The Shadow Belongs to the Body

In my standing objection against every heresy I make a habit of fixing my short, decisive test in the evidence of time. I claim that being first is on our side, and I charge every heresy with being late. The apostle himself will prove it now, when he says: “because of the hope stored up for you in heaven, which you heard of before in the word of the truth of the good news that has come to you, as it has to all the world.” If even at that date the message of the good news had spread everywhere, how much more now! And if it is our message that has spread everywhere, and not some heretical version of it — much less Marcion’s, which only dates from the reign of Antoninus — then ours is the message of the apostles. [a]

Suppose Marcion’s did succeed in filling the whole world: even then it could not claim to come from the apostles. That character, plainly, can belong only to the message that was first to fill the world — that is, to the message of the God who long ago said this about its spread: “Their sound has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.”

He calls Christ “the image of the invisible God.” We say the same: the Father of Christ is invisible. We know that it was the Son who was seen in ancient times — whenever any appearance was granted to men in the name of God — as the image of the Father himself. But nobody should take the apostle to be drawing a distinction here between a visible God and an invisible one, because long before he wrote, our God was described in these terms: “No one can see the Lord and live.”

If Christ is not “the firstborn of all creation” — that Word of God “through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made” — if “all things” were not “created in him, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers,” if “all things” were not “created through him and for him” (and Marcion ought not to allow any of that about him), then the apostle could not have laid it down so flatly that “he is before all.” For how is he before all, if he is not before all things? And how is he before all things, if he is not the firstborn of all creation — if he is not the Creator’s own Word? How will Marcion’s Christ be shown to have existed before all things, when he turned up after all things? Who can say whether he existed earlier, when no proof has been found that he existed at all?

And how could it have “pleased the Father that all fullness should live in him”? To begin with, what sort of fullness is it that does not consist of the very parts Marcion has taken out of it — the things “created in Christ, in heaven or on earth,” angels or men? that is not made up of things visible and invisible? that does not consist of thrones and dominions and rulers and powers?

Or else this: the false apostles and the gospel-preachers who push the Jewish law brought all these things in out of their own stock, and Marcion took them over to make up the fullness of his own god. Absurd as that guess is, it is the only thing that would let him off. For on any other reading, how could the Creator’s rival and destroyer have been willing that the Creator’s fullness should live in his Christ?

And to whom does he “reconcile all things through himself, making peace by the blood of his cross,” except to the one whom those very things had offended, against whom they had rebelled by breaking his law, and to whom in the end they came back? They might have been brought over to a god who was a stranger to them; but they could not possibly be reconciled to anyone except their own God. So too, when it says that we “who were once estranged, enemies in our minds by wicked deeds,” are reconciled, it is to the Creator that we are reconciled — the one we had offended by worshipping the creature at the Creator’s expense.

And since the apostle says elsewhere that the church is the body of Christ, here too he declares that he “fills up in his own flesh what is still lacking of the sufferings of Christ, for the sake of his body, which is the church.” Do not conclude from this that every mention of his body is only a figure of speech and never means real flesh. He says just above that we are “reconciled in his body through death” — meaning, of course, that he died in the body in which death was possible, because it was flesh. And that is why he writes not through the church but for the sake of the church, trading one body for another: a body of flesh for a body that is spiritual.

Then he warns them to “watch out for clever talk and philosophy,” which is “an empty fraud,” the sort that goes “by the elements of the world.” By that he does not mean the fabric of sky and earth, but worldly learning and “the tradition of men,” with their clever speech and their philosophy. To show how that one sentence condemns every heresy, on the ground that heresies are built out of clever speech and the rules of philosophy, would take a long time and deserves a book of its own.

But let Marcion be told once and for all that the leading article of his teaching comes straight out of the school of Epicurus: that the Lord is dull and takes no interest in anything. That is why he refuses to call him someone to be feared. And out of the Stoics’ porch he fetches matter, and sets it level with the divine Creator. He also denies that the flesh rises again — a truth not one of the schools of philosophy ever agreed to hold.

How far the truth we hold stands from this heretic’s contrivances! It is afraid of rousing the anger of God. It holds firmly that he brought everything into being out of nothing. It promises us back from the grave the same flesh that died. And it says without blushing that Christ was born from a virgin’s womb. At all this the philosophers laugh, and the heretics, and the pagans too. For “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise” — and that means the God who, with this very arrangement in view, threatened long ago that he would “destroy the wisdom of the wise.” Because the truth is this plain, and the direct opposite of philosophy’s subtlety and empty fraud, we can have no appetite at all for such twisted opinions.

Then again, if God “makes us alive together with Christ, forgiving us our trespasses,” we cannot suppose that the forgiving is done by a god against whom no offence could ever have been committed, since he was unknown the whole time.

Now tell me, Marcion, what do you make of the apostle’s words: “Let no one pass judgment on you about food or drink, or about a festival or a new moon or a sabbath — these are a shadow of what was coming, but the body is Christ’s”? We are not discussing the law here, except to note that the apostle plainly teaches how it has been done away: by passing from shadow into substance, that is, from the outlines that stood for something into the thing itself, which is Christ. So the shadow belongs to the one who owns the body as well. In other words, the law is his, and so is Christ. If you separate the law from Christ, handing one to one god and the other to another, you are trying to separate a shadow from the body that casts it. Clearly Christ belongs with the law, if a body belongs with its shadow.

And when he blames the people who cited visions of angels as their warrant for saying that men must keep off certain foods — “do not handle, do not taste” — in a self-chosen humility, while they are “puffed up for nothing by a fleshly mind and not holding on to the Head,” he is not in those words attacking the law or Moses, as though Moses had banned this or that food at the prompting of superstitious angels. Moses plainly received the law from God. So when the apostle speaks of people “following the commands and teachings of men,” he means the behavior of those who “did not hold on to the Head” — the one in whom all things are gathered up. For everything is called back to Christ and brought together in him as its starting point, foods and drinks included, which in themselves were neither here nor there.

