Against Marcion 5.11

If “God” has become a common word through the fault of human error, since many gods are spoken of and believed in the world, yet “the blessed God of our Lord Jesus Christ” will be understood to be none other than the Creator, who both blessed all things (you have Genesis) and is blessed by all things (you have Daniel). Likewise, even if a barren god can be called “father,” [by no one's name more than the Creator's,] yet the Father of mercies will be the same one who has been called merciful and compassionate and abounding in mercy. You have in Jonah the example of his mercy itself, which he showed to the Ninevites when they entreated him; he was easily moved by the tears of Hezekiah, ready to pardon Ahab, Jezebel's husband, for the blood of Naboth when he begged, and at once indulgent to David when he acknowledged his sin, preferring, of course, the repentance of a sinner to his death, out of the feeling of mercy. If Marcion's god has done or declared anything of this kind, I will acknowledge him as the Father of mercies. But if he ascribes this title to him from the time he was revealed, as though he has been the Father of mercies from the time he set about freeing the human race, then we deny him from the very time from which he is said to have been revealed. For if it were first established that he exists, then something could also be ascribed to him. For what is ascribed is an accident, and accidents are preceded by the showing of the thing itself to which they belong. So one cannot ascribe anything to him whom he shows at the very moment he ascribes something to him; especially since what is ascribed to one who has not first been shown already belongs to another. For he will be all the more denied to exist, the more that by which he is affirmed to exist belongs to one who has already been shown. So too the new covenant will belong to no other than the one who promised it, “not of the letter but of the Spirit”: this will be its newness. In short, the one who had cut the letter on tablets of stone is the same who had also declared of the Spirit, “I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh.” And if “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life,” both belong to him who says, “I will kill and I will make alive; I will strike and I will heal.” We have already claimed for the Creator a twofold power, both of judge and of good God, killing by the letter through the law and giving life by the Spirit through the gospel. Things that, though different, were already reckoned to belong to one cannot make two gods. He also recalls the veil of Moses, with which he covered his face, which the children of Israel could not look upon. If he does so to uphold the greater brightness of the new covenant, which remains in glory, than that of the old, which was to be done away, this suits my faith too, which puts the gospel above the law. And see whether it does not suit mine more: for something can be put above only where there is also the thing it is put above. But when he says, “But the minds of the world were blunted” (not, of course, of the Creator, but of the people who are in the world; for he says of Israel, “To this day that same veil is upon their heart”), he shows that the veil on Moses' face was then a figure of the veil on the people's heart, because even now Moses is not seen by them with the heart, as he was not then seen with the face. What, then, is still veiled in Moses that concerns Paul, if the Creator's Christ, foretold by Moses, has not yet come? And how (to put it more plainly) are the hearts of the Jews marked as still veiled, if Moses' prophecies, that is, about Christ, in whom they ought to have understood him, have not yet been fulfilled? What does it matter to the apostle of another Christ if the Jews did not understand the mysteries of their own God, unless the veil on their heart meant the blindness by which they had not seen the Christ of Moses? Finally, what follows, “But when he turns to God, the veil will be taken away,” he says properly of the Jew, on whom Moses' veil lies, who, when he passes over to faith in Christ, will understand that Moses preached about Christ. Otherwise, how will the Creator's veil be taken away in the Christ of another god, whose mysteries the Creator could not have veiled, being, of course, things unknown of one unknown? He says, then, that we now, with unveiled face (the face of the heart, of course, which is veiled in the Jews), beholding Christ, are transfigured into the same image from glory, the glory by which Moses too was transfigured by the glory of the Lord, to glory. So, setting out Moses' bodily illumination from his meeting with the Lord and the bodily veil because of the people's weakness, and adding over them the spiritual unveiling and spiritual brightness in Christ (“as from the Lord,” he says, “of the spirits”), he testifies that the whole order of Moses was a figure of Christ, unknown among the Jews but recognized among us. We know that some sentences can admit of ambiguity from the sound of the pronunciation or from the way they are punctuated, when a double possibility arises. Marcion seized on this by reading thus: “in whom