The Judgment Seat and the Law

As for the house of this earthly dwelling of ours: when Paul says that “we have an eternal home in heaven, not made with hands,” he in no way means that our present house, because the Creator’s hand built it, must therefore perish at death in a dissolution that never ends. He raises the subject in order to give comfort against the fear of death and the dread of that very dissolution. What follows makes it plainer still, when he adds that “in this tent of our earthly body we groan, longing to be clothed over with the covering that comes from heaven, if indeed, once we have been stripped, we shall not be found naked” — that is to say, we shall get back what we were stripped of, our body. And again he says: “We who are in this tent groan, not because we want to be stripped, but because we want to be clothed over.” Here he states outright what he only touched on lightly in his first letter, where he wrote: “The dead will be raised imperishable” — meaning those who had already gone through death — “and we shall be changed” — meaning those whom God finds still in the flesh. The first will be raised imperishable because they get their body back, and a renewed one at that, and that is where their imperishability comes from. The second, in the crisis of the last moment, dying instantly while the pressure of antichrist is on them, will undergo a change; and what they receive in it is not so much having the body taken off as having the heavenly covering put on over it. So these will put the heavenly clothing on over their changed body, while the dead for their part will recover their body, over which they too have an outer garment to put on, the imperishability that comes from heaven. It was about both that he said, “This perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” The one group puts the heavenly clothing on when they get their bodies back; the other puts it on over what they have, since in the suddenness of their change they hardly lose their bodies at all. [a]

So he had good reason to describe them as “not wanting to be stripped” but rather “to be clothed over” — as wanting, that is, not to go through death but to be overtaken by life first, “so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life,” rescued from death by having the covering of its changed state put on over it. This is why he shows us how much better it is not to be downcast if death takes us by surprise, and tells us that we hold from God “the down payment of his Spirit” — pledged, as it were, to that clothing over which is the thing we hope for — and that “as long as we are in the flesh, we are away from the Lord”; and that for this reason we ought to count it better “to be away from the body and at home with the Lord,” and so to be ready to meet even death gladly.

That is the setting in which he tells us that “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive what he has done in the body, whether good or bad.” But if repayment is to be made according to what people have deserved, how will anyone be able to settle accounts with God? By naming both the judgment seat and the difference between good works and bad, Paul sets before us a Judge who is to hand down both sentences, and in doing so he has stated that everyone will have to be present at that court in their bodies. For sentence cannot be passed except on the body, for what was done in the body. God would be unjust if anyone were punished, or else rewarded, in some condition other than the very one in which the deed itself was done.

“So if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away; look, everything has become new” — and with that Isaiah’s prophecy is carried out. And when, in a later passage, he tells us “to cleanse ourselves from every defilement of flesh and blood” (since that substance does not enter the kingdom of God), and when again he “betroths the church to Christ as a pure virgin,” a bride to a bridegroom in plain fact — then an image cannot be set alongside and compared with something contrary to the real nature of the thing it stands for.

So when he labels certain men “false apostles, deceitful workers who disguise themselves” into likenesses of himself, meaning of course their hypocrisy, he is charging them with living disgracefully rather than with preaching a corrupted message. The contradiction, then, was one of conduct, not of gods. And if “Satan himself disguises himself as an angel of light,” that saying must not be used to the Creator’s discredit. The Creator is not an angel; he is God. Satan would have had to be described as disguising himself as a god of light, not an angel of light, if Paul had not meant to name “the angel” — which both we and Marcion know Satan to be.

On Paradise is the title of a book of mine, in which everything the subject allows is discussed. Here I will simply say that I wonder, on this point, whether a god who has no dealings of any kind on earth could possibly have a paradise of his own to call his — unless he happens to be making use of the Creator’s paradise, as he does the Creator’s world, rather in the manner of a beggar. And in any case it is the Creator who has already given us an instance of a man carried off from earth to heaven, in Elijah. But here is what surprises me still more — the case Marcion supposes next: that a god so good and kind, so set against blows and cruelty, put up the angel Satan (not even his own angel, but the Creator’s) to “batter” the apostle, and then refused his request when he was begged three times to set him free. It looks, then, as if Marcion’s god is imitating the Creator’s own way of acting: the Creator, who is an enemy of the proud, who even “brings the powerful down from their thrones.” Is he, then, the same God who gave Satan power over Job’s person, so that “strength might be brought to its full in weakness”?

How is it that the man who scolded the Galatians still keeps the very formula of the law: “By the mouth of two or three witnesses every matter shall be established”? How is it that he threatens sinners “that he will not spare” them — he, the preacher of a most gentle god? He even declares that “the Lord has given him the power to use sharpness in their presence.” Now deny it, heretic, at your own cost: deny that your god is to be feared, when his own apostle was making himself so frightening!

Since this little work of mine is nearly finished, I must handle briefly the points that still come up, and set aside the ones that have turned up so often already. I am sorry to have to argue about the law again, after proving so many times that its giving way to the good news is no argument for another god, since that was itself foretold in Christ and, in the Creator’s own plans, ordained for his Christ. But I must go back to that argument, so far as the apostle takes me there, because this letter above all looks very much as if it did away with the law. We have often shown by now that the apostle declares God to be a Judge; that in a Judge an Avenger is implied; and in an Avenger, the Creator. So in the passage where he says, “I am not ashamed of the good news, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek; for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith,” he is beyond question crediting both the good news and salvation to the one whom, following our heretic’s own distinction, I have been calling the just God and not the good one. It is he who moves people from confidence in the law to faith in the good news — that is, from his own law to his own good news. [o]

And when he goes on to declare that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth down in unrighteousness” — the wrath of which God, I ask? The Creator’s, certainly. So the truth will belong to the one whose the wrath also is, the wrath that has to be revealed to avenge the truth. In the same way, when he adds, “We know that God’s judgment is according to truth,” he both defended that wrath, out of which comes this judgment on behalf of the truth, and at the same time gave a further proof that the truth comes from the same God whose wrath he had just attested — by testifying to his judgment. What Marcion asserts is quite another matter: that the Creator, in anger, takes revenge on the truth of a rival god, a truth that had been held down in unrighteousness. Just how badly Marcion has gutted this letter in particular, pulling out whole passages as he pleased, will be clear from the unmutilated text of our own copy. For my purpose it is enough to take as evidence of the truth whatever he has seen fit to leave unerased — remarkable instances, these, of his carelessness and blindness.

