It's ironic that the great 2nd century Church father and coiner of the oxymoron "Credo quia absurdum" would himself become something of an oxymoron - a heretic who started out as a staunch defender of orthodoxy:
Heresies, [Tertullian] begins, must not astonish us, for they were prophesied. Heretics urge the text, "Seek and ye shall find", but this was not said to Christians; we have a rule of faith to be accepted without question. "Let curiosity give place to faith and vain glory make way for salvation", so Tertullian parodies a line of Cicero's. The heretics argue out of Scripture; but, first, we are forbidden to consort with a heretic after one rebuke has been delivered, and secondly, disputation results only in blasphemy on the one side and indignation on the other, while the listener goes away more puzzled than he came. The real question is, "To whom does the Faith belong? Whose are the Scriptures? By whom, through whom, when and to whom has been handed down the discipline by which we are Christians? The answer is plain: Christ sent His apostles, who founded churches in each city, from which the others have borrowed the tradition of the Faith and the seed of doctrine and daily borrow in order to become churches; so that they also are Apostolic in that they are the offspring of the Apostolic churches. All are that one Church which the Apostles founded, so long as peace and intercommunion are observed. Therefore the testimony to the truth is this: We communicate with the apostolic Churches".He thought some sins - such as murder, apostasy, blasphemy, adultery and fornication - were unforgivable after Baptism, and in his fervor for the Faith he presumably considered himself more Catholic than the bishop. Interestingly, he formed his opinions before the Church condemned them, so he came to his rigorism and Montanism honestly but could not let them go, in the way all of us tend to form opinions and then fall madly in love with them. I wonder if there isn't a parallel in the recent Church. By the mid 1960s it was widely assumed the prohibition against artificial birth control would be relaxed and by the early '68 many clerics and theologians had already hardened their opinion. So when the encyclical Humane Vitae came out it was, for them, too late.
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