The Likeness of Sinful Flesh

If the Father “sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh,” it does not follow that the flesh he seemed to have was only a phantom. A little earlier the apostle had assigned sin to the flesh, and had called it “the law of sin living in his members,” “fighting against the law of the mind.” That is exactly why the Son was sent in the likeness of sinful flesh: so that he might redeem this sinful flesh by a substance like it — a fleshly one, resembling sinful flesh, though itself free of sin. And there you have the very perfection of divine power: to bring about salvation by means of a nature like our own. It would be no great thing if the Spirit of God repaired the flesh. But when a flesh that is the exact counterpart of the sinning substance — itself flesh too, only without sin — does the repairing, that is a great thing indeed. So the likeness has to do with the character of the sinfulness, not with any falseness of the substance. He would not have added the word “sinful” if he meant the “likeness” to be said of the substance in a way that denied the substance was real; in that case he would simply have written “flesh” and left “sinful” out. But since he put the two together and said “sinful flesh” — flesh of sin — he has both affirmed the substance, that is, the flesh, and referred the likeness to the fault of that substance, that is, to its sin. Suppose, though, that the likeness were said of the substance itself. Even then the reality of that substance would not be denied. Why call a true substance a likeness, then? Because it is indeed true, only not from a seed of the same condition as ours; true all the same, since its origin is not really unlike ours. Besides, between opposites there is no likeness. A likeness of flesh would never be called spirit, since flesh admits of no likeness to spirit; it would be called a phantom, if it seemed to be what it in fact was not. But it is called a likeness, because it is what it seems to be — and it is what it seems to be because it matches the other thing it is set beside. A phantom, which is a seeming and nothing else, is no likeness at all. [a]

The apostle himself comes to our help here. He explains in what sense he does not want us “living in the flesh” even while we are in the flesh — namely, by not living in the works of the flesh. That shows that when he wrote, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” he was not condemning the substance but its works. And since it is possible for us not to commit those works while we are still in the flesh, the charge properly falls not on the substance of the flesh but on its conduct. In the same way, if “the body indeed is dead because of sin” — which shows that he means the death of the body, not of the soul — “but the spirit is life because of righteousness,” then this life comes to the thing that incurred death because of sin: the body, as we have just seen. And a body is only given back to the one who lost it, so that the resurrection of the dead means the resurrection of their bodies. That is why he adds, “The one who raised up Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies.” With those words he both affirmed the resurrection of the flesh — for without flesh nothing can properly be called a body, and nothing can properly be counted mortal — and proved that Christ’s substance was bodily; because our own mortal bodies will be brought to life in exactly the way he was raised, and he was raised in no other way than in the body.

Here I have a very wide gulf of deleted Scripture to leap across. I come down at the place where the apostle testifies of Israel that “they have a zeal for God” — their own God, of course — “but not according to knowledge. For,” he says, “being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and setting out to establish their own righteousness, they have not submitted to the righteousness of God; for Christ is the end of the law, for righteousness to everyone who believes.” At this point the heretic will come at us with an argument: that the Jews were ignorant of the higher God, since it was against him that they set up their own righteousness — the righteousness of their law — refusing to receive Christ, the law’s end. But then how is it that Paul bears witness to their zeal for their own God, if the God they are charged with not knowing is not that same God? They did have zeal for God, but it was not an informed zeal. They were ignorant of him because they were ignorant of the arrangements he made through Christ, who was to bring the law to its completion; and that is how they came to maintain their own righteousness against him. And in fact the Creator himself testifies to their ignorance of him: “Israel has not known me; my people have not understood me.” As for their preferring to set up a righteousness of their own, he describes them as “teaching human commandments as their teaching”; and further, as men who have “gathered themselves together against the Lord and against his Christ” — out of ignorance of him, naturally. Now nothing that fits the Creator can be explained of some other god; otherwise the apostle would not have been fair in reproaching the Jews with ignorance of a god they had never heard of. Where would their sin have been, if all they did was uphold the righteousness of their own God against one they knew nothing about?

Then he cries out: “Oh, the depth of the riches and the wisdom of God! How unsearchable his ways are!” Where does that burst of feeling come from? Surely from remembering the Scriptures he had just been turning over, and from looking at the mysteries he had been setting out above, about the faith of Christ that comes out of the law. If Marcion’s erasures were made to some purpose, why does his apostle break out like this, when his god has no riches for him to look at? He was so poor and destitute that he created nothing, predicted nothing — in short, owned nothing; for it was into another God’s world that he came down. The fact is that the Creator’s resources and riches, once hidden, were now being opened up. He had promised as much: “I will give them treasures that have been hidden, and I will open to them things that men have not seen.” That is where the exclamation comes from — “Oh, the depth of the riches and the wisdom of God!” — because his treasures were now being brought out. That is the point of what Isaiah said, and of the apostle’s own quotation of the same passage of the prophet just afterward: “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Who has given to him first, so that it should be paid back to him again?” Now, Marcion, since you have deleted so much of the Scriptures, why did you keep these words, as though they too were not the Creator’s words?