If, then, God is to judge the secrets of men — both of those who have sinned under the law and of those who have sinned without law, since people who do not know the law still do by nature what the law contains — then surely the God who is to judge is the one to whom both the law belongs and that nature which stands in place of a law for those who do not know the law. But how will he conduct this judgment? “According to my good news,” says the apostle, “through Jesus Christ.” So both the good news and Christ must belong to the one to whom belong the law and the nature that the good news and Christ are to vindicate — and this at that judgment of God which, as he said just before, was to be according to truth. The wrath, then, which is to vindicate the truth, can be revealed from heaven only by the God of wrath. This sentence squares exactly with the earlier one, where the judgment is declared to be the Creator’s, and it cannot possibly be assigned to some other god who is no judge and is incapable of anger. It fits only the one among whose attributes are found the judgment and the wrath I am speaking of, and to whom the means of carrying them out must necessarily belong as well — the good news, that is, and Christ.

Hence his attack on the men who break the law, who teach that people should not steal and steal themselves. He makes it as a man in full deference to the law of God, not as though he meant to censure the Creator himself for having commanded a fraud to be worked on the Egyptians to get their gold and silver at the very time when he was forbidding people to steal — the sort of charge they are apt to bring against him, shamelessly, in other matters too. Are we then to suppose that the apostle held back out of fear from openly slandering a God from whom he nevertheless had no hesitation in drawing people away? In fact he had gone so far in censuring the Jews as to turn the prophet’s denunciation against them: “Because of you the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles.” How absurd, then, that he should himself blaspheme the very one for blaspheming whom he reproaches them as wrongdoers!

He also prefers circumcision of the heart to the neglect of circumcision in the flesh. Now it is entirely within the purpose of the God of the law that circumcision should be of the heart and not of the flesh, in the spirit and not in the letter, since this is the circumcision Jeremiah calls for: “Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, and take away the foreskins of your heart” — and Moses too: “Circumcise, then, the hardness of your heart.” So the Spirit who circumcises the heart will come from the same one who prescribed the letter that cuts the flesh; and “the Jew who is one inwardly” will belong to the very same God as the man who is “a Jew outwardly” — because the apostle would have preferred not to mention a Jew at all if he were not a servant of the God of the Jews.

Once it was the law; now it is “the righteousness of God that comes through faith in Jesus Christ.” What does this distinction mean? Has your god been serving the interests of the Creator’s arrangement, by allowing him and his law their time? Is the “Now” in the hands of the one to whom the “Then” belonged? Surely, then, the law belonged to the one whose the righteousness of God now is. The difference is a difference of arrangements, not of gods. He urges those who are counted righteous by faith in Christ and not by the law to have peace with God. With which God? The one whose enemies we have never been, under any arrangement at all? Or the one against whom we have rebelled, both against his written law and against his law of nature? Now peace is possible only toward someone with whom there was once a war. So we shall be counted righteous by him, and to him also the Christ will belong, in whom we are counted righteous by faith, and through whom alone God’s enemies can ever be brought round to peace.

“What is more,” he says, “the law came in, so that the offense might increase.” And why this? “So that,” he says, “where sin increased, grace might increase all the more.” Whose grace, if not that of the same God from whom the law also came? Unless, of course, the Creator slipped his law in for the sole purpose of making work for the grace of a rival god, an enemy of his own — I almost said, a god he had never heard of — “so that, as sin had reigned in death” under his own arrangement, “so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ,” his own opponent! It was for this, I suppose, that the Creator’s law had “shut everything up under sin,” and had brought “the whole world in guilty,” and had “stopped every mouth,” so that no one could boast through it — all in order that grace might be kept for the glory of Christ: not the Creator’s Christ, but Marcion’s!

Let me say something here in advance about the substance of Christ, since a question about it is now coming up. For he says that “we have died to the law.” It may be argued that Christ’s body is indeed a body, but not exactly flesh. Yet whatever the substance may be, since he speaks of “the body of Christ,” and states immediately afterward that Christ was “raised from the dead,” no body can be understood except the body of flesh — the flesh with reference to which the law was called a law of death.

But look: he bears witness to the law, and clears it by putting the blame on sin. “What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Absolutely not!” Shame on you, Marcion. “Absolutely not!” See how the apostle recoils from every charge against the law. “I, however, did not come to know sin except through the law.” But what high praise of the law comes out of that very fact, that through it the sin which was lying hidden came to light! It was not the law, then, that led me astray, but “sin, seizing its opportunity through the commandment.” Why do you, Marcion, lay to the charge of the God of the law what his own apostle does not dare lay to the charge of the law itself?

He even adds a climax: “The law is holy, and its commandment just and good.” Now if he reveres the Creator’s law like this, I am at a loss to see how he can destroy the Creator himself. Who can draw a line and say there are two gods, one just and the other good, when the one whose commandment is both “just and good” must be believed to be both? And again, when he affirms that the law is “spiritual,” he thereby implies that it is prophetic and that it speaks in figures. From this alone I am bound to conclude that Christ was foretold by the law, but in figures, so that in fact not all the Jews were able to recognize him.