The Maker Is the Father

In sending you this fourth book of the work called “The Detection and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So Called,” my very dear friend, I will do what I promised: I will add weight to what I have already argued, this time by using the Lord’s own words. Then you too, as you asked, will have from me the means of refuting all the heretics everywhere. Beaten back at every point, they are not to be allowed to launch out further into the deep of error, or to drown in the sea of ignorance. You are to steer them into the harbor of the truth instead, and so bring them to their salvation.

Anyone who takes on the work of turning them around, though, has to know their systems accurately — the whole scheme of what they teach. No one can heal the sick without knowing what disease the patients have. That is why the men who came before me, far better men than I am, still could not refute the Valentinians properly: they did not know these people’s system. I have set it out for you with all care in the first book, where I also showed that their teaching sums up every heresy there is. That is why, in the second book, we saw their whole defeat as in a mirror. For whoever opposes these men by the right method opposes everyone who has an evil mind, and whoever overthrows them in fact overthrows every kind of heresy.

Their system is more blasphemous than any other, since they make out that the Maker and Framer, who is one God, as I have shown, was produced from a defect — from a falling away. They blaspheme our Lord too, cutting Jesus off from Christ, and Christ from the Savior, and the Savior again from the Word, and the Word from the Only Son. And because they claim the Creator came from a defect, from a falling away, they have taught as well that Christ and the Holy Spirit were sent out on account of that defect, and that the Savior was a product of those Aeons who were themselves produced from a defect. So there is nothing to be found among them but blasphemy. In the book before this one, then, I set out what the apostles thought on all these points: not only did those men, “who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word” of truth, hold no such opinions, but they preached to us to keep away from these teachings, since by the Spirit they foresaw the weak-minded people who would be led astray.

For just as the serpent tricked Eve by promising her what he did not have himself, so these men do the same by pretending to a higher knowledge and to unspeakable mysteries; and by promising the admission they talk about, the entry into the Pleroma, they plunge those who believe them into death and make them apostates from the one who made them. Back then the angel who had fallen away, having brought about man’s disobedience by means of the serpent, imagined that he had escaped the Lord’s notice; and so God assigned him the serpent’s shape and the serpent’s name. But now that the last times have come upon us, evil is spread abroad among men, and it does more than make them apostates: by many contrivances the devil raises up blasphemers against the Creator, using all the heretics already named. For all of these, though they come out of different regions and put about different opinions, still agree in one and the same blasphemous plan. They wound men to death by teaching blasphemy against God our Maker and Supporter, and by taking away from the salvation of man.

Now man is a blend of soul and flesh, formed after the likeness of God and molded by his hands — that is, by the Son and the Holy Spirit, to whom he also said, “Let us make man.” This, then, is what the one who envies our life is after: to make men disbelieve in their own salvation and blaspheme God the Creator. Whatever any of the heretics may have put forward with the greatest solemnity, they all come to this in the end — they blaspheme the Creator, and they deny salvation to God’s handiwork, which is exactly what the flesh is. On the flesh’s behalf I have proved in many ways that the Son of God carried out the whole arrangement, and I have shown that the Scriptures call no one else God except the Father of all, and the Son, and those who have received adoption.

So this much is sure and settled: the Spirit announced no other God or Lord except the one who, as God, rules over all, together with his Word and those who receive the Spirit of adoption — that is, those who believe in the one true God and in Jesus Christ the Son of God. It is equally sure that the apostles themselves never applied the name God to anyone else, and never called anyone else Lord. And what matters more than either of those, our Lord did the same, since he commanded us to acknowledge no one as Father except the one who is in the heavens, who is the one God and the one Father. [k]

That being so, what these deceivers and thoroughly twisted debaters put forward is plainly false. They maintain that the being they invented for themselves is by nature both God and Father, while the Demiurge is by nature neither God nor Father and is called so in name only, because he rules the creation. That is what these perverse myth-makers say, setting their thoughts against God. Putting the teaching of Christ aside and spinning falsehoods out of their own heads, they argue against God’s whole arrangement. For they hold that their Aeons and gods and fathers and lords are further called heavens as well, along with their Mother, whom they also call “the Earth” and “Jerusalem” and a great many other names.

Now who cannot see this? If the Lord had known many fathers and gods, he would not have taught his disciples to know one God only and to call him alone Father. What he did instead was to mark off those who are called gods in name only from the one who truly is God, so that they would not go wrong about his teaching and take one for the other. And if he really did teach us to call one being Father and God, while from time to time acknowledging other fathers and gods in the same sense, then he will look like a man who lays down one course for his disciples and follows another himself. That is not how a good teacher behaves; that is a misleading and grudging one.

The apostles, too, on these men’s showing, turn out to be breakers of the command, since they acknowledge the Creator as God and Lord and Father, as I have shown — if he is not the only God and Father. So Jesus will be, for them, the author and teacher of that offense, since he commanded that one being be called Father, and thereby laid on them the necessity of acknowledging the Creator as their Father, as has been pointed out.

So Moses, summing up the whole law he had received from the Creator, speaks like this in Deuteronomy: “Give ear, heavens, and I will speak; and hear, earth, the words of my mouth.” Again, David, saying that his help came from the Lord, states: “My help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” And Isaiah acknowledges that the words spoken were spoken by God, who made heaven and earth and governs them. He says: “Hear, heavens, and give ear, earth, for the Lord has spoken.” And again: “This is what the Lord God says, who made the heaven and stretched it out, who established the earth and everything in it, and who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk in it.” [n]

Again, our Lord Jesus Christ acknowledges this same Being as his Father when he says: “I acknowledge you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth.” What Father do these men want us to understand by those words — these most twisted debaters of Pandora? Is it to be Bythus, whom they have made up for themselves? Or their Mother? Or the Only Son? Or is it the being whom the Marcionites and the rest have invented as a god, one I have amply shown to be no god at all? Or is it — as is in fact the case — the Maker of heaven and earth, the one the prophets proclaimed, the one Christ also acknowledges as his Father, the one the law announces when it says, “Hear, Israel: the Lord your God is one God”?

