The Foolishness of God

The groundwork I had to lay for the letter before this one kept me from dealing with its opening address. I let it go, since I was sure another chance would come; the same thing turns up constantly, and in the same form, in every letter. Here is the point. The apostle does not wish his readers the usual good health. He writes “grace and peace.” I will not even press the question of what a man out to demolish Judaism is doing with a formula the Jews still use — to this day they greet one another with “peace,” and they did the same long ago in their Scriptures. What I do see, plainly enough, is that by his own practice he is backing up something the Creator said: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things, who announce the good news of peace!” The herald of good — that is, of God’s grace — knew well enough that peace had to be announced along with it. [a]

Now when he announces these gifts as coming “from God the Father and the Lord Jesus,” he uses titles that belong to both alike, titles that also fit the sacred pledge we hold. And I do not think you can settle exactly which God is meant by “the Father” and by “the Lord Jesus” unless you ask which of the attributes attaching to them suits each of them better. So, first: no one but the Creator and Sustainer of man and of the universe can be acknowledged as Father and as Lord. Next: the title Lord belongs to the Father by reason of his power, and the Son receives the same title through the Father. Then: “grace and peace” belong not only to the one who had them published, but to the one who had been offended. For grace does not exist except after an offense, and peace does not exist except after a war. Now Israel, by breaking his laws, and the whole human race, by ignoring what nature itself showed them, had both sinned against the Creator and rebelled against him. Marcion’s god, on the other hand, could not have been offended: he was unknown to everyone, and he is incapable of being provoked. So what grace can be had from a god who has never been offended? What peace from one who has never had a rebellion on his hands?

“The cross of Christ,” he says, “is foolishness to those who are perishing; but to those who are to obtain salvation it is the power of God and the wisdom of God.” Then, so that we may know where this comes from, he adds: “For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.’” Now these are the Creator’s words, and it is the case of the cross that he counts foolish. So the cross belongs to the Creator, and Christ too by way of the cross — the Creator, who foretold everything that happened at the cross.

“Or else,” they will say, “the Creator took their wisdom away as an enemy would, so that the cross of Christ, his rival, should be reckoned foolish.”

But then how could the Creator possibly have foretold anything about the cross of a Christ who was not his own, and of whom he knew nothing at the time he published the prediction? And here is another question. Under a Lord as good as that, and as lavish with mercy, how is it that some carry off salvation, believing the cross to be the wisdom and the power of God, while others go to ruin because they count the cross of Christ folly? How, unless it lies in the Creator’s ordering of things to have punished Israel and the human race, for some great offense against himself, by taking away their wisdom and their good sense?

What comes next confirms it. He asks, “Has not God made the wisdom of this world foolish?” — and he adds the reason: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of what is preached.” But first a word about that expression, “the world.” The heretics spend a great deal of their cleverness on this passage in particular, arguing that “world” here means the lord of the world. We take the word to mean anyone who is in the world — a plain turn of human speech, which constantly puts the container for the thing contained. “The circus shouted.” “The forum spoke.” “The basilica murmured.” Everybody knows what those mean: the people in those places did it. So it was the man of the world, not the god of the world, who in his wisdom did not know God — a God he ought to have known, the Jew from his Scriptures and the whole human race from God’s works. And so that God, who was not recognized in his wisdom, decided to strike men’s knowledge with his foolishness, by saving everyone who believes in the folly of the preached cross.

“Because the Jews demand signs” — they who should have made up their minds about God long since — “and the Greeks look for wisdom” — they who lean on their own wisdom and not on God’s. But if it was a new god being preached, what sin had the Jews committed by looking for signs before they believed? Or the Greeks, when they went hunting for a wisdom they would find easier to accept? The very punishment that fell on Jews and Greeks alike proves that God is both a jealous God and a Judge, since he made the world’s wisdom foolish by a jealous and judicial punishment. And since the reasons for it lie in the hands of the one who gave us the Scriptures we use, it follows that the apostle, in speaking of the Creator as the God whom neither Jew nor Gentile has yet known, means to teach us that the God who is now to become known is the Creator.

