The Veil and the Clay Jars

Human error has turned the word “God” into a common name — since in this world there are said and believed to be “many gods.” Even so, “the blessed God,” who is “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” will be understood to be no other God than the Creator, the one who blessed everything he had made, as you find in Genesis, and who is himself “blessed by all things,” as Daniel tells us. And if the title of Father can be claimed for Marcion’s barren god, how much more for the Creator? It suits no one else. He is also “the Father of mercies,” the one the prophets describe as full of compassion, and gracious, and rich in mercy. In Jonah you find the clearest act of that mercy, shown to the people of Nineveh when they prayed. How he gave way at Hezekiah’s tears! How ready he was to forgive Ahab, Jezebel’s husband, the blood of Naboth, when Ahab pleaded against his anger. How quick to pardon David the moment he confessed his sin — since God prefers a sinner’s repentance to his death, which is only what you would expect of a God whose kindness is mercy. [a]

Now if Marcion’s god has ever displayed or announced anything of the kind, I will allow him to be “the Father of mercies.” But Marcion assigns him the title only from the time he was revealed, as though he became the father of mercies only when he began to set the human race free. Very well — then we on our side adopt exactly that date for his supposed revelation. We adopt it in order to deny him. He has no right to assign any quality at all to his god, when the only way he published that god’s existence was by assigning it. He could attribute a quality to his god only if it were already clear that his god exists. An ascribed quality is an accident, and accidents come after the statement of the thing they are said of — all the more so when somebody else lays claim to the very quality being handed to a being who has not yet been shown to exist. And our denial that his god exists will be all the more outright, because the attribute produced as proof of him belongs to the God who has already been revealed.

So “the new covenant” will belong to no one but the God who promised it — if not its letter, then its spirit; and that is where its newness lies. The one who engraved its letter on stone is the same one who said of its spirit, “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh.” Even if “the letter kills, the Spirit gives life,” both belong to him who says, “I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal.” We have already made good the Creator’s claim to this double character of judgment and goodness: killing by the letter through the law, and making alive by the Spirit through the good news. Different as these two qualities are, they cannot possibly make two gods, since they were found meeting in one and the same God long before.

He is alluding to Moses’ veil, covered with which “his face could not be looked at steadily by the sons of Israel.” He does this to establish the superiority of the new covenant’s glory, which stays, over the glory of the old, “which was to be done away with.” The fact supports my own position, which puts the good news above the law — and you had better watch that it does not do even more for me than that. Superiority is only possible where the thing it is superior to was there already. But then he says, “their minds were blunted” — the minds of the world. Certainly not the Creator’s mind: the minds of the people who are in the world. And of Israel he says, “To this day the same veil lies on their heart,” which shows that the veil on Moses’ face was a figure of the veil that is on the nation’s heart still. Even now they do not see Moses in the heart, just as then they did not see him with the eye.

But what business has Paul with a veil that still hides Moses from their view, if the Creator’s Christ, the one Moses foretold, has not yet come? How can the hearts of the Jews be described as still covered and veiled, if what Moses said about Christ — whom it was their duty to believe in through him — is still unfulfilled? What complaint could the apostle of a foreign Christ have if the Jews failed to understand the mysterious announcements of their own God, unless the veil on their hearts had to do with the blindness that hid the Christ of Moses from their eyes? Then take the words that follow: “But when it turns to the Lord, the veil will be taken away.” These refer properly to the Jew, over whose sight Moses’ veil is spread, and they mean that when he turns to faith in Christ he will understand how Moses was speaking of Christ. But how would a veil belonging to the Creator be lifted by the Christ of another god? The Creator could not possibly have veiled that other god’s mysteries — unknown mysteries, since they belonged to an unknown god.

And so Paul says that “we now with open face” — he means the openness of the heart, which in the Jews had been covered with a veil — “looking at Christ, are changed into the same image, from that glory” (the glory that transfigured Moses, as by the glory of the Lord) “to another glory.” He sets out the glory that lit up Moses’ face after his meeting with God, and the veil that hid it from the weakness of the people; then on top of that he brings in the unveiling and the glory of the Spirit in the person of Christ — “even as,” to use his words, “by the Lord of the Spirits.” By doing that he testifies that the whole system of Moses was a figure of Christ, whom the Jews did not know, but whom we Christians do.

