the church.
2. 2Against appeals to God's mercy, Tertullian sets God's justice and Scripture's warnings, and distinguishes remissible sins from irremissible ones, the “sins unto death.”
3. 3Penance for irremissible sins is not in vain: though the church gives no peace, it seeks pardon from God alone and may obtain it from him.
4. 4Tertullian defines his terms, adultery and sexual immorality covering every union outside marriage, including secret unions not declared before the church, and excludes unnatural vices entirely.
5. 5In the Decalogue adultery stands between idolatry and murder, bound to both; it cannot be pardoned while they are not.
6. 6Old Testament examples of pardon do not apply, since Christ has fulfilled and sharpened the law; flesh renewed in baptism is the body and temple of Christ, and only a precedent from the new era would count.
7. 7The parables of the lost sheep and coin concern heathen sinners, and even if applied to Christians they fit lesser sins, not adultery, whose guilty are counted as dead and expelled.
8. 8The prodigal son cannot stand for a Christian sinner, since the elder son does not fit the Jewish people; parables must be read by their own subject, not bent as the heretics bend them.
9. 9Parables must not be forced; the prodigal son is the heathen converted in baptism, not a Christian restored after grave sin, for that reading would make every apostasy pardonable.
10. 10Repentance belongs above all to the heathen; Tertullian rejects the idea of a second repentance for adulterers and the Shepherd of Hermas, which teaches it, in favor of John's call to amended life.
11. 11Christ's pardon of the sinful woman and the Samaritan woman, given before his passion and the Spirit's coming, sets no precedent for pardoning Christians.
12. 12The apostolic decree of Acts 15 places sexual immorality between idolatry and bloodshed as sins the Spirit forbids, so, like them, it cannot be pardoned by the church.
13. 13Tertullian argues that 2 Corinthians 2 does not pardon the incestuous man of 1 Corinthians 5, mocks the public penance of adulterers in the bishop's church, and reads “destruction of the flesh” as final exclusion.
14. 14Tertullian argues from the severe tone of 1 Corinthians that the man forgiven in 2 Corinthians was one of those merely rebuked, not the incestuous man whom Paul condemned.
15. 15The rest of 2 Corinthians, with its calls to holiness and separation from impurity, shows Paul could not have restored the incestuous man to communion.
16. 16Paul's teaching on the body as Christ's temple, on marriage as a concession against sexual immorality, and on divorce and continence shows he could never pardon adultery or incest after baptism.
17. 17Paul's letters to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans, Ephesians, and Colossians all forbid sexual immorality after baptism, so one doubtful passage cannot outweigh them.
18. 18Old Testament and apostolic texts forbid communion with the sexually immoral without any time limit; God's mercy to the repentant applies to those before baptism, while after baptism only lighter sins can be pardoned by the bishop and graver ones by God alone.
19. 19Neither Revelation's call to Jezebel nor 1 John's promises of cleansing grant pardon for adultery after baptism; John distinguishes daily sins, forgiven through Christ, from deadly sins such as murder, idolatry, apostasy, adultery, and sexual immorality.
20. 20Hebrews, which Tertullian ascribes to Barnabas, denies a second repentance, and the laws of the leper, the leprous house, and the betrothed slave woman prefigure that relapse after baptism cannot be cleansed.
21. 21Forgiving grave sins belongs to God's power, not to church discipline; Christ's word to Peter was personal to him, and the church that forgives is the church of the Spirit acting through spiritual men, not the bishops.
22. 22Tertullian denies that confessors or martyrs can forgive adultery for others, since martyrdom washes only one's own sins, and protests that adulterers are readmitted more easily than those who denied Christ under torture.