Take the “stumbling-block” he says Christ is “to the Jews.” It points unmistakably to the Creator’s own prophecy about him, spoken through Isaiah: “See, I lay in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.” That rock, that stone, is Christ. And Marcion is still keeping that stumbling-stone.

What is “the foolishness of God, wiser than men,” but the cross and the death of Christ? What is “the weakness of God, stronger than men,” but God’s being born and having flesh? If Christ was not born of the virgin, was not made of human flesh, and so did not really undergo either death or the cross, then there was nothing foolish or weak in him at all. And it is no longer true that “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise,” or that “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong,” or “the low things and the least things in the world, and the things that are despised, which are as good as nothing” — that is, things that really are not — “to bring to nothing the things that are” — that is, the things that really are.

For nothing in God’s ordering of things turns out to be low, or ignoble, or contemptible. That only happens in man’s arrangements. Take the old order in the Creator’s own case: you can certainly charge it with foolishness, weakness, dishonor, lowness and contempt. What is more foolish, more feeble, than God asking for sacrifices of blood and for whole burnt offerings sending up their scent? What is weaker than washing out pots and scrubbing beds? What more undignified than grading the shade of a patch of reddened skin? What lower than the rule of paying back like for like? What more contemptible than the list of foods and drinks a man must avoid? The heretic, I am fairly sure, laughs at the whole of the older Scriptures. Well — God chose the foolish things of the world to shame its wisdom. Marcion’s god has no such training to give, because he does not take after the Creator in this business of confounding opposites by their opposites, so that “no flesh may boast; but, as it is written, let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.” In which Lord? Surely in the one who gave the rule. Unless, of course, it was the Creator who told us to boast in Marcion’s god.

By all these statements, then, he shows us which God he means when he says, “We speak the wisdom of God among the perfect.” It is the God who confounded the wisdom of the wise, who brought to nothing the understanding of the prudent, who made the world’s wisdom look foolish by choosing the world’s foolish things and arranging them so that they lead to salvation. This wisdom, he says, once lay hidden in things that were foolish, weak and without honor; it lay hidden as well under figures, allegories and riddling patterns; but it was to be brought out into the open later, in Christ, who was set “as a light to the nations” by the Creator — the Creator who promised through Isaiah’s mouth that he would uncover “the hidden treasures,” the things “no eye has seen.” [t]

That the other god ever hid anything is simply not credible, since he never made a covering to hide things under. Grant that he existed: he could not have concealed himself, let alone any sacred observance of his. The Creator, by contrast, was as well known in himself as his observances were. They ran their course out in the open in Israel — and yet they lay in shadow, full of hidden meanings, and in them the wisdom of God was tucked away, to be brought to light in due time among “the perfect,” but “settled beforehand in God’s purposes before the ages.”

Whose ages, if not the Creator’s? Ages are made of stretches of time; stretches of time are made of days and months and years; and days and months and years are measured by suns and moons and stars, which he appointed for exactly that purpose — “let them be,” he says, “for signs of the months and the years.” It plainly follows that the ages belong to the Creator, and that nothing fore-ordained before the ages can be called the property of anyone but the one who claims the ages as his own. Otherwise, let Marcion show that the ages belong to his god. And then he will have to claim the world for him too, since it is in the world that ages are counted — the world being, so to speak, the vessel that holds the times, and the signs of the times, and their order. He has no such proof to show us.

So I go back to the point and put the question to him: why did his god fore-ordain our glory before the Creator’s ages? I could understand him settling it before the ages if he had revealed it at the opening of time. But he does it when nearly all the Creator’s ages have run out. Ordaining it before the ages, instead of within them, was pointless, since he did not intend to reveal his purpose until the ages had almost finished their course. It is thoroughly inconsistent to be so quick at planning and so slow at showing. In the Creator the two things fit together perfectly — ordaining before the ages and revealing at the end of them — because what he both fore-ordained and revealed he also announced in the time between, sending figures and symbols and allegories on ahead of it.

