Hidden from the Wise

Who can be called on as the Lord of heaven without first being shown to be the one who made it? For Christ says, “I thank you, Father, and I acknowledge you, Lord of heaven, because the things that were hidden from the wise and the clever you have revealed to little children.” What things are these? Whose are they? Who hid them, and who revealed them? [a]

If it was Marcion’s god who hid them and who revealed them, the whole business was thoroughly unjust. He had never put anything out beforehand in which anything could have lain hidden — no prophecies, no parables, no visions, no proofs of things or words or names veiled in allegories and images or in cloudy riddles. The one thing he had kept concealed was his own greatness, and that he was now revealing with all his might through his Christ. And in what way had the wise and the clever done wrong, that God should hide himself from them, when their wisdom and cleverness had never been enough to bring them to knowledge of him in the first place? He had provided no road to himself — no statement of his works, no traces that might have led them into wisdom and good sense. And suppose they had failed in some duty toward a god they did not know; grant that he is known now, at last. Even so, they ought not to find a jealous god in someone introduced to us as unlike the Creator.

So he had provided no material in which he could hide anything. He had no offenders to hide himself from. And even if he had had any, he ought not to have hidden from them. He will not now turn out to be the one who reveals, when he was never the one who concealed. And so no one will be the Lord of heaven, or the Father of Christ, except the one in whom all these things fit together. For the Creator does conceal — by the groundwork he laid in prophetic obscurity, which is open to be understood by faith, since “if you will not believe, you will not understand.” And the Creator did have offenders: those wise and clever men who would not look for God, though he was there to be found in works so many and so great; or who philosophized about him recklessly, and by doing so handed the heretics the tools of their trade. And, last of all, he is a jealous God.

In fact the very thing Christ thanks God for doing, God announced long ago through Isaiah: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the understanding of the clever I will hide.” In another place he says both that he has hidden and that he will also reveal: “I will give them treasures that have been hidden, and I will show them secret things.” And again: “Who else scatters the signs of the belly-speakers and the schemes of those who divine out of their own heart, turning wise men backward and making their plans foolish?” Now he did appoint his Christ to be the one who gives light to the nations: “I have set you for a light of the nations.” And if that is what is meant by the word “children” — men who were once dwarfs in knowledge and infants in good sense, and who even now are children in the lowliness of their faith — then it is all the easier to see that the God who had once hidden “these things,” and had promised to reveal them through Christ, is the same God who has now revealed them to children.

Otherwise, if it was Marcion’s god who revealed what the Creator had hidden, it follows that he did the Creator’s own work for him by setting out the Creator’s doings. “He did it for the Creator’s destruction,” you say, “to show those things up.” Then he ought to have shown them up to the very people the Creator had hidden them from — the wise and the clever. And if his intention was a kind one, the gift of knowledge was owed to the men the Creator had kept it back from, rather than to the children, whom the Creator had never grudged a thing. But after all, what we have found in Christ so far is the building up of the law and the prophets, I think, and not their pulling down.

“All things,” he says, “have been handed over to me by my Father.” You may believe him, if he is the Creator’s Christ, since all things belong to the Creator — because the Creator has not handed over to a Son lesser than himself all the things he made through him, that is, through his Word. But if he is that famous intruder, what are the “all things” that have been handed over to him by the Father? Are they the Creator’s? Then the things the Father handed over to the Son are good, and the Creator is therefore good, since everything of his is good — while the other is no longer good, having raided another’s good property in order to hand it to his son, and by doing so having taught the robbery of what belongs to someone else. He must be an out-and-out liar, who had no way of making his son rich except by helping himself to another man’s goods.

Or else, if nothing of the Creator’s has been handed over to him by the Father, by what right does he claim authority over man? Or again, if man has been handed over to him, and man only, then man is not “all things.” But Scripture says plainly that all things have been transferred to the Son. And if you want to read that “all” of the whole human race — all the nations — then the handing over of even these to the Son is part of the Creator’s own plan: “I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession.” If he does have some things of his own, the whole of which he could give to his son along with the Creator’s man, then produce one of them, any one, as a sample, so that I can believe. Otherwise I have as much reason to disbelieve that all things belong to a god of whom I see nothing, as I have reason to believe that even the things I cannot see belong to the one who owns the universe I can see.