All the rest of his instructions — as we showed well enough when we dealt with them in another letter — came from the Creator. He is the one who foretold that “the old things were passing away” and that he would “make all things new,” and who told men to “break up fresh ground for yourselves,” teaching them even then to strip off the old self and put on the new.

When the apostle lists the various motives of the men who were preaching the good news — how some, “made confident by his chains, were bolder in speaking the word,” while others “proclaimed Christ out of envy and strife,” and others “out of good will,” many “out of love,” some “out of contention,” and some in rivalry with him — he certainly had his chance there to charge their preaching with holding different doctrines, as though nothing less than that could explain so wide a difference in temper. But while he exposes those tempers as the only cause of the difference, he takes care not to blame the settled rules of the faith, and he states that there is still only one Christ and one God of his, whatever the motives men had for preaching him. [u]

That is why he says it makes no difference to him “whether Christ is preached in pretense or in truth”: one and the same Christ was announced, whether the faith preaching him was a pretended one or a true one. He was applying the word truth to the honesty of their preaching, not to the soundness of the standard itself, since there was in fact only one standard. It was the preachers’ conduct that varied: in some of them it was true, that is, single-minded, while in others it was doctored with too much learning.

That being so, it is plain that the Christ they preached was the one the prophets always spoke about. If the apostle had been bringing in a completely different Christ, the sheer novelty of it would have produced a split. Even with the new teaching in the air, there would have been no shortage of men taking the preaching to be about the Creator’s Christ, since the majority of people everywhere, even now, think as we do rather than side with the heretics. In a passage like this one, then, the apostle would not have held back from noticing such a split and condemning it. But since he blames no split, there is no evidence of anything new.

Naturally, Marcion’s followers suppose they have the apostle on their side in the passage that follows, on the question of what Christ was made of — that in him there was nothing but a phantom of flesh. He says of Christ that, “being in the form of God, he did not count it robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself and took the form of a slave” — not the reality — “and was made in the likeness of a man” — not a man — “and was found in fashion as a man” — not in his substance, that is, his flesh. As though a substance did not come with a form and a likeness and a fashion of its own.

It is lucky for us that in another passage the apostle calls Christ “the image of the invisible God.” Will it not follow just as forcibly from that passage that Christ is not really God, since the apostle puts him in the image of God — if, as Marcion holds, he is not really a man because he took on the form or image of a man? In both cases the real substance would have to be ruled out, if image and likeness and form are handed over to a phantom. But he is truly God, as the Son of the Father, in the Father’s fashion and image; and by the force of that conclusion he has already been settled to be truly man as well, as the Son of man, “found in the fashion” and image “of a man.”

When he set him out as thus “found” in the manner of a man, he was in fact affirming that he was most certainly human. What is found plainly exists. So, as he was found to be God by his mighty power, he was found to be man by reason of his flesh; for the apostle could not have said of him that he “became obedient to the point of death” if he had not been made of a substance that could die. It comes out plainer still in the words he adds: “even the death of the cross.” He would hardly be piling that on as the height of human suffering, to set off the strength of Christ’s obedience, if he had known the whole thing to be a phantom’s make-believe, which dodged the cross rather than went through it, and showed no strength in the suffering, only illusion.

As for “the things he once counted as gain,” which he lists in the verse before — “confidence in the flesh,” the mark of “circumcision,” his birth as “a Hebrew of Hebrews,” his descent from “the tribe of Benjamin,” his standing in the honors of a Pharisee — he now reckons them nothing but “loss” to himself. What he is throwing over is not the God of the Jews, but their dull stubbornness. These are also the things “he counts as dung, for the surpassing worth of knowing Christ” — and by no means for the throwing over of God the Creator — “while he does not have a righteousness of his own, which comes from the law, but the one that comes through him,” that is, through Christ, “the righteousness that is from God.”

Then, you say, on that distinction the law did not come from the God of Christ. Clever enough. But here is something cleverer still for you. When the apostle says, “Not the righteousness that comes from the law, but the one that comes through him,” he would not have used the words through him of anyone but the one to whom the law belonged.

“Our way of life,” he says, “is in heaven.” Here I recognize the Creator’s old promise to Abraham: I will multiply your offspring like the stars of heaven. And that is why “one star differs from another star in glory.”

And if Christ, when he comes from heaven, “will change the body of our humiliation so that it is formed like the body of his glory,” then it follows that this body of ours will rise again — the body that is now humiliated in its sufferings and, by the law of mortality, drops into the ground. But how will it be changed, if it has no real existence? And if this is said only of the people who will be found still in the flesh when God comes, and who will have to be changed, then what about those who rise first? They will have no substance out of which to be changed. But he says elsewhere, “We will be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.” Well then: if we are to be caught up together with them, we must be changed together with them too.

This letter alone was brief enough for its brevity to protect it from Marcion’s falsifying hands. But I am surprised that, having taken into his collection a letter written to just one man, he threw out the two letters to Timothy and the one to Titus, all of which deal with the ordering of church life. His aim, I suppose, was to carry his tampering right through to the number of Paul’s letters. [ag]

And now, reader, I ask you to keep in mind that we have brought forward proofs out of the apostle in support of matters we had to handle earlier, and that we have now finished off the subjects we put aside for this part of the work. What I am asking is this: do not think any repetition here has been wasted, for we were only keeping the promise we made you; and do not be suspicious of anything we postponed back there, where we were setting out only the essential points. If you go over the whole work carefully, your own honest judgment will clear us of being long-winded here or thin there.