Tertullian taught Christ made everything in heaven and earth, and also taught the Holy Spirit as the paraclete from page 31
This is a good history of the early church.
C. Tertullian's doctrine of the oikonomia of God and its Stoic source.
After having condemned Praxeas doctrine, Tertullian explains the true belief accepted by those who are “better instructed by the Paraclete,” implying that his theory of the Trinity was a product of Montanist speculation. God is one, but has the following internal structure, described in Tertullian's terminology as “dispensation”or “economy” (sub hac tamen dispensatione quam oikonomiam dicimus): he has a physical pneumatic Son (Filius), his Word (Sermo), who proceeded from himself. Through this Son all things are made, so he had a function of creating and maintaining the world. The Son was sent by the Father into the virgin and was born as a man and God, as Son of Man and as Son of God (Filium hominis et Filium Dei), and is called Jesus the Anointed (Christ). After his death he was resurrected by the Father, taken into heaven (in caelo) to be seated at the right side of the Father. He will come to judge all men, dead and alive, before the institution of God‟s kingdom on earth. In the meantime the Father in heaven sent the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete (Spiritum sanctum, Paracletum).165 Before Tertullian there was a tradition of the unity of the Godhead as a concept derived from the Hebrew tradition, and a tradition of the triad, of his appearance and function, as formulated by the Apologists and based on Philonic hypostatization of the divine powers. Today Christians speculate that the trinitarian doctrine was present in the baptismal formula, but it was before Tertullian who formulated it explicitly. Tertullian's “rule of faith” is based on the specific interpretation of the story found in the Gospels and the formula of the baptismal invocation found in all early Christian writers. This rule also imposed on him the necessity to formulate a doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The Apologists were preoccupied with the Greek concepts of the Logos and treated the Holy Spirit in a fashion analogical to the Logos. Tertullian made the Holy Spirit related to the Son as the Son is related to the Father. The original sense of the crucial terms used for the development of Tertullian‟s doctrine is already changed in the Greek environment. And Tertullian 32 32 makes a special reference to the “beginning of the Gospel,” (ab initio euangelii), presumably that of John 1:1, as the source of his opinion, to him the true and original story. Any later theory must be considered a heresy. Quo preaeque aduersus uniuersas haereses iam hinc praeiudicatum sit id esse uerum quodcumque primum, id esse adulterum quodcumque posterius.166 The innovation introduced by Tertullian was the ascription of the relative unity to the triadic entities found in the Christian Logos theory as the unity of substance. Starting from the baptismal formula, Tertullian distinguished three persons and prolations with specific names in one God who is the common substance as a mode of existence of God and his economy, that is, his internal organization. Though Tertullian never defined what he meant by the term “person,” we must understand this word as a depiction of a distinct divine individual with distinct quality and function. Substance is the unifying element in the divinity while person is the differentiating characteristic in the life of God. If so, then there is no real division in the Godhead, only purely relative modal distinction. But then Tertullian is in contradiction when he claims a reality of the Word, and of the Holy Spirit by extension, as a substantiva res and a rational substance. Thus in any case it seems to be a verbal device to reconcile a popular triadic interpretation of the terms found in the New Testament and in the baptismal formula with the requirement of the oneness of God. Such a term has obvious origin from the analogy with the human entity which is defined by a set of physical and behavioral characteristics, and its status is regulated by laws in a society. This unity of the three entities is produced by the unity of substance (per substantiae unitatem) though its structure, that is distribution of one into the three, still remains a mystery (oikonomiae sacramentum). Nevertheless Tertullian found a formula which would verbally justify the claim: the three (the Father, the Son, and the [Holy] Spirit) are formed not in condition (statu), but in degree or sequence (gradu); not in substance (substantia), but in form (forma); not in
power (potentate), but in manifestation (specie); yet of one substance, and of one condition, and of one power, inasmuch as he is one God, from whom (unus Deus ex quo) these degrees and forms and manifestations are designated (deputantur), under the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And Tertullian promises to show how these three entities can be differentiated numerically without division. Moreover, he developed a concept of the prolation of the Holy Spirit from the Son, as the Son is a prolation of the Father.167 In Tertullian‟s understanding, heaven is a concrete physical place located above the earth, the abode of divine beings in the pneumatic realm of the world whose substance must be “ether,” “noetic fire” or “pneuma,” in accordance with the current view.168 This must be also the substance of all divine beings. Tertullian faces a problem, however, namely, how to reconcile the unity of God with the statements about the three entities, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit found in the New Testament writings, but understood and interpreted in the Greek naturalistic mode. Tertullian is aware that his opinion is not the only one; on the contrary the majority of believers cannot understand how one can believe in one God who may have his own dispensation in three entities. In popular folkloric interpretation they were considered three divinities. Thus the pressing issue was finding a formula which would reconcile their mutual relationship with the requirement of the unity of the divinity. He could not accept the solution proposed by Praxeas who reasoned that one cannot believe in one God in any other way than by saying that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are the very sameself, since this would imply that the Father or God suffered himself on the cross. The task of Tertullian, therefore, was to develop a formula by which the complete deity of Jesus and the reality of his identity as the Logos or the Mediator is distinct from the source-deity yet without creating two Gods. In Logos theory the distinction was introduced between the transcendent God and the derivative God, the absolute and the relative, and special problems arise when we consider now the
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