The Scriptures Are Not Theirs

I now deliberately give up this line of attack. Grant, if you like, that the words “Seek, and you will find” were spoken to everyone alike. Even then, the point is to settle carefully what the words mean, and to settle it in keeping with the reason that steers every act of interpretation. No saying of God’s is so slack and so open-ended that its words alone are to be pressed while their connection is left undecided. [a]

But let me lay this down at the outset. There is some one thing — and therefore a definite thing — that Christ taught, which the Gentiles are absolutely bound to believe, and which they are for that reason to “seek,” so that when they have found it they may be able to believe. And there can be no open-ended seeking for what was taught as one definite thing. You are to seek until you find, and to believe once you have found; and after that you have nothing further to do but keep hold of what you have believed — provided you believe this as well: that nothing else is to be believed, and therefore nothing else is to be sought, once you have found and believed what was taught by the one who charges you to seek nothing but what he taught. If anyone has doubts about that, the proof will be forthcoming, that what Christ taught is in our keeping. Meanwhile I am so sure of that proof that I will get ahead of it and give certain people a warning: do not “seek” anything beyond what you have believed. That was the one thing they should have been seeking — how not to read “Seek, and you will find” with no regard for the rule of reason.

The sense of that saying comes down to three things: the matter, the time, and the limit. The matter, so that you consider what it is you have to seek; the time, when you have to seek it; the limit, how long. What you have to seek is what Christ taught, and you go on seeking, of course, for as long as you fail to find — until you do find it. And you have found the moment you have believed. You would not have believed if you had not found, any more than you would have sought except with a view to finding. Your aim in seeking was to find, and your aim in finding was to believe. By believing you have put a stop to any further seeking and finding. The very fruit of your search has fixed this limit for you. And he set the boundary himself, the one who does not want you believing anything other than what he taught, or, for that matter, even looking for it. [c]

But suppose that, because so many other things have been taught by one man and another, we are for that reason obliged to go on searching as long as we can find anything at all. Then we must be forever searching and never believe anything. Where will seeking end? Where will believing take its stand? Where will finding be complete? With Marcion? But Valentinus too holds out the maxim “Seek, and you will find.” With Valentinus, then? Well, Apelles will come at me with the same quotation; so will Hebion, and Simon, and the whole line of them. Not one of them has any other argument to coax me over to his side. So I shall be nowhere, still running up against “Seek, and you will find,” exactly as if I had no post to stand at — as if I had never found what Christ taught, the thing that ought to be sought and must be believed.

There is no penalty for going wrong where nothing has been done wrong — though in fact going wrong is itself doing wrong. A man may wander safely, I say again, so long as he is deserting nothing on purpose. But if I have believed what I was bound to believe, and then afterwards decide there is something new to look for, plainly I am expecting to find something else; and I would never expect that unless either I had not believed at all, though I looked like a believer, or else I have stopped believing. And if I abandon my faith that way, I am found to have denied it. [g]

Let me put it once and for all: nobody searches unless he either never had the thing or else has lost it. The old woman in the Gospel had lost one of her ten drachmas, so she searched for it; once she found it, she stopped looking. The neighbor had no bread, so he knocked; the moment the door was opened and he was handed the bread, he stopped knocking. The widow kept begging the judge for a hearing, because she was not being let in; once her case was heard, she said no more. So there is a limit to seeking, and to knocking, and to asking. He says, “For to everyone who asks it will be given, and to the one who knocks it will be opened, and by the one who seeks it will be found.”

Away with the man who is always seeking because he never finds: he is looking where there is nothing to find. Away with the man who is always knocking because it will never be opened to him: he is knocking where there is nobody to open. Away with the man who is always asking because he will never be heard: he is asking someone who does not listen.

