This paper analyses Tertullian’s innovative syntagm “religious freedom” (libertas religionis) from several perspectives, presenting the historical and literary context that enabled
the Carthaginian thinker to coin this idea. In the second part of the study, which is devoted
to a critical reflection on the relationship between religious freedom and religious pluralism
in Tertullian’s optic, it becomes clear that when the principle of religious freedom emerged
at the end of the 2nd century in North Africa, at least in the case of the Carthaginian teacher,
there was no talk of any religious indifferentism. Tertullian makes the greatest Pauline-like
concession to other religions in merely recognising that other religions, even if unconsciously,
already worship the one true God, the God of the Christians. For Tertullian believes that every
human soul is already Christian by nature, but this belief cannot be equated with a principled
acceptance of religious pluralism in the sense of indifferentism.
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