What Marcion Erased

From time to time we are obliged to come back to subjects already handled, in order to establish the truths that hang on them. So I say again here: since the apostle publishes the Lord as the one who awards both sentences, the good and the bad, he must be either the Creator himself or — though Marcion would hate to admit it — someone like the Creator. “It is a righteous thing with him to repay trouble to those who trouble us, and to us who are troubled, rest, when the Lord Jesus is revealed, coming from heaven with the angels of his power and in flaming fire.” Our heretic, however, has erased the flaming fire — meaning, no doubt, to put out every trace of our own God in the passage. But the stupidity of the deletion is plain to see. The apostle says that the Lord comes “to take vengeance on those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel”; such people, he says, “will be punished with everlasting destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power.” If he is coming to inflict punishment, then he needs the flaming fire. So on this ground too, whatever Marcion says, we have to conclude that Christ belongs to a God who kindles flames, and therefore to the Creator, since he takes vengeance on people who do not know the Lord — that is, on the Gentiles. [a]

For he has listed separately “those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ,” meaning the sinners among Christians or among Jews. Now punishing the Gentiles, who in all likelihood have never so much as heard of the gospel, is no business of a god who is by nature unknown, who is revealed nowhere but in the gospel, and who therefore cannot possibly be known by everyone. The Creator, on the other hand, ought to be known from nature itself. He can be understood from his works, and so the knowledge of him can spread much further. It belongs to him, then, to punish those who do not know God, because nobody has any excuse for not knowing him. And in the phrase “from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power” the apostle is using the words of Isaiah, who for that very reason has the same Lord “rise up to shake the earth terribly.”

Well then — who is “the man of sin, the son of destruction,” who has to be revealed first, before the Lord comes; “who opposes and lifts himself above everything that is called God or worshiped, who is to sit in the temple of God and give himself out as God”? On our reading he is Antichrist, as we are taught by both the old prophecies and the new, and above all by the apostle John, who says that “already many false prophets have gone out into the world,” the forerunners of Antichrist, who deny that Christ has come in the flesh and who undo Jesus — that is, they refuse to acknowledge him in God the Creator. On Marcion’s reading, though, it is genuinely hard to tell whether this figure may not after all be the Creator’s own Christ, since on his account that Christ has not yet come. But whichever of the two he is, I want to know why he comes “with all power, and with lying signs and wonders.” “Because,” says the apostle, “they did not receive the love of the truth, so that they might be saved. For that reason God will send them a prompting to delusion, so that they should believe the lie, and that all of them should be judged who did not believe the truth but took pleasure in wrongdoing.” So if he is Antichrist, as we hold, and comes by the Creator’s design, then it must be God the Creator who sends him, to fix in their error the people who would not believe the truth and be saved. And the truth and the salvation must be his as well — his, who avenges the contempt shown them by supplying error in place of truth. That is, the Creator’s, since this is exactly the kind of anger that suits him: an anger that deceives with a lie the people who would not be won by the truth.

If, however, he is not Antichrist, as we take him to be, then he is the Creator’s Christ, as Marcion would have it. In that case, how does Marcion’s Christ come to hire the Creator’s Christ to avenge his own truth? And if Marcion in the end agrees with us that Antichrist is meant here, then I must ask, in the same way, why he has any use for Satan, an angel of the Creator. Why, too, should Antichrist be killed by Marcion’s Christ, when it is the Creator who gave him the job of filling people with a love of untruth? In short, there is no arguing it: the messenger, the truth and the salvation all belong to the one to whom the anger belongs as well, and the jealousy, and the sending of the strong delusion on those who despise and mock him as well as on those who do not know him. So even Marcion will have to come down a step now and grant us that his god is “a jealous god.” That being settled, I ask which God has the better right to be angry. The one, I should think, who from the beginning of all things gave people the first witnesses to the knowledge of himself — nature in all her works, his kindnesses, his heavy blows, his announcements of himself — and who for all that evidence has still not been acknowledged. Or the one who was produced to view once and for all in a single copy of a gospel, and that one without any reliable authority, a copy that makes no secret of proclaiming another god. Now the one who has the right to inflict the vengeance has the sole claim to what gives occasion for it — I mean the gospel, and with it both the truth and the salvation. And the rule that “if anyone will not work, he should not eat either” agrees exactly with the command of the God who ordered that “the mouth of the ox that treads out the grain shall not be muzzled.”