As for us — granted we must still seek, and always — where should our searching be done? Among the heretics, where everything is foreign and hostile to our own truth, and whom we are forbidden to go near? What slave looks for his food to a stranger, let alone to his master’s enemy? What soldier expects his bounty and his pay from kings who are not his allies, I might almost say from the enemy, unless of course he is a deserter, a runaway, a traitor? Even that old woman searched for her coin inside her own house. It was at his own neighbor’s door that the persistent caller kept knocking. And it was not to a hostile judge, hard as he was, that the widow made her appeal. Nobody is built up by what pulls down. Nobody gets light where everything is dark. So let our seeking be in what is our own, and from those who are our own, and about what is our own — and only about what can be asked without damaging the rule of faith. [i]

Now about this rule of faith, so that from here on you may know what it is we are defending. It lays down that there is one God only, and that he is none other than the maker of the world, who produced everything out of nothing through his own Word, sent forth before anything else; that this Word is called his Son, and under the name of God was seen in various ways by the patriarchs and heard at all times in the prophets, and was at last brought down by the Spirit and power of the Father into the virgin Mary, and was made flesh in her womb, and being born of her came forth as Jesus Christ; that from then on he preached the new law and the new promise of the kingdom of heaven, and worked miracles; that he was crucified, rose again on the third day, was taken up into the heavens, and took his seat at the Father’s right hand; that he sent in his own place the power of the Holy Spirit to lead those who believe; and that he will come in glory to take the holy ones into the enjoyment of everlasting life and the promises of heaven, and to sentence the wicked to everlasting fire — both of them, after the resurrection of the two has taken place and their flesh has been restored to them. This rule, as I shall prove, was taught by Christ, and raises no questions among us except the ones the heresies bring in, the ones that make men heretics. [k]

So long as the rule keeps its shape and its proper order, you may seek and argue as much as you like and pour out your whole appetite for curiosity on whatever seems to you doubtful or shrouded in obscurity. No doubt you have some very learned brother on hand, gifted with the grace of knowledge; someone from among the experienced; someone in your own circle who is as curious as you are. And yet, fellow-seeker with you though he is, in the end he will know that it is better for you not to know — so that you do not come to know what you should not, seeing that you have already learned what you should. [o]

He says, “Your faith has saved you” — not your practiced skill in the Scriptures. Faith has been deposited in the rule; the rule has a law, and keeping it brings salvation. Practiced skill is a matter of curiosity, and its only glory is the readiness that comes of being good at it. Let that curious skill give way to faith; let that glory yield to salvation. At the very least, let them drop the noise, or else be quiet. To know nothing against the rule is to know everything.

Suppose the heretics were not enemies of the truth, so that we had never been warned to keep away from them. What sense would it make to agree with men who admit themselves that they are still searching? If they are still searching, they have not yet found anything certain; and so whatever they seem to hold for the moment, they give away their own doubt by going on searching. And you, searching their way, looking to men who are themselves forever searching — a doubter turning to doubters, a waverer to waverers — must end up “led, blind by the blind, down into the ditch.”

But when they pretend to be still searching in order to take us in, so that they can slip their treatises in on us under cover of an anxious sympathy; when, in short, they have got in the door and at once start insisting that we must look into the very points they were in the habit of raising — then we are bound to push them off, so that they understand it is not Christ we are disowning, but them. Since they are still seekers, they hold nothing yet; holding nothing, they have not yet believed; not yet believing, they are not Christians. And even if they do hold something and believe it, they still say that inquiry is necessary so that they can defend it; and before the defense they deny what they admit they have not yet believed, so long as they keep it under inquiry. When men are not Christians even on their own showing, how much less are they Christians to us. What sort of truth is it that they act as counsel for, when they recommend it to us with a lie?

Ah, but they do handle the Scriptures, and it is out of the Scriptures that they urge their opinions. Of course they do. Where else could they get arguments about matters of faith except from the records of the faith?

So we have arrived at the point we were aiming at; this is what the whole preamble was preparing for. Now we can join battle on the ground our opponents challenge us to. They hold up the Scriptures, and by this effrontery of theirs they sway some people from the start. In the fight itself they wear out the strong, catch the weak, and send the undecided away with a doubt. And so the move we make against them before any other is this: we do not admit them to any argument out of the Scriptures. [u]

If the Scriptures are where their resources lie, then before they can use them it ought to be settled plainly who owns the Scriptures — so that nobody is allowed the use of them who has no title to them at all.

