God Made Small

God swears, too. By the God of Marcion, I wonder? No, no, he says: “By a far emptier oath than that — by himself!” And what was he to do, when he knew of no other God — especially when the very point he was swearing to was that besides himself there is no God at all? So which do you catch him at: swearing falsely, or swearing an empty oath? He cannot be made to look like a perjurer, since on your own account he did not know there was another God; swearing by the one he knew, he committed no perjury. And it was no empty oath to swear that there is no other God. It would have been empty only if nobody believed there were other gods — but people did: the idol-worshippers of that day, and the heretics of this one. So he swears by himself, so that you will believe God even when he swears that besides himself there is no other God at all. And it was you, Marcion, who forced God to it. Even that early you were in view. [a]

So if he swears in his promises and in his threats alike, and by that means wrings out of us a faith that came hard at first, then nothing that gets people to believe in God is unworthy of God.

But God, you say, was petty even in his ferocity, when he was angry at the people for consecrating the calf and made this request of his servant Moses: “Let me alone, so that my anger may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and I will make you into a great nation.” And so you hold that Moses is better than his God — Moses who begged the anger off, who actually turned it aside. Moses said: “You will not do this; or else destroy me along with them.” You are as much to be pitied as the people were, since you do not recognize Christ, sketched out beforehand in the figure of Moses — the one who pleads with the Father and offers his own life for the people’s salvation. It is enough, in any case, that the nation really was handed over to Moses there and then. What the servant was in a position to ask of the Lord, the Lord had already demanded of himself. That is why he said to his servant: “Let me alone, that I may consume them.” He said it so that Moses, by pleading and by offering himself, might hold the sentence back — and so that you might learn from a case like this how much a faithful man and a prophet is allowed with God.

Now, to clear off briefly the rest of the items you have been busy collecting — petty, feeble, unworthy, as you call them — for pulling the Creator down, I will put the answer in one plain principle. God could have had no dealings with human beings at all unless he had taken human emotions and human feelings on himself. They were his way of tempering the force of his majesty, which a man’s moderate capacity could never have withstood; and he did it by a lowering of himself that was indeed beneath him, but was necessary for man, and for that very reason turned out worthy of God — because nothing is so worthy of God as the saving of man. [g]

If I were arguing with pagans I would stay longer on this, though the ground is not very different with heretics. Since you yourselves have by now come to believe that God took up lodging in the shape of a human being and in every other condition of one, you plainly do not need convincing that God fitted himself to what is human; your own faith has you tied. For if your god, from his higher condition, laid the supreme dignity of his majesty as low as death — death on a cross — why can you not allow that some small doings suit our God as well, and gentler ones at that than Jewish insults and gibbets and graves? Are these the small doings that are from now on to count against Christ — Christ, who is subject to human feeling — as a reason why he cannot share in that God whom you reproach for sharing human qualities?

Now we hold that it was always Christ who acted in the name of God the Father; that it was he himself who from the beginning had dealings with men; he himself who met with the patriarchs and the prophets; that he was the Son of the Creator, and his Word, whom God made his Son by bringing him forth out of himself, and then set over every arrangement and every carrying out of his will, making him a little lower than the angels, as it is written in David. In that lowered condition he received from the Father a commission in the very matters you find fault with as human — rehearsing from the very beginning, even then, the human state he was in the end to become. He is the one who comes down. He is the one who asks the questions. He is the one who makes the demands. He is the one who swears.

As for the Father, the Gospel we hold in common will testify that he was never seen, in the word of Christ: “No one knows the Father except the Son.” And in the Old Testament he had already declared: “No one shall see me and live.” He means that the Father is the invisible one, and that the one who appeared as Son of God was God on the Father’s authority and in the Father’s name. With us, Christ is received under his own person as Christ, because that is how he is our God too.

So whatever qualities you demand as worthy of God are to be looked for in the Father: invisible, unapproachable, unruffled — the God, so to speak, of the philosophers. And the qualities you condemn as unworthy are to be reckoned the Son’s: the one who has been seen and heard and met with, the Father’s witness and servant, joining man and God in himself — God in the mighty acts, man in the weak ones — so that he may give to man as much as he takes from God. What you count the whole disgrace of my God is in fact the sacred design by which man is saved. God talked with man so that man might learn to act as God acts. God dealt with man on level terms so that man might be able to deal with God on level terms. God was found small, so that man might become very great.

