The Sponge and the Scars

“But,” he says, “I am speaking in human terms: when we were children, we were kept as slaves under the elements of the world.” This, however, was not said in human terms. There is no comparison being made here; it is plain fact. Take the second half of the sentence. What child — a child in the sense in which the Gentiles are children — is not a slave to the elements of the world, which he looks up to as a god? In the first half there really was a comparison, as the apostle himself wrote it. After saying “I am speaking in human terms,” he goes on: “Even a human covenant, once it has been ratified, nobody sets aside or adds to.” By the picture of a human covenant that holds good, he was defending the divine one. “The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say ‘and to seeds,’ as of many, but as of one, ‘and to your seed,’ which is Christ.” Let Marcion’s sponge blush! But it is a waste of time to dwell on what he has erased, when he can be answered more effectively out of what he has kept. [a]

“But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son” — the God, of course, who is Lord of that very run of times which makes up an age; who also set the sun and the moon, the constellations and the stars in place as “signs” to mark time; and who both settled beforehand and announced beforehand that the revealing of his Son would be held back to the end of the times. “It will come about in the last days that the mountain of the house of the Lord will be made plain to see”; and “in the last days I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,” as Joel says. It belonged to him alone to wait patiently for the fullness of time — to the one who owned the end of time as much as the beginning. But that idle god of Marcion’s, who has no work, no prophecy, and therefore no time of his own to show for himself — what has he ever done to bring the fullness of time about, or to wait patiently for it to run out? If nothing, then what a helpless position he is in: having to wait for the Creator’s time, a servant to the Creator.

And what did he send his Son for? “To redeem those who were under the law” — that is, to “make the crooked ways straight and the rough places smooth,” as Isaiah says — so that the old things might pass away and a new course begin, “the new law out of Zion, and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem,” and “so that we might receive adoption as sons,” meaning the Gentiles, who once were not sons. For he is to be “a light of the Gentiles,” and “in his name the Gentiles will trust.” And so that we may be sure we are children of God, “he has sent his Spirit into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” For “in the last days,” he says, “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh.”

Now who does this grace come from, if not from the one who announced the promise of it? Who is our Father, if not the one who is also our Maker? So after such a flood of grace they should not have gone back “to the weak and beggarly elements.” Among the Romans, by the way, the first lessons of a schoolboy are called the elements. He was not, then, trying to turn them away from their god by running down the elements of the world. It is true that just before this he had said, “At that time you were slaves to beings that by nature are not gods,” and in saying it he was condemning the mistake of that natural superstition which treats the elements as god. But it was not the God of those elements that his censure was aimed at.

He tells us himself, clearly enough, what he means by “elements” — the first lessons of the law: “You observe days and months and seasons and years.” The sabbaths, I take it, and the Preparations, and the fasts, and the high days. For the Creator’s own decrees appointed that even these should stop, no less than circumcision. He said through Isaiah, “Your new moons and your sabbaths and your high days I cannot bear; your fasting and feasts and ceremonies my soul hates”; and through Amos, “I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell your solemn assemblies”; and again through Hosea, “I will make an end of all her merrymaking, and her feast days, and her sabbaths, and her new moons, and all her solemn assemblies.”

Did he then pull down the institutions he had set up himself, you ask? Yes — he did it himself, rather than anyone else. Or if someone else pulled them down, that someone was only helping the Creator’s purpose along by clearing away what the Creator had condemned in any case. But this is not the place to go into why the Creator abolished his own laws. It is enough for us to have proved that he meant them to be abolished, so that it can be said that the apostle ruled nothing against the Creator, since the abolition itself comes from the Creator.

But just as, with thieves, some piece of the stolen goods tends to drop on the road and put people on their track, so, it seems to me, it has gone with Marcion. He left the last mention of Abraham’s name standing in the letter, though no passage needed erasing more than this one — or, at the very least, altering in part. “For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman; but the one by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, and the one by the free woman through a promise. These things are being spoken as an allegory” — that is, they were signs of something beyond the plain history — “for these are the two covenants,” or the two showings of God’s plans, which is how we have found the word rendered: “the one from Mount Sinai,” answering to the synagogue of the Jews, under the law, “bearing children for slavery”; while the other bears children for freedom, and is lifted above every rule and authority and power and every name that is named, not only in this age but in the age to come, “which is the mother of us all” — and in her we have the promise of Christ’s holy church. That is why he adds, to close it: “So then, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman but of the free.”