Someone might think I had taken this position to cover a weak case, or from a wish to open the fight on some other footing, if there were not reasons on my side, and above all this one: our faith owes obedience to the apostle, who forbids us to get into “questions,” or to lend our ears to novelties, or to keep company with a heretic “after a first and second warning” — after a warning, note, not after a debate. He shut out debate in exactly that way, by naming warning as the way to deal with a heretic, and a first warning at that, because a heretic is not a Christian. He was not to seem to need correcting again and again in the way a Christian does, and “before two or three witnesses,” since the very reason he ought to be corrected is that he is not to be argued with. And in the second place, because a controversy out of the Scriptures can plainly do nothing but upset a man’s stomach or his head. [v]

Now, this heresy of yours does not accept certain of the Scriptures at all; and any it does accept it twists to suit its own ends by adding and subtracting; and even those it accepts it does not accept whole; and where it does take some of them as they stand, up to a point, it still twists them by inventing different interpretations. A forged meaning damages truth exactly as much as a forged text does. Their empty assumptions naturally have to refuse to acknowledge the writings that refute them. They lean on the books they have doctored, and on the ones they picked out in the first place for being ambiguous. You may be the great expert in the Scriptures — you will get nowhere, when everything you assert is denied on the other side and everything you deny is asserted. As for yourself, you will lose nothing but your voice and gain nothing but bile from their blasphemy. [x]

But think of the man for whose sake you go into the argument out of the Scriptures, hoping to steady him while he is unsettled. Will he end up leaning toward the truth, or toward the heretics’ opinions? He sees that you have got nowhere, while the other side stands on equal ground with you in denying and in defending, or at any rate on the same footing. He will come away from the discussion less sure than he was, not knowing which side to call heretical. For of course they can turn all of this back on us. They are bound to go so far as to say that it is we, rather, who bring in corruptions of the Scriptures and false readings of them, since they insist just as hard as we do that the truth is on their side.

So our appeal must not be made to the Scriptures, and we must not allow a contest on points where victory will be either impossible, or doubtful, or not certain enough. Even if an argument from the Scriptures did not come out with the two sides level, the natural order of things would still require that this question be put first — the one question we now have to settle: With whom does that very faith reside, to which the Scriptures belong? From what source, through whom, when, and to whom was that teaching handed down by which men become Christians? For wherever it turns out that the true Christian teaching and faith are, there the true Scriptures will be too, and the true readings of them, and all the Christian traditions. [z]

Christ Jesus our Lord — and may he put up with me a moment for putting it this way — whoever he is, whatever God’s Son he is, of whatever substance he is as man and as God, whatever faith it is he teaches, whatever reward it is he promises: while he lived on earth he himself declared what he was, what he had been, what will of the Father’s he was carrying out, what duty he was laying on men. He declared it either openly to the crowds or privately to his disciples, out of whom he had chosen twelve to be his closest, the men he meant to be the teachers of the nations. And so, when one of them had been struck off, at his departure to the Father he ordered the other eleven, “Go and teach all nations.” The nations were to be baptized into the Father, and into the Son, and into the Holy Spirit. [ab]

That is what the apostles did at once — and the name itself marks them out as “the sent.” On the authority of a prophecy in a psalm of David they chose Matthias by lot as the twelfth, in Judas’s place, and then received the promised power of the Holy Spirit for miracles and for speech. They bore witness to the faith in Jesus Christ first throughout Judea and founded churches there; then they went out into the world and preached the same teaching of the same faith to the nations. In the same way they founded churches in city after city, and from these all the other churches took their cutting of the faith and the seeds of the teaching, and are taking them still, day after day, so as to become churches themselves. That, and nothing else, is what lets them count themselves apostolic: they are the offspring of apostolic churches.

Every kind of thing has to be registered under its own origin. So the churches, many and great as they are, amount to that one first church founded by the apostles, from which they all spring. In this way all are first and all are apostolic, while all are proved to be one, in unbroken unity, by the peace they share, the name of brother they use, and the tokens of hospitality they exchange — rights governed by nothing except the one handed-down tradition of the same sacred pledge.