e _fides credenda_
and theology was noticed neither by Irenaeus nor by Hippolytus and
Tertullian. According to Irenaeus I. 10. 3 this distinction is merely
quantitative. Here faith and theological knowledge are still completely
intermixed. Whilst stating and establishing the doctrines of tradition
with the help of the New Testament, and revising and fixing them by
means of intelligent deduction, the Fathers think they are setting forth
the faith itself and nothing else. Anything more than this is only
curiosity not unattended with danger to Christians. Theology is
interpreted faith.[474]

Corresponding to the baptismal confession there thus arose at the first
a loose system of dogmas which were necessarily devoid of strict style,
definite principle, or fixed and harmonious aim. In this form we find
them with special plainness in Tertullian.[475] This writer was still
completely incapable of inwardly connecting his rational (Stoic)
theology, as developed by him for apologetic purposes, with the
Christological doctrines of the _regula fidei_, which, after the example
of Irenaeus, he constructed and defended from Scripture and tradition in
opposition to heresy. Whenever he attempts in any place to prove the
_intrinsic_ necessity of these dogmas, he seldom gets beyond rhetorical
statements, holy paradoxes, or juristic forms. As a systematic thinker,
a cosmologist, moralist, and jurist rather than a theosophist, as a
churchman, a masterly defender of tradition, as a Christian exclusively
guided in practical life by the strict precepts and hopes of the Gospel,
his theology, if by that we understand his collective theological
disquisitions, is completely devoid of unity, and can only be termed a
mixture of dissimilar and, not unfrequently, contradictory propositions,
which admit of no comparison with the older theology of Valentinus or
the later system of Origen.[476] To Tertullian everything lies side by
side; problems which chance to turn up are just as quickly solved. The
specific faith of Christians is indeed no longer, as it sometimes seems
to be in Justin's case, a great apparatus of proof for the doctrines of
the only true philosophy; it rather stands, in its own independent
value, side by side with these, partly in a crude, partly in a developed
form; but inner principles and aims are nearly everywhere sought for in
vain.[477] In spite of this he possesses inestimable importance in the
history of dogma; for he develope