“But no one knows who the Father is except the Son, and who the Son is except the Father, and the one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” So the god Christ was preaching was an unknown god, was it? Other heretics prop themselves up on this text as well, setting against it the claim that the Creator was known to everybody — to Israel through long familiarity, and to the nations through nature. But how is it, then, that he himself testifies that he was not known to Israel? “Israel does not know me, and my people has not understood me.” Nor to the nations: “Look,” he says, “among the nations I have no man.” That is why he reckoned them “a drop from a bucket,” while “Zion he left like a lookout post in a vineyard.”

See, then, whether this does not confirm what the prophet said, when he rebukes that ignorance of God in men which went on until the days of the Son of Man. That is exactly why Christ added the clause that the Father is known to the man the Son reveals him to. For it was the Son who had been announced as set by the Father to be a light to the nations — who obviously needed enlightening about God — and to Israel as well, by giving it a fuller knowledge of God. So arguments that suit the Creator will be no use for producing belief in the rival god; it is only arguments that will not fit the Creator that can advance belief in his rival.

Look at the words that come next: “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see, for I tell you that prophets have not seen what you see.” You will find that they follow from the sense above — that no one had come to know God as he ought to have done, since even the prophets had not seen the things that were now being seen under Christ. And if he had not been my Christ, he would not have mentioned the prophets here at all. What would have been remarkable about their not having seen the things of a god who was unknown to them, and who was only revealed long after their time? Where, in that case, would the blessedness of these men lie, in seeing what others simply could not see, if all it came to was that the prophets had failed to get sight of things they had never predicted? It means something only because the prophets had every right to see the things that belonged to their own God — the very things they had foretold — and did not see them. That, then, is the blessedness of these others: they were seeing what others had only foretold. We will show shortly, or rather we have shown already, that the things seen in Christ were the things that had been foretold, and yet had been hidden even from the prophets who foretold them, so that they might be hidden from the wise and the clever too.

In the true Gospel a lawyer comes to the Lord and asks, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” In the heretic’s gospel only “life” is mentioned, with “eternal” left out. On that reading the lawyer would seem to have been asking Christ simply about the life which the Creator promises in the law to lengthen, and the Lord to have answered him out of the law — “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength” — since the question was about the terms of ordinary life. But of course the lawyer knew perfectly well how the life the law meant was to be obtained. His question can hardly have been about the life whose rules he taught for a living. What had happened was that the dead were by now being raised by Christ, and these cases of a life given back had lifted his hopes as far as eternal life; he was not going to stand there merely watching any longer. So he asked about how eternal life is obtained.

And the Lord — being no different himself, and bringing in no new command except the one that bears above all others on a man’s salvation entire, this life and the life to come together — set the very head of the law in front of him: that he should love the Lord his God every way he possibly could. If it had really been only about a longer life, the sort that is at the Creator’s disposal, that the man asked and Christ answered, and not about the eternal life which is in the gift of Marcion’s god, then how is a man to obtain the eternal one? Surely not in the same way as the longer one. The difference in the reward must mean a difference in the service.

So your disciple the Marcionite will not obtain his eternal life by loving your god in the way that the man who loves the Creator secures his lengthened one. But how does it come about that the god who promises a longer life is to be loved, and the god who offers eternal life is not to be loved far more? Both lives, then, will be in the gift of one and the same Lord, since one and the same training is to be pursued for the one life and for the other. What the Creator teaches men to love, he must necessarily make good through Christ as well. For the rule holds here that greater things ought to be believed of the one who has smaller proofs to show first, rather than of someone for whom no smaller presumptions have gone ahead to earn him a claim to be believed in greater matters.

So never mind whether the word “eternal” was slipped in by us. It is enough for me that the Christ who was inviting men to eternal life — not to a lengthened one — when he was consulted about the temporal life he was abolishing, did not choose to point the man instead to that eternal life he was bringing in. Tell me: what would the Creator’s Christ have done, if the one who made man for loving the Creator did not belong to the Creator? I suppose he would have said that the Creator was not to be loved!