Part Two: Tertullian
Author’s Note
These three companion essays arose from my engagement with a documentary on Tertullian and its published transcript. [https://youtu.be/j2bfxwdQvzQ?si=LZTakl99Ga2e4tVB] Selected excerpts are quoted where necessary for precision, but the reflections, questions, and critiques that follow are my own. The intention is not to reproduce the documentary, but to think with it—and at times beyond it.
Introduction:
I write this not as a Christian insider, but as a Hindu bhakta who has personal relationship with the Lord.
I have no authority to prescribe solutions to the Church. I stand outside it. Yet I cannot ignore its history, because I have drawn nourishment from it.
The question that troubles me is not whether creeds should exist. Communities need structure. Even in Hindu sampradayas there are doctrines, lineages, disciplines.
The deeper question is: can devotion survive without becoming either private sentiment or institutional control?
Tertullian’s story forces this question upon us.
The Early Church Had No Final Canon
When Tertullian embraced Montanism around AD 207, there was no finalized New Testament canon. No Nicene Creed. No centralized authority in the later sense.
Revelation was still being discerned. Apostolic tradition was still being consolidated.
When Montanus claimed fresh prophecy, the Church had to decide:
Is the Spirit still speaking in new authoritative ways?
Or is revelation closed?
Behind the doctrinal debate lay another concern — control.
If anyone can claim “The Spirit told me,” how does a community remain unified?
But if the Spirit is confined only to past documents, does faith become bureaucratic?
The tension remains alive even today.
Control of Doctrine — Control of Life
Over time, the Church did not merely guard doctrine. It increasingly regulated practice — worship, marriage, festivals, discipline.
In India, we see a fascinating example.
After Second Vatican Council, many Catholic churches in Tamil Nadu began celebrating Pongal collectively within church premises, contextualizing it as a harvest thanksgiving. Sweet Pongal is cooked, prayers offered.
Yet most Catholic families do not celebrate Pongal in their homes the way Hindu families do. The festival becomes institutionalized rather than domestic.
Meanwhile, no Hindu temple organizes Pongal in the same centralized way; it remains primarily a home celebration. Even where women cook Pongal in temples during specific festivals — such as in certain temples of Tamil Nadu [not associated with Pongal festival but only related to that particular temple]— each does so individually, offering from her own pot.
This difference is subtle but significant.
Institutional religion often absorbs culture — but in absorbing it, reshapes it.
The same happens with theology. Once doctrine becomes dogma merely to be recited, spiritual energy seeks other channels.
Social Media, AI, and Fragmented Fellowship
Today the whirlpool is even stronger.
Spiritual seekers increasingly turn to videos, online discussions, academic lectures — even AI — for emotional and intellectual support. I myself watch university discussions, theological debates, philosophical lectures.
But what happens to embodied fellowship?
Faith in the Lord, by its own nature, demands collective response. One cannot have a purely private bhakti. I may have a personal relationship with the Lord — but I cannot have a private bhakti cut off from other bhaktas.
And yet institutional structures often suffocate, while unstructured spirituality dissolves into individualism.
Where does this end?
The Return of What Was Suppressed
One cannot help noticing that in institutional Christianity a careful distinction developed between “revelation” and other forms of spiritual experience. Revelation came to be understood as uniquely apostolic — completed, consolidated through canonical Scripture, creed, and ecclesial authority. Personal experiences were not denied, but they were placed in a different category: inspiration, guidance, illumination — not revelation in the full sense.
Perhaps such distinctions were necessary for preserving unity. Yet one may still ask whether the line between revelation and lived experience is always as clear as theology suggests. When spiritual experience is reclassified rather than rejected, has it truly been separated — or simply renamed?
This tension continues to surface wherever believers wrestle with the question: how does the living voice of the Spirit relate to a closed canon?
Perhaps this is the lesson.
When life is divided into watertight compartments — doctrine here, culture there, devotion somewhere else — human beings resist. Spiritual, social, and cultural needs overlap.
When one need is unmet inside, it is sought outside.
No Accusation — Only Questions
These are not accusations against Christianity. Nor are they triumphalist claims about Hinduism.
Each tradition wrestles with its own tensions.
The Church cannot return to a purely informal stage; Christian faith requires corporate identity.
Hinduism cannot pretend to be without structure; sampradayas also guard teaching.
The question is humility.
Can doctrine remain a living conversation instead of a closed verdict?
Can institutions guard without suffocating?
Can zeal avoid becoming exclusion?
Heresies Never Die
Tertullian fought heresy fiercely.
Later, he himself stood outside the boundaries of what became orthodoxy.
Centuries afterward, much of his theological language nourished the very tradition that distanced itself from him.
This is not irony alone. It reveals something about how religious communities mature.
What is first explored passionately may later be regulated carefully.
What is regulated may harden into formula.
And what hardens may eventually provoke fresh protest.
The cycle continues not because truth itself shifts, but because living conviction gradually becomes institutional memory.
One generation’s dangerous excess becomes another generation’s accepted doctrine.
One generation’s safeguard becomes another’s suffocation.
And so new movements arise — sometimes disruptive, sometimes renewing.
Perhaps awareness of this pattern can soften our judgments.
As a Hindu bhakta who loves the Lord, I stand at the edge of this history — not to accuse, not to romanticize rebellion, but to observe how faith seeks balance between fire and form.
If devotion becomes merely private, it fades.
If authority becomes merely control, it constricts.
If doctrine becomes merely repetition, it loses vitality.
Fire cannot be completely contained within walls.
But fire without walls burns everything.
The challenge is not to eliminate tension.
It is to live humbly within it.
And perhaps that humility is the only safeguard against the endless reappearance of what we once hurriedly called heresy.
Ashram, February, 16, 2026
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