On the subject of our glory the apostle adds that “none of the rulers of this age knew it; for if they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” The heretic argues from this that the rulers of this age crucified the Lord — the Christ of the rival god — so that the blow would fall back on the Creator himself. But anyone who has followed what I have already said, and sees that our glory issues from the Creator, will have concluded that, since the Creator settled it in his own secret purpose, it was quite properly unknown to all the Creator’s rulers and powers. Servants are not let in on their masters’ plans. Still less the fallen angels and the leader of the rebellion himself, the devil; I would argue that their fall left them further than anyone from any knowledge of the Creator’s arrangements.

But in fact I can no longer take the rulers and powers of this age to be the Creator’s, since the apostle charges them with ignorance — whereas the devil, in our Gospel, recognized Jesus at the temptation; and in the record both sides share, the evil spirit knew that Jesus was the Holy One of God, knew his name, and knew that he had come to destroy them. Then there is the parable of the strong man armed, whom a stronger man overpowers before carrying off his goods; Marcion himself takes that one to be about the Creator. In that case the Creator could not have gone on being ignorant of the God of glory, seeing that he is overcome by him — and he could not have crucified the one he was unable to handle.

The conclusion cannot be avoided, as I see it. We have to believe that the Creator’s rulers and powers crucified the God of glory in his Christ knowingly, with the desperation and the sheer spite of the worst sort of household slaves, who do not balk even at murdering their masters. For it is written in my Gospel that “Satan entered into Judas.” On Marcion’s own reading, though, the apostle in the passage under discussion does not allow ignorance about the Lord of glory to be laid on the Creator’s powers at all — because Marcion will not have them understood as “the rulers of this age” in the first place. But the apostle plainly was not speaking of spiritual rulers. So he meant worldly ones: the rulers of the people who came first in God’s ordering, though certainly not first among the nations of the world; and their king Herod, and Pilate too, and, through Pilate, that power of Rome which was the greatest in the world and which at that moment he presided over. So the other side’s arguments are pulled down, and our own proofs go up in their place.

But you still insist that our glory comes from your god, and that it lay hidden with him. Then why does your god make use of the very same book the apostle relies on? What has your god to do with anything the prophets said? “Who has found out the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” — that is Isaiah. And what has he to do with illustrations taken from our God? When the apostle calls himself “a wise master-builder,” we find the Creator giving that same title, through Isaiah, to the teacher who stakes out the ground of God’s discipline: “I will take away from Judah the wise master-builder,” and the rest of it. And was it not Paul himself who was foretold there — the man to be taken away from Judah, that is, from Judaism, to put up the building of Christianity, and “to lay the one foundation, which is Christ”? Of that work the Creator says, through the same prophet, “See, I lay in Zion for a foundation a precious and honorable stone; and whoever rests on it will not be put to shame.”

Unless, of course, God was announcing himself as the builder of some earthly structure, and meant to give no sign at all of his Christ, who was to be the foundation for those who believe in him — the foundation on which each man builds what he pleases, sound teaching or worthless. For when a man’s work is tested by fire, and when his pay is handed to him through fire, that is the Creator’s business. It is by fire that the test is applied to the building you put up on the foundation he laid: the foundation of his Christ.

“Do you not know that you are God’s temple, and that the Spirit of God lives in you?” Now man is the Creator’s property, the Creator’s work, the Creator’s image and likeness; his flesh was shaped by him out of the ground and his soul out of his own breath. So it follows that Marcion’s god is living entirely inside somebody else’s temple — unless we are not the Creator’s temple after all. But “if anyone ruins the temple of God, he will himself be ruined” — by the God of the temple, of course. Threaten us with an avenger, and it is the Creator you are threatening us with.

“You must become fools, so that you may be wise.” Why? “Because the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” With which God? Even if the ancient Scriptures had contributed nothing to our case so far, an excellent piece of evidence turns up in what he adds next: “For it is written, ‘He catches the wise in their own craftiness’; and again, ‘The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are empty.’” As a general rule we may take it as certain that he could not possibly have cited the authority of a God he was under orders to destroy, since he was not teaching on that God’s behalf. “Therefore,” he says, “let no one boast in man” — an instruction that agrees with the Creator’s own teaching: “Wretched is the man who trusts in man”; and again, “It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man”; and the same thing is said about boasting in princes.