Nothing from God Comes Suddenly

Following the line of my original book — the lost one I am steadily working to replace — I come now, in the order of my subject, to Christ. Strictly this is more than I need to do, since I have already worked through the proof that there is only one God. It has surely been settled clearly enough that Christ can be the Son of no God but the Creator, once it is established that no God but the Creator is to be believed in. Christ preached that God so plainly, and the apostles one after another affirmed so plainly that Christ was the Son of no other God than the one he himself preached — that is, the Creator — that no one ever raised the question of a second God, and so of a second Christ, until Marcion's scandal. [b]

The easiest way to prove that is to review both the apostolic churches and the heretics' own. The review forces the verdict that the rule of faith has plainly been overturned wherever an opinion turns up with a later date — a point I made in my first book. Arguing it would certainly be worth something even now, when I am about to make a separate examination of Christ; for in proving Christ to be the Creator's Son I am shutting Marcion's god out altogether. Truth should use every resource she has, and not fight at half strength. By the short road of the plea in bar she wins outright. Still, I have chosen to go at my opponent eagerly, by every route and on every field, into the madness of his heresy — a madness so complete that he found it easier to suppose that a Christ had come who had never been heard of than the one who had always been foretold.

So, straight to the point. The question I have to meet is this: should Christ have come as suddenly as that? No. First, because he was the Son of God his Father. Order required that the Father announce the Son before the Son announced the Father, and that the Father testify to the Son before the Son testified to the Father. Second, because besides being Son he was also the Sent One. The backing of the Sender had to appear first, then, in a testimony given to the Sent One. A man who comes on somebody else's authority does not assert that authority for himself; he looks to it for cover, and the man who gave him the authority speaks first. [f]

So Christ will not be acknowledged as Son if the Father never named him, and will not be believed in as the Sent One if no Sender ever commissioned him — the Father, if there is one, naming him on purpose, and the Sender, if there is one, commissioning him on purpose. Anything that breaks a rule of order is open to suspicion. And the first order of all things will not allow the Father to be recognized after the Son, or the Sender after the Sent, or God after Christ. Nothing can come ahead of what it came from, either in being acknowledged or in the way it is arranged. Suddenly a Son, suddenly sent, suddenly Christ!

I should have thought, on the contrary, that nothing from God comes suddenly, because there is nothing that God has not ordered and arranged. And if it was arranged, why not foretold as well — so that the prediction proves it was arranged, and the arranging proves it was God's? Besides, so great a work, which plainly needed preparing, since it was for the salvation of the human race, could not for that very reason be a sudden thing: it was going to do its good through faith. Since it had to be believed before it could be of any use, to that extent it needed, in order to secure that faith, a preparation laid on the foundations of arrangement beforehand and announcement beforehand. Faith shaped that way could fairly be demanded of a person by God, and fairly placed in God by the person. Once knowing has made believing possible, believing is a duty — and what a man believes is what he had already learned to believe from the announcement made beforehand.

“No such procedure was necessary,” you say, “because he was going to prove straight off, by the evidence of his wonderful works, that he really was the Son, the Sent One, and the Christ of God.” But I deny that evidence of that kind, on its own, was enough of a testimony to him. He himself later stripped it of its rank. When he said that many would come and “show great signs and wonders,” enough to lead even the chosen astray, and that they were still not to be received, he showed how reckless it is to believe on the strength of signs and wonders — things that even false christs find easy to produce. Otherwise, how is it that if he meant himself to be approved and understood and received on one particular kind of evidence, namely miracles, he forbade recognizing others who had exactly the same sort of proof to show, and whose coming was going to be just as sudden and just as unbacked by any authority? [i]

Suppose that by coming before them, and getting his mighty deeds in ahead of theirs, he seized the first claim on people's faith — the way the first arrivals at the baths take the best places — and so shut out everyone who came after him. Then take care he is not caught in the latecomers' position himself, if he turns out to be behind the Creator, who had already been made known, had already worked the same kind of miracles, and had already warned people in the same way not to believe in others, even in any who might come after him. So if coming first and giving that warning is what closes faith off and limits it, he will have to be condemned himself, since he was recognized later; and the right to lay down such a rule about latecomers will belong to the Creator alone, who could be later than nobody.

And since I am about to prove that the Creator sometimes displayed through his servants long ago, and in other cases kept back for his Christ to display, the very same miracles you claim as belonging to faith in your Christ alone, I may fairly argue from that by itself that there was all the more reason not to believe in Christ simply on account of his miracles. Those miracles would have shown him to belong to no God but the Creator, since they answer to the Creator's own mighty deeds, both the ones performed by his servants and the ones held in reserve for his Christ. And even if some other proofs were found in your Christ — new ones, that is — we would sooner believe that these too belong to the same God as the old ones do than that they belong to a god who has nothing but new proofs, proofs with none of that ancient standing behind them which is what wins faith.

On that ground too, then, he ought to have come announced by prophecies of his own that built faith in him, quite as much as by miracles — especially since he was up against the Creator's Christ, who was to come armed with signs and with prophets of his own. Only so could he shine out as Christ's rival, with evidence of both kinds to help him. But how was his Christ to be foretold by a god who was himself never foretold? So there is no escaping the conclusion: neither your god nor your Christ can be believed in. God ought not to have been unknown, and Christ ought to have been made known through God.