You who look down on a God like that — I hardly know whether you sincerely believe that God was crucified. How twisted you are, then, about the Creator’s two characters! You name him Judge, and then condemn as cruelty the severity of a judge, which never goes further than the merits of the case. You demand that God be perfectly good, and then despise as pettiness the gentleness that came of his kindness, which stooped to talk with man at man’s own modest level. He pleases you neither great nor small — not as your judge, and not as your friend. And what if the same features turn up in your god? That he too is a judge we have already shown in its proper place; that being a judge he must be severe; and that being severe he must be cruel as well — if “cruel” is the word for it.

Now for the weak acts and the spiteful ones and the other marks you set against the Creator: I will bring on antitheses of my own, to match Marcion’s. If my God knew of nobody above himself, your god knew just as little that there was anybody beneath him. It is what Heraclitus the Obscure said: up or down, it comes to the same thing. And if he really did know, he ought to have come out against him from the beginning. [u]

Sin and death, and the author of sin, the devil, and all the evil that my God allowed to exist — your god allowed every bit of it as well, since he allowed my God to allow it. Our God changed his mind; so did yours, for the one who turned his eye on the human race so late changed the mind that had refused for so long to turn it. Our God repented of harm he had meant; so did yours, for in coming round at last to man’s salvation he showed exactly the repentance a wrong deed calls for — repentance for the long stretch in which he had looked the other way. And neglecting man’s salvation will be reckoned a wrong deed for this reason alone: in your god’s case it took repentance to put it right.

Our God, you say, ordered a fraud — but the fraud was about gold and silver. Since a man is worth more than gold and silver, your god is the greater swindler by that much, for he defrauds a man of his own Lord and Creator. Our God demands an eye for an eye; but your god does a bigger injury, by your own lights, when he stops a man from paying back. For what man, once struck, will not strike back rather than wait to be struck again? Our God, you say, does not know whom he ought to choose. Neither does yours — if he had known how it would come out, he would not have chosen the traitor Judas. If you charge the Creator with a lie in any instance, there was a far bigger lie in your Christ, whose very body was not real.

Many were consumed by my God’s severity; and the ones your god does not save he just as surely consigns to ruin. My God ordered a man to be killed; your god willed his own death — no less a murderer against himself than against the man by whose hand he meant to die. And I will prove to Marcion besides that his god killed a great many, for he made every man a murderer, and so doomed him to perish, except where a man had done Christ no wrong. But the straight strength of truth is content with few resources. It is falsehood that needs a great many.

I would have gone at Marcion’s Antitheses hand to hand and at greater length, if a more thorough demolition of them were needed to secure the Creator’s character as a good God and a judge, in line with the examples of both which we have shown to be so entirely worthy of God. But since these two qualities, goodness and justice, together make up the full measure of a divine being who is almighty, I can be satisfied with the short refutation of the Antitheses I have now made — a book that tries to draw distinctions out of the Creator’s own turns of character, or his laws, or his great works, and so to cut Christ off from the Creator: the wholly good from the judge, the merciful from the ruthless, the one who brings salvation from the one who brings ruin. [af]

In fact they do the opposite. They join the two beings they lay out in those differing qualities — qualities that go together perfectly well in God. Take away the title of Marcion’s book, and the design and aim of the work itself, and you could not ask for a better demonstration that one and the same God was both entirely good and a judge, since it is only in God that the two characters properly sit together. The very effort spent in his selected examples to set Christ against the Creator does all the more to bring them together. For the divine nature — the good and the severe alike — was so completely one and the same, as those same examples and proofs like them show, that it chose to display its goodness to the very people it had first dealt with in severity. The difference in time is nothing to be surprised at: the same God was merciful later, when the trouble had been broken in, who had been so austere earlier while it was still unbroken.

So the Antitheses make it all the easier to show that the Creator’s arrangement was reformed by Christ, not demolished; restored, not shut out — especially since you cut your own god off from every bitter impulse, and so from any rivalry at all with the Creator. And if that is so, how does it come about that the Antitheses show him as the Creator’s rival on every single count? Well, even here I will grant it: in these matters my God has been a jealous God, who has taken care, and had every right to, that everything begun by him should start out with a sturdier growth in it — and taken that care by way of a good rivalry, good because it has reason in it, the kind of rivalry that works toward maturity. In that sense the world itself will own his “antitheses,” out of the opposition of its own elements, and yet it has been ordered by the highest reason there is.

So, Marcion, you most thoughtless of men, what you had to show was that one of your two gods was a god of light and the other a god of darkness. Then you would have had an easier time talking us into one being a god of goodness and the other a god of severity. As it stands, the “antithesis” — the running of things by opposites — will belong by right to the one it does in fact belong to in the running of the world.