Against Marcion 5.12

… of our earthly dwelling, he does not mean that we have an eternal house, not made with hands, in heaven, in the sense that what is made with hands, being the Creator's, perishes altogether, dissolved after death. For he is plainly treating these things to console the fear of death and the grief at that very dissolution, as is clear also from what follows, when he adds that we groan in this tabernacle of the earthly body, longing to put on over it what is from heaven, “since, having been stripped, we shall not be found naked,” that is, we shall receive back what we have been stripped of, that is, the body. And again: “For we who are in this tabernacle of the body groan, being weighed down, not wishing to be unclothed but to be clothed over.” For here he has spelled out what he touched on briefly in the first letter: “And the dead will rise incorrupt” (those who have already died) “and we shall be changed” (those who will have been found by God here in the flesh). For the former will rise incorrupt, having received back the body, and that whole, so as to be incorrupt from this; and the latter, because of the very last moment of time and as the reward of the harassments of Antichrist, will obtain a short cut past death, but changed, clothed over with what is from heaven rather than stripped of the body. So if these put that heavenly thing on over the body, the dead too will surely receive back the body, over which they too may put on incorruption from heaven, since of them also he says, “This corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal immortality.” The former put it on when they have received back the body; the latter put it on over, because they have not lost the body. And so not idly did he say, “not wishing to be unclothed of the body, but to be clothed over,” that is, not wishing to experience death but to be overtaken by life, “that this mortal may be swallowed up by life,” while it is snatched from death by being clothed over with the change. Because he shows that this is better, so that we should not grieve if perhaps we are overtaken by death, he says too that we have from God the pledge of the Spirit, as though given in security for the same hope of being clothed over; and that we are away from the Lord as long as we are in the flesh, and that we ought therefore to think it good rather to be away from the body and to be with the Lord, so that we may even welcome death gladly. And so he says that we must all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive what he has done through the body, whether good or evil. For if the recompense of deserts is then, how can some be reckoned as already with the Lord? And by naming a judgment seat and the reckoning of good and evil work he both shows a judge who pronounces both sentences and confirms the bodily presence of all. For what was done in the body cannot fail to be judged in the body. For God would be unjust if one were not punished or rewarded in that through which he acted. “If, then, there is any new creation in Christ, the old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new”: Isaiah's prophecy has been fulfilled. If also he commands us to cleanse ourselves from the defilement of flesh and blood, it is not the substance … to receive the kingdom of God. If he also means to present the church as a holy virgin to Christ, as a bride to a bridegroom, surely an image cannot be joined to what is hostile to the reality of the thing itself. If he also calls the false apostles deceitful workers who disguise themselves, through hypocrisy, of course, he taxes them as guilty of adulterated conduct, not of adulterated preaching. So the dispute was about the rule of life, not about deity. If Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, this cannot be directed at the Creator. For the Creator, being God and not an angel, would have been said to disguise himself as a god of light, not as an angel; unless he meant by it that Satan whom both we and Marcion know as an angel. (Paradise has its own treatise for every question it raises. Here I shall perhaps wonder whether a god who has no earthly arrangement of his own could have had a paradise of his own; unless he used the Creator's paradise too on sufferance, as he used the world. And yet taking a man up into heaven is a precedent of the Creator's, in Elijah.) But I shall wonder more that the best god, a stranger to striking and to harshness, applied to his own apostle, to buffet him, an angel of Satan, not even his own but the Creator's, and did not grant it when entreated by him three times. So Marcion's god too corrects in the Creator's way, who is jealous of the proud and brings down the mighty from their thrones. Or is he perhaps the very one who gave Satan power even over Job's body, that strength might be proved in weakness? And why does the chastiser of the Galatians still keep to the form of the law, laying down that every word will stand on three witnesses? Why does the preacher of the gentlest god threaten that he will not spare sinners, and even affirm that the very power to act more harshly when present has been given him by the Lord? Deny now, heretic, that your god is feared, whose apostle was feared!