Your god thought it beneath him, I suppose, to copy the order our God keeps, since our God displeased him and was to be beaten at all costs. He wanted to come as a new being and in a new way — a son ahead of his father's announcement, a sent one ahead of the sender's authority — so that he might personally spread a monstrous kind of faith, in which people would come to believe that Christ had come before they knew that he existed. [l]

This is a convenient place to take up the other point: why did he not come after Christ? When I notice that through all that long stretch of time Marcion's lord put up, with the greatest patience, with the ruthless Creator who was all the while announcing his Christ to people, this is what I say. Whatever reason moved him to do that, and so to postpone his own revelation and his own intervention, that same reason laid on him the duty of putting up with the Creator, who had arrangements of his own to carry out in his Christ as well; so that when the whole plan of the rival God and the rival Christ had been finished and carried through, he could then bring in his own arrangement on top of it. But he got tired of enduring so long, and did not wait for the end of the Creator's course. There was no point in his allowing the Creator's Christ to be foretold if he then refused to let him be shown.

Either he had no good reason for breaking off his rival's full stretch of time, or he had no good reason for holding back so long from breaking it off. What held him in at the start? What upset him at the end? As it stands, he has compromised himself on both counts: he revealed himself so late after the Creator, and so hastily before the Creator's Christ. He ought long ago to have met the one and refuted him, and to have held off from meeting the other for the time being — not to have borne so long with the one in all his ruthless hostility, nor to have disturbed the other, who was still quiet. In both cases, in the very act of stripping them of the title of supremely good God, he showed himself at the very least capricious and unsteady: lukewarm toward the Creator, hot against the Creator's Christ, and powerless against either. He no more held the Creator back than he stood up to the Creator's Christ. The Creator remains exactly what he is. And his Christ will come too, just as it is written of him.

Why did Marcion's Christ come after the Creator, when he could not correct him by punishment? Why did he reveal himself before the Creator's Christ, when he could not keep him from appearing? Or if he did punish the Creator, then presumably he revealed himself after him so that whatever needed correcting would come first. In that case he ought also to have waited for the Creator's Christ to appear first, since he meant to punish him in the same way; then he would have been his corrector coming after him, exactly as he had been the Creator's. And there is another thing to consider. At his second coming he will come after the Creator's Christ. So, just as at his first coming he took hostile action against the Creator, doing away with the law and the prophets, which were the Creator's, he may at his second coming proceed against the Creator's Christ and overturn his kingdom. Then, no doubt, he would finish his course, and then — if ever — he would deserve to be believed. Otherwise, if his work is already complete, there is no point in his coming at all, for there would be nothing left that he could do.

So much for the opening skirmish, made at this first stage of the discussion, while the fighting is still at long range. But from this point on I have to close with my opponent on a definite issue and at close quarters, and I see that I must first bring up the line at which the battle will have to be fought. That line is the Creator's Scriptures. Since I am going to prove from them that Christ came from the Creator, and that they were afterward fulfilled in the Creator's Christ, I need to set out the form — the nature, so to speak — of the Scriptures themselves. Otherwise they will distract the reader by turning into a dispute of their own at the very moment I apply them to the matters at issue, and proving them will get tangled up with proving the matters themselves. [q]

There are two features of prophetic announcement that I put forward, and that our opponents will have to grant in the later stages of the argument. The first is that things still to come are sometimes announced as if they had already happened. It suits God to treat as accomplished fact whatever he has decided on, because with him there is no difference of time: in that Being, eternity itself keeps the seasons all one. And it is characteristic of prophetic sight to present what it foresees as already seen and already done, in the very act of foreseeing it — to present as done, that is, a thing that is beyond doubt still to come. Isaiah, for instance: “I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to their hands. I did not hide my face from shame and spitting.” Now whether it was Christ speaking even then, as we hold, or the prophet speaking about himself, as the Jews say, either way something that had not yet happened was uttered as though it were already done.

The other feature is that a great many things are foretold in figures — by riddles and allegories and parables — and have to be understood in some sense other than the plain wording. We read that “the mountains will drip new wine,” but not so that anyone should expect fresh grape juice out of the stones, or boiled-down syrup out of the rocks. We hear of “a land flowing with milk and honey,” but not so that you should suppose you would ever pick Samian cakes up off the ground. And God is certainly not hiring himself out as a waterworks man or a farmer when he says, “I will open rivers in a land; I will plant the cedar and the box tree in the wilderness.” In the same way, when he foretells that the nations will turn to him and says, “The beasts of the field will honor me, the dragons and the owls,” he was surely not taking his good omens from young birds and foxes, or from creatures that sing only in legend.

But why say more about it? The very apostle our heretics have adopted takes the law that leaves the mouth of the threshing ox unmuzzled and reads it not of cattle but of us. He also says that the rock which followed Israel and gave them their drink was Christ. He teaches the Galatians, further, that the two accounts of Abraham's sons carried an allegory as they went. And to the Ephesians he gives notice that the word spoken at the beginning — that a man will leave his father and mother and become one flesh with his wife — he himself applies to Christ and the church.