We have it from the true tradition of the church that this letter was sent to the Ephesians, not to the Laodiceans. Marcion, however, was set on giving it the new title, as though he had been especially careful in looking the point up. But what do the titles matter? In writing to one particular church the apostle was in fact writing to all of them. In any case it is certain that, whoever the people were that he wrote to, he declared God to be in that Christ with whom everything that was foretold agrees. To what god, then, will everything most suitably belong that has to do with “the good pleasure which God purposed in the secret of his will, that in the ordering of the fullness of the times he might gather up under one head” — if I may put it that way, keeping to the exact force of the Greek word — “all things in Christ, both the things in heaven and the things on earth”? To whom, if not to the God whose all things are from their beginning, yes, and the beginning itself as well; from whom the times come, and the ordering of the fullness of the times, by which everything, right back to the very first thing, is gathered up in Christ? [p]

What beginning does the other god have? That is to say, how can anything proceed from him, when he has no work to show? And if there is no beginning, how can there be times? If no times, what fullness of times can there be? If no fullness, what ordering of it? What in fact has he ever done on earth, that any long ordering of times waiting to be filled up should be put down to his account, for the completing of all things in Christ, even of the things in heaven? Nor is there any supposing that anything whatever was ever done in heaven by any God other than the one by whom, as everyone allows, everything on earth was done. Now if all these things from the beginning cannot possibly be credited to any God but the Creator, who is going to believe that a foreign god has gathered them up under a foreign Christ, instead of their own proper Author under his own Christ? And if they belong to the Creator, they must be separate from the other god; and if separate, then set against him. In that case, how can things that are set against him be gathered up into the very one who simply destroys them? Again, which Christ do the words that follow announce, when the apostle says, “that we should be to the praise of his glory, we who hoped in Christ beforehand”? Who could have hoped first — that is, hoped in advance — in God, before he came, except the Jews, to whom Christ was announced in advance, from the beginning? The one who was foretold was also hoped in ahead of time. So the apostle refers the statement to himself, that is, to the Jews, in order to mark off the Gentiles from them, when he goes on: “In whom you also hoped, after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in whom you believed, and were sealed with his Holy Spirit of promise.” What promise? The one made through Joel: “In the last days I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh” — that is, on all the nations. So the Spirit and the gospel are to be found in the Christ who was hoped in beforehand, because he had been foretold beforehand.

Again, “the Father of glory” is the God whose Christ, on his way up to heaven, is hailed as “the King of glory” in the Psalm: “Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory.” From him, too, “the spirit of wisdom” is asked for — the God at whose disposal Isaiah lists that sevenfold sharing out of the spirit of grace. The one who will grant “the enlightening of the eyes of the understanding” is the same one who enriched our bodily eyes with light, and who is offended by the blindness of his people: “And who is blind but my servants? … Yes, the servants of God have gone blind.” In his gift, too, are “the riches of the glory of his inheritance among the holy ones” — his, who promised exactly such an inheritance in the calling of the Gentiles: “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance.” It was he who “worked in Christ his mighty power, raising him from the dead and seating him at his own right hand and putting all things under his feet” — the same God who said, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.” For in another passage the Spirit says to the Father about the Son, “You have put all things under his feet.”

Now if, out of all these facts that are found in the Creator, another god and another Christ are still to be inferred, let us go looking for the Creator. Of course, we are supposed to find him where the apostle speaks of people who “were dead in trespasses and sins, in which they once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, who is at work in the children of disobedience.” But Marcion is not to take “the world” here as meaning the God of the world. A creature is nothing like the Creator, a thing made nothing like its maker, the world nothing like God. Nor is the one who is prince of the power of the ages to be thought of as being called the prince of the power of the air; the one who is head over the higher powers takes no title from the lower ones, even though those belong to him too. And he certainly cannot be taken for the one at work in that unbelief, since he was the one who had to put up with it, at the hands of Jews and Gentiles alike. It is enough, then, to say that these descriptions do not fit the Creator. There is another to whom they fit better — and the apostle knew perfectly well who that was. So who is he? Beyond doubt, the one who has raised up “children of disobedience” against the Creator himself, ever since he took possession of that air of his; the one the prophet makes say, “I will set my throne above the stars; … I will go up above the clouds; I will be like the Most High.” This must be the devil, the one we shall recognize in another passage under the title “the god of this world,” since that is the sense they want the apostle to have there. For he has filled the whole world with the lying pretence of his own divinity. To be sure — if he did not exist, we might just possibly have applied these descriptions to the Creator.