In this passage he has certainly shown that Christianity comes of good birth. It is descended, as the hidden sense of the allegory indicates, from that son of Abraham who was born of the free woman, while from the son of the slave woman came the legal slavery of Judaism. Both arrangements, then, come from that same God, and it was by him, as we have found, that both were sketched out beforehand.

When he speaks of “the freedom with which Christ has set us free,” does the phrase itself not show that the Liberator is the one who was once the Master? Even Galba never freed slaves who were not his own, in the very act of giving free men back their liberty. So freedom will be granted by the one who had the law’s enslaving power at his command. And that is exactly right. It was not fitting that men who had been given their freedom should be “caught in a yoke of slavery again” — the law’s yoke — now that the psalm’s prophecy had come true: “Let us break their bonds apart and throw their cords off from us, since the rulers have gathered themselves together against the Lord and against his Christ.”

So he would very much have everyone who has been delivered from the yoke of slavery rub out the very brand of slavery — circumcision itself — and he had a prophet’s prediction to go on. He remembered that Jeremiah had said, “Circumcise the foreskin of your heart,” and that Moses had likewise commanded, “Circumcise your hard hearts” — not the flesh, literally. And if he was for shutting circumcision out as the messenger of a new god, why does he say that “in Christ neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision”? He was bound to prefer the opposite of the thing he was abolishing, if he came on a mission from a god who was circumcision’s enemy.

Besides, since circumcision and uncircumcision were both credited to the same God, both were left with nothing to do in Christ, faith counting for so much more — that faith about which it had been written, “And in his name the Gentiles will trust”; that faith “which,” he says, “works through love.” By saying this he also shows that the Creator is the source of that grace. Whether he means the love owed to God or the love owed to one’s neighbor, either way it is the Creator’s grace he means. He is the one who commands the first: “You shall love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength”; and the second, in another place: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

“But the one who is troubling you will have to bear his judgment.” Judgment from which God? From Marcion’s most excellent god? But he carries out no judgment. From the Creator? But he will not condemn a man for keeping circumcision up either. Now if no one but the Creator turns out to be the one who carries out judgment, it follows that only he — the God who determined that the law should cease — is in a position to condemn the law’s defenders.

And what if he actually upholds the law in the part of it that ought to stand? “For,” he says, “the whole law is fulfilled among you in this one saying: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” If he wants “it is fulfilled” to mean that the law no longer has to be kept, then of course he does not mean me to go on loving my neighbor as myself, since that command must have stopped along with the law. But no — this is one we must go on keeping forever. So the Creator’s law has the rival god’s approval. He has not handed it a summary dismissal but done it the favor of a summary acceptance, with the whole of it packed into this one command! And packing the law down like that is something only its Author can do. So when he says, “Carry one another’s burdens, and in that way you will fulfill the law of Christ,” and this cannot be done unless a man loves his neighbor as himself, then plainly the command “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” — which is what lies under “carry one another’s burdens” — really is “the law of Christ,” though word for word it is the law of the Creator. Christ, then, is the Creator’s Christ, just as Christ’s law is the Creator’s law.

“Do not be deceived: God is not mocked.” But Marcion’s god can be mocked, since he does not know how to be angry or how to take revenge. “For whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.” It is the God of repayment and judgment, then, who holds this over us. “Let us not grow tired of doing good”; and “as we have the chance, let us do good.” Deny now that the Creator ever gave a command to do good, and then a difference in the commands might argue a difference of gods. But if he announces the repayment as well, then the harvest of decay and the harvest of life must both come from the same God. And “in due season we shall reap,” because Ecclesiastes says, “For everything there will be a time.”

Then: “The world has been crucified to me” — to me, a servant of the Creator — “the world,” I say, but not the God who made the world; “and I to the world,” not to the God who made the world. “The world,” in the apostle’s sense here, means the life and the way of living that go by the world’s rules; it is by giving those up that we and they are crucified to each other and killed off to each other. The men he is speaking of he calls persecutors of Christ. But when he adds that “he carries the scars of Christ in his body” — and scars, of course, are things that happen to a body — he was stating the truth: that the flesh of Christ is not a supposed flesh but real and solid, and that the scars of it are the ones he says he carries on his own body.