But come now — let us take a good clear look at the commands of your new god. “Hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” Well, is the command any different in the Creator’s teaching? “Put away evil from yourself, turn away from it, and do good.” Then again: “Be devoted to one another in brotherly love.” Is that not the same thing as “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”? Your apostle says, “rejoicing in hope” — hope in God, that is. So says the Creator’s psalmist: “It is better to hope in the Lord than to hope even in princes.” “Patient in trouble.” You have that in the Psalm: “May the Lord hear you in the day of trouble.” “Bless, and do not curse,” says your apostle. And what better teacher of that will you find than the one who created all things and blessed them? “Do not set your mind on high things, but keep company with the lowly. Do not be wise in your own eyes.” Isaiah pronounces a woe on exactly that frame of mind. “Repay no one evil for evil.” And here is the Creator’s command to match: “You shall not hold your brother’s wrong against you.” Again: “Do not avenge yourselves,” for it is written, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” “Live at peace with everyone.” The law’s rule of retaliation, then, did not permit paying back an injury; it held any attempt at it down by the fear of what would be paid back in return. So it was quite right of him to sum up the whole teaching of the Creator in this command of the Creator’s own: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Now if this is the law summed up out of the law itself, I am at a loss to say who the God of the law is. I am afraid he must be Marcion’s god after all! And if the good news of Christ is fulfilled in this same command, and yet not the Creator’s Christ, what is the use of our arguing any longer over whether Christ did or did not say, “I have not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it”? Our man from Pontus has worked hard to deny that saying, and worked for nothing. If the good news has not fulfilled the law, then look — the law has fulfilled the good news. But it is just as well that a little further on he threatens us with “the judgment seat of Christ” — the Judge, that is, and the Avenger, and therefore the Creator’s Christ. And however much he may preach up another god, he certainly sets this Creator before us as someone whose favor has to be won, if he holds him up like that as someone to be feared.

I am not sorry to give the shorter letters my attention as well. Even brief works have plenty of flavor in them. The Jews had killed their prophets. What, I ask, has that to do with the apostle of the rival god — such an agreeable god, who can hardly be said to condemn even the failings of his own people, and who himself has a hand in doing away with the very prophets he is destroying? What injury did Israel do him by killing men he had condemned himself, since he was the first to pass a hostile sentence on them? No: Israel sinned against their own God. The one who charged them with that wrong is the one to whom the wronged God belongs; and he is certainly anything but the opponent of the God who was wronged. Otherwise he would not have loaded them with the charge of killing the Lord as well, in the words, “who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets” — though the words their own are an addition of the heretics. And what was so very bitter about their killing Christ, the herald of the new god, when they had already put to death the prophets of their own god too? But their killing of the Lord and of his servants is set out as a rising scale. Now if it were the Christ of one god and the prophets of another god that they killed, Paul would surely have put the two godless crimes on the same level instead of ranking one above the other; and in fact the two would not admit of being put on the same level. So the ranking was only possible because the sin had actually been committed against one and the same Lord on both counts. To one and the same Lord, then, Christ and the prophets belonged. [u]

What that “holiness of ours” is, which he declares to be “the will of God,” you can find out from the opposite conduct that he forbids: that we should “keep away from sexual immorality” — not from marriage — and that everyone “should know how to keep his own vessel in honor.” In what way? “Not in the passion of craving, as the nations do.” But craving is not laid to the charge of marriage even among the nations; it is laid to extravagant, unnatural and monstrous sins. The law of nature is set against self-indulgence as much as against coarseness and filth; it does not forbid intercourse between husband and wife, but craving; and it takes care of our vessel by way of an honorable marriage. I would handle this passage of the apostle in a way that still upholds the other and higher holiness, preferring self-control and virginity to marriage, while by no means forbidding marriage. For what I am beating back is people who want to destroy the God of marriage — not people who pursue chastity.

He says that those who “remain until the coming of Christ,” together with “the dead in Christ, will rise first,” and be “caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” I find that it was in foresight of all this that the powers of heaven gazed in wonder at “the Jerusalem that is above,” and said long ago through the mouth of Isaiah: “Who are these that fly like clouds, and like doves with their young, to me?” And since Christ has prepared this climb into heaven for us, he must be the Christ of whom Amos spoke: “It is he who builds his ascent up to the heavens” — for himself and for his people. So from whom am I to expect all this, except from the one I have heard promise it?

What “spirit” does he forbid us to “quench,” and what “prophecies” to “treat as nothing”? Not the Creator’s spirit, Marcion will answer of course, and not the Creator’s prophecies. But he has already quenched and treated as nothing the very thing he destroys, and a man cannot forbid what he has already annihilated. So it is now up to Marcion to display in his own church that spirit of his god which must not be quenched, and those prophecies which must not be treated as nothing. And once he has put on whatever display he thinks fit, let him know that we will hold it, whatever it turns out to be, against the standard of the grace and power of the Spirit and the prophets — namely, foretelling the future, laying bare the secrets of the heart, and explaining mysteries. And when he has failed to produce and prove any such test, we for our part will bring out both the Spirit and the prophecies of the Creator, which predict according to his will. Then it will be plain what the apostle was talking about: the very things that were to happen in the church of his God. As long as that God lasts, his Spirit is at work, and his promises are kept in use.

Come now, you who deny that the flesh is saved, and who, whenever the word body turns up in a passage of this sort, take it to mean anything at all rather than the substance of the flesh: how is it that the apostle has given each of our parts its own distinct name, and has gathered them all into a single prayer for their safekeeping, asking that our “spirit and soul and body be kept blameless until the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”? He has set out soul and body here as two separate and distinct things. Now the soul does have a kind of body of a quality of its own, and so does the spirit; but since soul and body are named separately, the soul has its own particular name and does not need the general word body. That word is left over for the flesh, which has no name of its own in this passage and so must fall back on the general one. And in fact I can see no other substance in a human being, after spirit and soul, that the word body can apply to, except the flesh. So that is what I take “body” to mean whenever the flesh is not named outright — and all the more here, where the flesh is expressly called by the name body.