The apostle himself had lived as a Jew; and when he adds, in passing, about the sins of that stretch of his life, “among whom we all also once lived our lives,” he is not to be understood as indicating that the Creator was lord of sinful men and prince of this air. He means that in his days as a Jew he had been one of the children of disobedience, with the devil at work in him, when he persecuted the church and the Creator’s Christ. That is why he says, “We too were children of wrath” — but “by nature.” And let the heretic not argue that, because the Creator called the Jews his children, the Creator must therefore be the lord of wrath. When the apostle says, “We were by nature children of wrath,” then — since the Jews were not the Creator’s children by nature but by the choosing of their fathers — he must be tracing their being children of wrath to nature, and not to the Creator, and he adds at the end, “like the rest,” who of course were not children of God. Plainly, sins and cravings of the flesh and unbelief and anger are put down to the common nature of the whole human race, while it is the devil who leads that nature astray, having already infected it with the sin he planted in it. “We are his workmanship,” he says, “created in Christ.” To make, as a workman does, is one thing; to create is another. But he assigns both to one. Man is the Creator’s workmanship. So the one who made man at the start is the one who created him in Christ as well. In respect of the substance of his nature, he made him; in respect of the work of grace, he created him.

Look at what follows on from these words, too: “So remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh, who are called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision — done in the flesh, by hand — that at that time you were without Christ, shut out from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants and their promise, having no hope, and without God in the world.” Now which God, and which Christ, were these Gentiles without? Surely the one to whom the commonwealth of Israel belonged, and the covenants, and the promise. “But now in Christ,” he says, “you who were once far off have been brought near by his blood.” Far off from what, before? From the things he speaks of just above: from the Creator’s Christ, from the commonwealth of Israel, from the covenants, from the hope of the promise, from God himself. That being so, the Gentiles have now in Christ been brought near to the very things they were once far from. But if in Christ we are brought so very near to the commonwealth of Israel, which takes in the worship of the divine Creator, and to the covenants and the promise, and indeed to their God himself, then it is simply ridiculous to say that the other god’s Christ has brought us from far off into this nearness to the Creator. The apostle had in mind that the calling of the Gentiles out of their distant estrangement had been foretold in words like these: “Those who were far from me have come to my righteousness.” For the Creator’s righteousness, no less than his peace, was announced in Christ, as we have shown often enough already. So he says, “He is our peace, who has made both one” — the Jewish nation, that is, and the Gentile world.

What is near and what was far off are made one “in his flesh,” now that the dividing wall of their “enmity” has been broken down. But Marcion erased the word his, so as to attach the enmity to flesh, as though the apostle were speaking of an enmity belonging to the flesh, rather than of the enmity that stood as Christ’s rival. And so, as I have said elsewhere, you have put on show the stupidity of Pontus and not the sharpness of a Marrucinian — for here you deny flesh to the one you allowed blood to a line earlier. And since he has emptied the law of its force by his own commands, by fulfilling the law himself — for “you shall not commit adultery” has nothing left to do once he says, “you shall not look at a woman to crave her,” and “you shall not murder” has nothing left to do once he says, “you shall not speak evil of your neighbor” — it is impossible to make an opponent of the law out of a man who backs it up so completely. “That he might create in himself out of the two” — for the one who had made is the same one who creates, just as we found it stated above, “we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus” — “one new man, making peace” (really new, and really a man, no phantom, but new, and newly born of a virgin by the Spirit of God), “that he might reconcile both to God” (the God, that is, whom both races had offended, Jew and Gentile alike), “in one body,” he says, “having killed the enmity in it by the cross.” So from this passage too we find that there was a fleshly body in Christ, one able to endure the cross.

“And so, when he came, he preached peace to those who were near and to those who were far off,” and both of us obtained our “access to the Father,” being “no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of God’s household” — the household of the very God from whom, as we showed above, we were aliens, set far off — “built on the foundation of the apostles.” And the apostle added, “and the prophets.” Those words the heretic erased, forgetting that the Lord had set in his church not only apostles but prophets as well. He was afraid, no doubt, that our building was to stand in Christ on the foundation of the ancient prophets — since the apostle himself never stops building us up with the prophets, wherever you look. For where did he learn to call Christ “the chief cornerstone,” if not from the figure handed to him in the Psalm: “The stone the builders rejected has become the head of the corner”?