But since the writings of Moses are the words of Christ, he says so himself to the Jews, as John has recorded in the Gospel: “If you had believed Moses, you would have believed me, for he wrote about me. But if you do not believe his writings, neither will you believe my words.” In the clearest possible way he shows that the writings of Moses are his own words. And if that is how it stands with Moses, then beyond any doubt the words of the other prophets are his words too, as I have pointed out. Again, the Lord himself presents Abraham as saying to the rich man, with reference to all those who were still alive: “If they do not obey Moses and the prophets, then even if someone were to rise from the dead and go to them, they will not believe him.”

He was not simply telling us a story about a poor man and a rich one. He was teaching us, first of all, that no one should live a life of luxury, or be a slave to his cravings and forget God while living in worldly pleasures and endless feasting. “There was a rich man,” he says, “who was clothed in purple and fine linen, and enjoyed himself with splendid feasts.”

The Spirit has spoken of such people through Isaiah as well: “They drink wine with lyres and tambourines and harps and flutes; but they pay no attention to the works of God, and they do not consider the work of his hands.” So, to keep us from running into the same punishment as those men, the Lord reveals how they end up. At the same time he shows that if they had obeyed Moses and the prophets, they would believe in the one whom Moses and the prophets preached: the Son of God, who rose from the dead and gives us life. And he shows that they are all of one and the same stock — Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and the Lord himself, who rose from the dead, in whom many of the circumcision believe, men who do listen to Moses and the prophets announcing the coming of the Son of God. But the men who sneer at the truth say that these came from a different stock, and they do not know the firstborn from the dead. They take Christ to be one being, who went on as though he could not suffer, and Jesus, who did suffer, to be another and entirely separate from him.

For they do not receive the knowledge of the Son from the Father, and they do not learn from the Son who the Father is — the Son who teaches plainly and without parables about the one who truly is God. He says: “Do not swear at all: not by heaven, for it is God’s throne; nor by the earth, for it is his footstool; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King.” Those words are plainly spoken with reference to the Creator, just as Isaiah says: “Heaven is my throne, the earth is my footstool.” And besides this Being there is no other God; otherwise the Lord would not have called him “God” or “the great King.” A being who can be described that way admits no one compared with him and no one set above him. Anyone who has a superior over him, and is under another’s power, can never be called either “God” or “the great King.”

These men will not be able to argue that the words were said ironically, either, since the words themselves prove that he meant them. The one who spoke them was Truth, and he truly claimed his own house when he drove out of it the money changers who were buying and selling, saying to them: “It is written, My house will be called a house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves.” And what reason had he for doing this, and saying this, and defending his house, if he was preaching a different God? He did it to point out the men who were breaking his Father’s law. He brought no charge against the house, and he found no fault with the law he had come to fulfill; he corrected the men who were putting his house to a wrong use and the men who were breaking the law. And so the scribes and Pharisees, who from the days of the law had begun to despise God, did not receive his Word — that is, they did not believe in Christ. Isaiah says of them: “Your princes are rebels, companions of thieves, lovers of bribes, chasing after rewards; they do not give judgment for the fatherless, and they take no trouble over the widow’s case.” And Jeremiah says the same: “Those who rule my people did not know me; they are senseless and thoughtless children; they are clever at doing evil, but they have no knowledge of how to do good.”

But everyone who feared God and cared about his law ran to Christ, and they were all saved. For he said to his disciples: “Go to the sheep of the house of Israel, the ones that have been lost.” And it is said that many more Samaritans, when the Lord had stayed with them two days, believed because of his words, and said to the woman: “Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we have heard him ourselves, and we know that this man is truly the Savior of the world.”

Paul likewise declares, “And so all Israel will be saved”; and he has also said that the law was our attendant, to bring us to Christ Jesus. So let them not lay the unbelief of some of them at the law’s door. The law never kept them from believing in the Son of God. On the contrary, it urged them to believe, saying that men can be saved from the serpent’s old wound in no other way than by believing in the one who, in the likeness of sinful flesh, is lifted up from the earth on the tree of his witness, and draws all things to himself, and makes the dead alive.

They also argue spitefully like this: if heaven really is God’s throne and earth his footstool, and if it is declared that heaven and earth will pass away, then when these pass away the God who sits above them must pass away too, and so he cannot be the God who is over all. [aa]

In the first place, they do not know what the expression means — that heaven is his throne and earth his footstool. They do not know what God is. They imagine that he sits the way a man sits, and that he is held within limits rather than holding all things. And they do not know what the passing away of heaven and earth means, either. Paul was not in the dark about it when he declared, “For the outward form of this world is passing away.”

In the second place, David answers their question. He says that when the form of this world passes away, not only will God remain, but his servants as well. This is how he puts it in the 101st Psalm: “In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth, and the heavens are the works of your hands. They will perish, but you will endure; they will all wear out like a garment, and like a cloak you will change them, and they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will not fail. The children of your servants will continue, and their offspring will be established forever.” He points out plainly what the things are that pass away, and who it is that endures forever — God, together with his servants. Isaiah says the same: “Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth beneath; for the heaven was made firm like smoke, and the earth will wear out like a garment, and those who live in it will die in the same way. But my salvation will be forever, and my righteousness will not pass away.”