Episode 135: Stories from the Church Family Tree, Part 6--Tertullian

As the keep rummaging through the old church family photo album, so to speak, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve take a look at an early church teacher who is a complicated figure.  Tertullian is celebrated for being a brilliant mind who was the first major Christian figure to write in Latin, rather than Greek, wrote several works presenting the Christian faith to a hostile empire, and was responsible for essential ideas to "orthodox" Christian teaching as "the Trinity."  He was passionate about the church's witness through suffering rather than violence (and wrote that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church" as well as that "when Jesus told Peter to put his sword away he disarmed all Christians forever"), and he reveled in the idea that the Christian message of a God on the cross rising from the dead sounded impossible--that's how you know it's true, Tertullian said!  On the other hand, Tertullian ended up becoming associated with a splinter group called the Montanists and ended up being deliberately swept under the rug by later church memory for being tangled up in a group that seemed like a cult.  How can we remember that both are a part of this one person's legacy, and learn from all of it?  That's the challenge in today's episode of "Crazy Faith Talk"--join the conversation!