We are well aware that some passages can be read two ways, either from how they are pronounced or from where the stops are placed, when there is room for both. Marcion has taken the second route with the words that come next, “in whom the God of this world.” He reads them as calling the Creator the God of this world, so that the words will imply another God for the other world. Our own view is that the sentence ought to be stopped with a comma after God, like this: “In whom God has blinded the eyes of the unbelievers of this world.” “In whom” means the unbelieving Jews, and it is from some of them that the good news is still hidden under Moses’ veil. These are the people God had already threatened for “loving him with the lip while their heart was far from him,” in those angry words: “You will hear with your ears and not understand, and see with your eyes and not perceive”; and, “If you will not believe, you will not understand”; and again, “I will take away the wisdom of their wise men, and bring the understanding of their clever men to nothing.” He certainly did not say that against them for hiding the good news of an unknown God.

In any case, if there is a God of this world, then he blinds the heart of this world’s unbelievers, because they have not recognized his Christ for themselves, though they should have understood him out of his own Scriptures. I have got what I want out of this, and I am willing to leave the matter of punctuation there and go no further, so as not to hand my opponent an advantage. In fact I could have left the whole discussion out. There is a simpler answer ready to hand: take “the god of this world” to be the devil, who once said, as the prophet describes him, “I will be like the Most High; I will set my throne above the clouds.” The whole superstition of this world has passed into his hands, so that he blinds the hearts of unbelievers effectively enough — and nobody’s more effectively than the apostate Marcion’s.

What Marcion failed to notice was how much the next clause of the sentence tells against him: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of his glory in the face of Jesus Christ.” Now who was it who said, “Let there be light”? And who was it who said to Christ, about giving light to the world, “I have set you as a light to the nations” — that is, to those “who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death”? It can be no one but the God to whom the Spirit answers in the Psalm, seeing beforehand what was coming: “The light of your face, Lord, has been displayed upon us.” And the face, or person, of the Lord here is Christ. That is why the apostle said, a little earlier, “Christ, who is the image of God.” So if Christ is the person of the Creator, the God who said “Let there be light,” then it follows that Christ and the apostles and the good news and the veil and Moses — the whole run of God’s arrangements — belong to the God who is the Creator of this world, on the evidence of the clause I have just quoted, and certainly not to a god who never said “Let there be light.”

I pass over any discussion of another letter, which we hold was written to the Ephesians, though the heretics say it was written to the Laodiceans. In it he tells them to remember that in the days when they were Gentiles they were without Christ, foreigners to the commonwealth of Israel, with no share in it, without the covenants and without any hope of a promise — indeed, without God, and that in a world which was God’s own, since the Creator made it. Now since he said the Gentiles were without God while their god was the devil and not the Creator, it is clear that the one the Gentiles took for their god has to be understood as the lord of this world — not the Creator, whom they knew nothing about.

And how could “the treasure we carry in these clay jars of ours” be reckoned to belong to anyone but the God who owns the jars? God’s glory is that so great a treasure is held in clay jars; and the clay jars are of the Creator’s making; so the glory is the Creator’s. More than that: since these jars of his have so much of the surpassing power of God about them, that power must be his as well. All of it was put into the clay jars for exactly this purpose, that his surpassing greatness should be displayed. From here on, then, the rival god can have no claim on the glory, and therefore none on the power either. What falls to him instead is dishonor and weakness, since the clay jars he had nothing to do with have received all the excellence. And if it is in these very clay jars that Paul tells us we have to endure such great sufferings, carrying about in them the dying of God himself, then Marcion’s god is truly ungrateful and unjust if he does not mean to give this same substance of ours back at the resurrection — the substance in which so much has been endured out of loyalty to him, in which Christ’s own death is carried about, and in which the surpassing greatness of his power is stored up.

For Paul makes a point of the words “so that the life of Christ may also be shown in our body,” setting them against what came just before, that Christ’s death is carried about in our body. Which life of Christ does he mean here? The one we are living now? Then how is it that in the words that follow he urges us on, not toward what is seen and temporary, but toward what is not seen and is eternal — in other words, not toward the present, but toward the future? But if it is Christ’s future life he is speaking of, and he means it to be made visible in our body, then he has plainly foretold the resurrection of the flesh. He also says that “our outer man is wasting away” — and he does not mean some everlasting ruin after death, but a wearing out through hard work and suffering. That is what he had in mind just before, when he said, “and this is why we do not lose heart.” Then, when he adds of “the inner man” that it “is renewed day by day,” he shows both things at once: the body worn down by the rough handling of its trials, and the mind renewed by its looking at the promises.