Jenson summarizes several thread of Tertullian’s Trinitarian theology: “Tertullian’s interpretation of God was far more biblical than that of the Apologists. He explicitly distinguished the living personal God of Scripture from both the numina of the old Roman religion and the abstract deity of Hellenism . . . . So far from using ‘God’ as an adjective, he took it for a proper name. And despite formal adherence to the negative theology and lapses into more conventional caution, at the height of his christological passion he can defiantly affirm the ‘humiliations and sufferings of God,’ in full knowledge of the offense to what is also for him the only sensible theology. ‘What is unworthy for God is needed for me . . . . The Son of God has died; it is to be believed because it is unlikely.’ Even the unchangeability axiom could be defied: because nothing is equal to God, so that he has no effective opposite, ‘God can be changed into all things and yet remain as he is.’”

Tertullian also focused on the verbal character of Logos , as opposite to the rational emphasis of the Apologists. He wrote, “God, like us, is rational by silently thinking through and disposing with himself what is abou to be uttered.” Jenson glosses this as “God planned the world and its history in interior discourse. Then he spoke .”