Against Marcion 3.14

This interpretation of ours will be helped when, supposing Christ a warrior elsewhere too because of the names of certain weapons and words of that kind, you are refuted by comparison with the sense of the rest as well. “Gird your sword,” says David, “upon your thigh.” But what do you read of Christ just before? “You are in the bloom of beauty beyond the sons of men; grace is poured out on your lips.” It makes me laugh, if the one he was girding with a sword for war he was flattering about the bloom of his beauty and the grace of his lips. So too, adding, “and stretch out, and prosper, and reign,” he went on: “because of truth and gentleness and justice.” For who will work these things with a sword, and not rather their opposites, deceit, harshness, and injustice, the proper business of battles? Let us see, then, whether that sword is not a different one, since its action is different. For the apostle John too in the Apocalypse describes a sword coming out of the mouth of God, two-edged and very sharp, which must be understood as the divine Word: two-edged by the two testaments of the law and the gospel, sharp with wisdom, hostile to the devil, arming us against the spiritual enemies of wickedness and of all lust, cutting us off even from those dearest to us for the name of God. But if you will not acknowledge John, you have our common teacher Paul, girding our loins with truth and the breastplate of righteousness, and shoeing us with the preparation of the gospel of peace, not of war, bidding us take up the shield of faith, with which we can quench all the fiery darts of the devil, and the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, “which is,” he says, “the word of God.” This is the sword which the Lord himself came to send on the earth, not peace. If he is your Christ, then he too is a warrior. If he is not a warrior, brandishing an allegorical sword, then the Creator's Christ too in the psalm could, without anything warlike, be girded figuratively with the sword of the Word, and to him the aforesaid bloom and grace of lips fit; the sword with which he was already then being girded upon the thigh in David, and which he was at some time to send on the earth. For this is what it says: “and stretch out, and prosper, and reign”: stretching out the Word into all the earth for the calling of all the nations; to prosper by the success of the faith by which he was received; and reigning from then on, in that he conquered death by the resurrection. “And your right hand,” it says, “will lead you wonderfully”: the power, that is, of spiritual grace, by which the knowledge of Christ is led forth. “Your arrows are sharp”: the precepts flying everywhere, and threats, and exposures of the heart, pricking and piercing every conscience. “Peoples will fall under you”: in worship, of course. Such is the Creator's Christ, mighty in war and bearing arms; so too now he receives spoils, not of Samaria only but of all the nations. Recognize figurative spoils too, when you have learned that his arms are allegorical. And so, since the Lord speaks figuratively in this way and the apostle writes so, we are not rash in using such interpretations, examples of which even our adversaries admit; and so the Christ who came will be Isaiah's precisely in so far as he was not a warrior, since he is not foretold as such by Isaiah.