One God, Just and Good

So all these men now stand exposed — the ones who bring in ungodly teachings about our Maker and Framer, who also formed this world, and above whom there is no other God. And those who teach falsehoods about the substance of our Lord, and about the ordering he carried out for the sake of man, his own creature, have been overthrown by their own arguments. [a]

On the other side, it has been shown that the church’s preaching is the same everywhere, that it holds an even course, and that it has the witness of the prophets, the apostles, and all the disciples — as I have proved — through those at the beginning, those in the middle, and those at the end; through the whole ordering of God; and through that solid working which leads to man’s salvation, namely, our faith. We received that faith from the church, and we keep it. By the Spirit of God it is always being made young again, like something precious stored in a fine jar, and it makes the jar that holds it young again as well.

For this gift of God has been put into the church’s keeping, as breath was given to the man first formed, so that every member who receives it may be brought to life. And the means of sharing in Christ has been handed out through the whole body — that is, the Holy Spirit, the down payment on freedom from decay, the strengthening of our faith, and the ladder by which we climb to God. “For in the church,” it says, “God has appointed apostles, prophets, teachers” — along with all the other ways in which the Spirit works. None of this belongs to those who do not join themselves to the church. They cheat themselves out of life by their twisted opinions and their disgraceful behavior. For where the church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the church and every kind of grace. And the Spirit is truth.

So those who have no share in him are not nursed into life at their mother’s breasts, and they do not drink from that clearest of springs which flows from the body of Christ. Instead they dig themselves broken cisterns out of ditches in the ground, and drink foul water out of the mud. They run from the faith of the church so as not to be proved wrong, and they throw off the Spirit so as not to be taught.

Cut off from the truth like this, they deserve to wallow in every kind of error, thrown this way and that by it. They think one thing about a matter now and something else later, and they never arrive at any settled knowledge, since they are keener to be sophists of words than students of the truth. They were not built on the one rock but on sand — and sand is a great crowd of little stones. That is why they imagine many gods; and why they always have the search for truth as their excuse, for they are blind, and never manage to find it.

For they speak against the Creator, the one who is truly God and who also supplies the power to find the truth, while they imagine they have discovered another god beyond God, or another Pleroma, or another ordering of things. That is also why the light that comes from God does not shine on them: they have dishonored God and looked down on him, thinking little of him because, out of his love and his measureless kindness, he has come within reach of human knowing. Not knowledge of his greatness, or of what he is in himself — no one has ever measured that or handled it — but knowledge of this kind: that the one who made us and formed us and breathed the breath of life into us, who feeds us by means of creation, who holds all things in place by his Word and binds them together by his Wisdom, is the only true God.

But they dream up a being above him who does not exist, so that they may be taken for men who have found out the great God — a God who, on their account, can be recognized by no one as having dealings with the human race or as running the affairs of this world. What they have found out is the god of Epicurus, who does nothing for himself and nothing for anyone else; that is, he exercises no providence at all.

But God does exercise providence over everything, and therefore he also gives counsel; and when he gives counsel, he is present with those who give their attention to moral discipline. It follows, then, that the things which are watched over and governed must know the one who rules them. They are not without reason and not without purpose; they have understanding, and they have it from the providence of God. This is why certain men among the nations — men less given over to enticements and pleasure-seeking, and not carried so far into superstition about idols — were moved, if only slightly, by his providence, and were convinced all the same that they ought to call the Maker of this universe the Father, who watches over everything and arranges the affairs of our world. [l]

Then, so as to take the power to rebuke and to judge away from the Father — counting that unworthy of God, and thinking they had discovered a God without anger, a God who is only good — they claimed that one God judges and another saves. Without noticing it, they take intelligence and justice away from both of their gods. For if the one who judges is not also good — good enough to grant favors to those who deserve them, and to aim his rebukes at those who need them — he will look like neither a just judge nor a wise one. And if the good God is only good, and is not one who tests the people he means to send his goodness to, he falls outside justice and outside goodness alike. His goodness will look unfinished, since it does not save everyone — which it would have to do, if judgment were not going along with it.

So Marcion himself, by dividing God in two and holding that one is good and the other the judge, in fact puts an end to God on both sides. For the one who is the judge, if he is not good, is not God, since anyone without goodness is no God at all. And the one who is good, if he has no power to judge, loses exactly what the other lost: he too is stripped of what makes him God. And how can they call the Father of all wise, if they will not grant him the power to judge? If he is wise, he also tests; and the power to judge belongs to the one who tests; and justice follows the power to judge, so that the verdict may be a just one; and justice calls judgment out; and judgment, when it is carried out justly, goes on to wisdom.

So the Father will surpass in wisdom all wisdom, human or angelic, because he is Lord, and Judge, and the Just One, and Ruler over all. For he is good, and merciful, and patient, and he saves those he should save. Goodness does not desert him when he does justice, and his wisdom is not made smaller: he saves those who ought to be saved, and he judges those who deserve judgment. Nor does he show himself just without mercy, for his goodness goes ahead of his justice and takes the first place.

So the God who kindly makes his sun rise on everyone, and sends rain on the just and the unjust, will also judge those who enjoyed that evenly shared kindness and then led lives that did not answer to the worth of his generosity — who spent their days in wild living and luxury, against his kindness, and who even spoke against the one who had given them such great gifts.

Plato turns out to be more religious than these men. He allowed that one and the same God is both just and good, that he has power over all things, and that he carries out judgment himself. This is how he puts it: “And God indeed, as the old saying also has it, holds the beginning and the end and the middle of all things that exist. He does everything rightly, moving around them according to their nature; and justice that repays always follows him against those who fall away from the divine law.” Then he points out that the Maker and Framer of the universe is good: “And in the good no envy over anything ever arises.” So he makes God’s goodness the beginning and the cause of the world’s creation — not ignorance, not an Aeon that went wrong, not the aftermath of a flaw, not the Mother weeping and wailing, and not some other God or Father.

Their Mother may well weep over them, for being able to conceive and invent such things. They have earned the lie they have told against themselves: that their Mother is outside the Pleroma — that is, outside the knowledge of God — and that the whole gathering of them turned into a shapeless, half-formed miscarriage. For it takes hold of nothing of the truth; it falls into emptiness and darkness. Their own Sophia, their wisdom, was empty and wrapped in darkness, and Horos would not let her into the Pleroma; and the Spirit, Achamoth, did not receive them into the place of refreshment. Their father, by fathering ignorance, worked in them the sufferings that belong to death.

We are not misreporting them on these points. They confirm it themselves, they teach it themselves, they boast of it. They imagine some lofty mystery about their Mother, whom they present as having been brought forth without a father — that is, without God — a female from a female, which is to say, decay out of error.

We do pray that these men will not stay in the pit they have dug for themselves, but will separate themselves from a Mother of that kind, come away from Bythus, stand clear of the emptiness, and let the shadow go; and that, turning to the church of God, they may be lawfully born, and Christ may be formed in them, and they may know the Framer and Maker of this universe, the only true God and Lord of all. We pray these things for them, loving them better than they seem to love themselves. Our love, since it is a true love, is good for them, if only they will take it. It works like a harsh medicine that eats away the proud, rotting flesh in a wound; it puts an end to their pride and their arrogance. So we will not grow tired of holding out a hand to them with all our strength.

Besides everything already said, I have held over to the next book the bringing forward of the Lord’s own words. It may be that by convincing some of them out of the teaching of Christ himself, I will manage to persuade them to give up such error and to stop speaking against their Creator, who is God alone and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.