Tertullian is a gift and a problem at once. He was a North African convert from Carthage who gave Latin-speaking Christianity its first working vocabulary, including the word for Trinity. He also wrote about women in language that should never be repeated from a pulpit. The honest way to remember him is to keep both facts in view and never let one cancel the other. His theology stands or falls on whether it matches Scripture, not on whether he was a good man. His contempt for women deserves to be named plainly, whatever else he achieved.
This guide is for practicing that kind of remembrance. You can work through it alone in an hour or two, or with a group over one long session or two shorter ones. The center of it is a reading exercise with Tertullian’s own writing. The aim is not to finish with a verdict on him. The aim is to finish able to say, with evidence, what we can keep from him and what we must leave behind.
Two ways to get an African father wrong
Start with the pressure this subject carries. For Black Christians who have been told the faith is foreign to them, figures like Tertullian are part of the answer. Christianity has deep African roots, and a Carthaginian writing around 200 AD is hard evidence of that. Recovering him matters. Recovery brings a temptation, though: once a figure becomes proof of belonging, admitting his faults can feel like handing ammunition to the other side.
The opposite failure is just as common. Someone learns the inspiring version of a hero, later stumbles on something ugly, and walks away from the whole inheritance. Lisa Fields named this pattern directly in her conversation with Dr. David Wilhite, who teaches early Christian history at Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University. She observed that “sometimes when we’re retelling history, we can only tell the good parts and then somebody may later find a bad part and they’ll jettison everything.” She added that “we live in these kind of extremes” and argued that “telling the good, bad, ugly upfront is helpful.”
Her point goes beyond tactics. A heritage that only survives when its flaws stay hidden cannot hold much weight. Telling the truth up front is what makes the inheritance safe to receive.
Pause here. Before reading further, write one sentence about how you first learned about the early church, if you did at all. Was it presented as European? As heroic? As something you had never heard of? Keep that sentence. You will come back to it.
What is actually on the scale
Honest weighing requires knowing what is being weighed. Here are the items that matter most for this question. The paired article tells the fuller story.
On the side of contribution. Wilhite explains that “Tertullian has to invent a Latin, a Christian vocabulary.” He coined the Latin Trinitas and described God as one substance and three persons more than a century before the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople used that formula. Wilhite gives the reason for the match: “that’s because they’re all reading the same scriptures and trying to put it in the most precise way.” Tertullian also refused to separate belief from life. Alongside the rule of faith, Wilhite says, he spoke of a rule of discipline, and “this was a life of prayer and fasting and devotion and giving to the poor.” Early Christians, in Wilhite’s account, “could never envision separating it from orthopraxis.”
On the side of harm. Wilhite assigns his students a treatise on how women should dress and tells them “this is where you get the good, the bad, and the ugly” in Tertullian. In it, Tertullian tells each woman in his audience that she is an Eve and calls women the devil’s gateway. Wilhite is blunt that Tertullian has “some pretty awful rhetoric when it comes to women.” He calls the treatise’s argument close to victim blaming, says plainly “I don’t endorse this,” and judges that what the rhetoric reveals about Tertullian’s view of women is “something that has to be taken seriously.”
On the side of complication. Wilhite does not let the story end there, and he does not turn the complications into excuses. Read further and the treatise’s main target turns out to be the showy display of wealth. Some recent rhetorical studies, he reports, suggest Tertullian is “not quite as bad as he sounds,” and “there are some who’ve tried to defend him and say in his context, he’s somewhat liberating to women.” Elsewhere Tertullian “actually wants women to prophesy in the church service” and cites the visions of the martyr Perpetua. Yet Wilhite still concludes that the rhetoric probably reveals “ways that he degradates women in his own thinking.”
Notice what Wilhite does with all of this. He does not average it into a lukewarm middle. He keeps two clear judgments side by side: Tertullian “has a lot of profound things to say about what it means to be human, both men and women,” and “we’ve gotta be aware of the problems with him.” He also admits the limits of the evidence. He wishes “we had more information on him to tell us sort of what he really thinks.” Holding a verdict loosely where the record is thin is part of the honesty too.
How Scripture teaches us to remember flawed teachers
The Bible does not hand us spotless heroes, and it gives us patterns for remembering imperfect ones. Read these passages slowly, ideally aloud.
Galatians 2:11. “But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed.” Paul is writing about an apostle and a pillar of the church. He does not erase Peter’s authority, and he does not hide Peter’s failure. In the surrounding verses the issue is Peter pulling back from table fellowship with Gentile believers, a failure of how he treated people. Ask what Paul’s handling of Peter permits and what it forbids.
1 Thessalonians 5:21. “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” The verb is active. Testing is the reader’s job, and it means keeping something, not only rejecting things. A tradition received without testing has not really been received.
Hebrews 13:7. “Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God: whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation.” In KJV English, “conversation” means manner of life. The writer asks believers to remember teachers by looking at how their lives played out. Remembrance in Scripture is attentive, not sentimental.