the God of this age,” so that, showing the Creator as the God of this age, he might suggest another god of another age. We say, on the contrary, that it should be punctuated thus: “in whom God,” and then, “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers of this age.” “In whom”: in the unbelieving Jews, in whom the gospel is still hidden from some under the veil of Moses. For God had threatened them, who loved him with their lips but whose heart stood far off from him: “With the ear you will hear and not hear, with the eyes you will see and not see,” and, “Unless you believe, you will not understand,” and, “I will take away the wisdom of the wise, and the understanding of the prudent I will bring to nothing.” And he surely was not threatening these things in order to hide the gospel of an unknown god. So, even if he is the God of this age, yet it is the heart of the unbelievers of this age that he blinds, because they did not of their own accord recognize his Christ, who was to be understood from the Scriptures. And content to have dealt this far with a point that depends on the ambiguity of punctuation, so that it should not profit the adversary, … I could also have passed over this contention altogether. A simpler answer will be at hand: to interpret the god of this age as the devil, who said, as the prophet relates, “I will be like the Most High; I will set my throne in the clouds,” just as the whole superstition of this age has been made over to him, so that he blinds the hearts of unbelievers, and above all of the apostate Marcion. In short, he did not see the conclusion of the sentence that confronts him: “For God, who said that light should shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of his glory in the person of Christ.” Who said, “Let there be light”? And who says to Christ about the enlightening of the world, “I have set you as a light of the nations,” of those, that is, who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death? To whom the Spirit answers in the psalm, out of foresight of the future: “The light of your countenance, O Lord, has been signed upon us.” And the countenance of God is Christ the Lord, which is why the apostle said above, “who is the image of God.” So if Christ is the countenance of the Creator who said, “Let there be light,” then Christ and the apostles and the gospel and the veil and Moses and the whole series, according to the testimony of the conclusion, belong to the Creator, the God of this age; certainly not to the one who never said, “Let there be light.” (Here I pass over another letter too, which we have headed “To the Ephesians” but the heretics “To the Laodiceans.” For it says that the nations should remember that at that time, when they were without Christ, aliens from Israel, without its way of life and the covenants and the hope of the promise, they were also without God in the world, even though it were of the Creator. So if he said that the nations were without God, and their god is the devil, not the Creator, it is plain that the god of this age is to be understood as the one whom the nations received as god, not the Creator, whom they do not know.) And how can it be that the treasure in earthen vessels, that is, in our bodies, should not be held to belong to the same one to whom the vessels also belong? Now if it is to God's glory that so great a treasure is held in earthen vessels, and the earthen vessels are the Creator's, then the glory is the Creator's, whose vessels taste of the surpassing greatness of God's power; and so is the power itself, since it was entrusted to earthen vessels for this reason, that its surpassing greatness might be proved. But it will not then be the glory of another god, and therefore not his power either (rather his disgrace and weakness), whose surpassing greatness earthen vessels, and others' vessels at that, have contained. And if these are the earthen vessels in which he says we suffer so much, in which we even carry about the dying of the Lord, then God is quite ungrateful and unjust if he is not going to raise up this substance too, in which so much is endured for faith in him, in which the death of Christ too is carried about, in which the surpassing greatness of his power is consecrated. For he puts it forward: “that the life of Christ too may be manifested in our body,” just as, that is, his death is carried about in the body. Of what life of Christ, then, is he speaking? Of that by which we now live in him? And how is it that in what follows he urges us not to things visible and temporal but to things invisible and eternal, that is, not to things present but to things to come? And if he is speaking of the future life of Christ, saying that it will appear in the body, he has plainly preached the resurrection of the flesh; saying that our outer man is being corrupted, yet not as by an eternal destruction after death, but by labours and hardships, of which he spoke before, and adding, “and we shall not lose heart.” For in saying that our inner man is being renewed day by day, he shows both here: the corruption of the body from the harassment of trials, and the renewal of the mind from the contemplation of the promises.