Genesis 1:27. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” This is the measuring line Tertullian’s rhetoric fails. Calling women the devil’s gateway is not a cultural quirk to shrug at. It contradicts what the text says about who women are. Notice, though, that this same Scripture is what Tertullian was trying to read when he found words for the triune God. We measure him by the same text he served.
Observation prompt: Which of these passages warns more against flattery, and which warns more against dismissal? Is there one that does both?
Whose experience is being remembered?
Cultural memory always chooses a point of view. When Tertullian is celebrated as an African genius, the story is usually told from the side of doctrine and from the side of men arguing with other men. Ask the question differently: what was it like to sit in his audience as a woman and hear yourself called an Eve?
The evidence here is genuinely mixed. Wilhite reports that the rhetorical clues suggest many women in the audience likely agreed with Tertullian and were probably not the wealthy women he was attacking. That is a real interpretive possibility, and it shows that “the women” of Carthage were not one group with one reaction. It does not settle whether the language did damage. Words aimed at a few can still teach many to think less of half the church.
There is also Perpetua. A young African woman martyred for her faith, she had visions that Tertullian himself cited. Her presence in the record is a counterexample inside his own corpus. When you remember Tertullian, Perpetua belongs in the frame, not as a footnote that rescues him, but as a witness who shows the North African church was never only the men who wrote its treatises.
Keep one distinction clear here. Tertullian’s support for women prophesying is a historical fact about him. It does not settle present questions about women in church leadership, where faithful Christians who love Scripture still land in different places.
A practice: read one page of Tertullian yourself
The best way to learn honest remembrance is to do it with a primary source rather than a summary. Tertullian’s surviving works are freely available in English translation online. Choose one short passage: the closing of his work on prayer, a section of the treatise on baptism, or a section of the treatise on women’s dress. Groups will learn the most if different people read different passages and compare.
Wilhite offers a method for reading a writer who is “always writing against someone.” He suggests stopping to ask, “now why is he saying this? Who’s he arguing against?” Because Tertullian is always arguing, Wilhite says, you can watch “his doctrines and his beliefs kind of forged in this fire of debate.” Use his questions, then add three of your own.
- Locate the opponent. Who is he arguing against in this passage? What would that person have said?
- Trace the source of the claim. Mark each major claim with an S if it rests on Scripture he cites or clearly echoes, a C if it seems to come from his culture or temperament, and an H if it diminishes people God made in his image. Some lines may get two marks.
- Name the absent voice. Who is being talked about but not heard? What might they have said back?
- Decide what to keep. Write one sentence you could honestly quote from this passage, and one you would refuse to repeat. Then explain each choice in a sentence.
If you read the end of the prayer treatise, notice how Tertullian asks his readers to pray for him as a sinner. Wilhite draws the conclusion: “So he still saw himself as in need of grace late in life.” Ask whether that detail changes how you weigh the harsher passages. Should it, or should it not?
For those leading a group
This material can land differently depending on who is in the room. Some women may have heard language like Tertullian’s in their own churches, and the conversation may touch something personal for them. Let people speak from experience if they choose, and never require it. Keep the focus on the texts rather than on individuals.
Watch for two easy exits. One is defensiveness: “it was a different time.” Wilhite does acknowledge the context Tertullian was bound in, but he still insists, “we gotta do better with our rhetoric today.” The other is dismissal: “why read him at all?” Bring the group back to the evidence on each side. The goal is a group that can hold a sharp judgment and a real debt in the same sentence.
Discussion questions
- Lisa Fields warns about retelling only the good parts. Where have you seen a community, a family history, or a church tradition protect a figure by leaving things out? What did that cost later?
- Tertullian’s Trinitarian language survived because later Christians reading the same Scriptures found it accurate. What is the difference between trusting a teacher and trusting a teaching? Can you separate them in practice?
- Paul publicly opposed Peter without disowning him. What would it look like to treat Tertullian the way Paul treated Peter? Where does that comparison break down?
- Wilhite reports that some scholars think Tertullian’s women’s dress treatise was more liberating in context than it sounds. What evidence would you need to find that persuasive? What would still trouble you even if it were true?
- When African Christian history is used to answer the claim that Christianity is a white man’s religion, how might that purpose shape which parts of the history get told? How can that story be told truthfully without being weakened?
- Look at the sentence you wrote at the start about how you first learned church history. After this study, what would you add to it or change?
Carrying it forward
Honest remembrance is a skill, and Tertullian is a good place to practice it because his case is so stark. The skill transfers to every figure you were taught to admire, and to every one you were taught to reject.
Before the week ends, pick one person from your own tradition, a preacher, author, or historical leader whose work shaped you. Write down one thing they gave you that you intend to keep, and one thing they said or did that you will not carry forward. Then ask whether you can say both out loud to someone else without softening either one.