Against Marcion 5.13

As the little work draws to its close, what comes up again must now be treated briefly, and some things that have come up quite often must be passed over. I am weary of fighting still about the law, when I have so often proved that its giving way offers no argument for a different god in Christ, since it was foretold and promised with the Creator with a view to Christ; although this letter in particular seems to exclude the law most of all. But we have also often shown that a judging God is carried about by the apostle, and in the judge an avenger, and in the avenger the Creator. So here too, when he says, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel; for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew and to the Greek, because the righteousness of God is revealed in it from faith to faith,” he undoubtedly ascribes both the gospel and salvation to the just God, not to the good god (to speak according to the heretic's distinction), who transfers men from faith in the law to faith in the gospel, his own law, surely, and his own gospel; since he also says that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold down the truth in unrighteousness. The wrath of which God? Surely the Creator's. So the truth too will belong to him to whom the wrath belongs, which is to be revealed to avenge the truth. And by adding, “But we know that the judgment of God is according to truth,” he both proved the wrath itself, from which judgment comes on behalf of the truth, and again confirmed that the truth belongs to the same God whose wrath he proved by proving the judgment. It would be another matter if the Creator, in anger, were avenging the truth of another god held down in unrighteousness. How many pits Marcion has dug in this letter above all, by taking away what he wished, will be plain from the completeness of our own document. For me it is enough to take up what he likewise failed to see should be erased, as his negligences and blind spots. For if God will judge the secrets of men, both of those who sinned under the law and of those who sinned without the law (since these too, even if they do not know the law, yet by nature do what the law requires), then surely that God will judge to whom belong both the law and nature itself, which serves as law for those who do not know the law. And how will he judge? “According to the gospel,” he says, “through Christ.” So both the gospel and Christ belong to him to whom belong both the law and nature, which will be vindicated through the gospel and Christ by God in that judgment of which he spoke above: “according to truth.” So, just as the wrath revealed from heaven to defend these things comes only from the God of wrath, so this sense too, which coheres with the former and in which the Creator's judgment is proclaimed, cannot be referred to another god, who neither judges nor is angry, but to him to whom these things belong, I mean judgment and wrath; and so those things too must be his through which these are to be carried out, the gospel and Christ. And so he inveighs against the transgressors of the law, who teach not to steal and steal themselves, as a man of the God of the law, not as attacking the Creator himself in these ways, who, though he forbade stealing, ordered the fraud on the Egyptians over the gold and silver, just as they twist the other things against him. The apostle, of course, was afraid to abuse openly the God from whom he was not afraid to have departed! And he so attacked the Jews that he threw at them the prophetic rebuke: “Because of you the name of God is blasphemed.” How perverse, then, that he should himself blaspheme the one for whose blaspheming he reproaches the wicked! He also prefers circumcision of the heart to the foreskin. But with the God of the law, too, circumcision of the heart was made, not of the flesh; in the spirit, not in the letter. And if this is Jeremiah's circumcision (“and circumcise the foreskins of your heart”), as it is also Moses' (“and circumcise your hardness of heart”), then the Spirit that circumcises the heart will belong to him to whom the letter that cuts the flesh belongs; and the Jew who is one inwardly will belong to him to whom the Jew who is one outwardly belongs, since the apostle would not have wanted to name as a Jew one who was not a servant of the God of the Jews. Then the law; now the righteousness of God through faith in Christ. What is this distinction? Has your god been serving the Creator's arrangement, granting time to him and to his law? Or does the “then” belong to him to whom the “now” belongs? The law to him to whom faith in Christ belongs? The distinction is one of dispensations, not of gods. He admonishes those who are justified by faith in Christ, not by the law, to have peace with God. With which God? The one whose enemies we never were, or the one against whose law and nature we rebelled? For if peace applies to him with whom there was war, we shall be justified by him as well; and Christ will be his by faith in whom we shall be justified, to whose peace it is fitting that his once-enemies be brought back. “But the law came in,” he says, “that sin might abound.” Why? “That grace,” he says, “might abound all the more.” The grace of which God, if not of him whose the law is too? Unless the Creator inserted the law in order to do business for the grace of another god, and a rival at that, not to say an unknown one; so that, as sin had reigned with him unto death, so grace also might reign in righteousness unto life through Jesus Christ, with his adversary! For this reason, then, the Creator's law had shut up all things under sin, brought the whole world into guilt, and stopped every mouth, so that no one should boast through it, in order that grace might be kept for the glory of Christ, not the Creator's Christ, but Marcion's! Here too I can lay a foundation concerning the substance of Christ, looking ahead to the question that will follow. For he says that we are dead to the law through the body of Christ. So Christ has a body. It may be argued that a body is not straightaway flesh! But whatever substance it may be, since he names the body of one who, he goes on, rose from the dead, no other body can be understood than a body of flesh, to which the law of death was pronounced. But look: he even bears witness to the law and excuses it from being the cause of sin: “What then shall we say? That the law is sin? Far from it!” Blush, Marcion, at the apostle who recoils from accusing the law. “But I did not know sin except through the law.” What high praise of the law from this, that through it sin could not lie hidden! So it was not the law that led astray, but sin, taking occasion from the commandment. Why do you charge against the God of the law what his apostle does not dare to charge against his law? And yet he piles it up: “The law is holy, and its commandment just and good.” If he so reveres the Creator's law, how he could destroy the Creator himself I do not know. Who distinguishes two gods, one just and another good, when he whose commandment is both good and just ought to be believed to be both? And if he also affirms that the law is spiritual, then surely it is prophetic too, surely figurative too. For from here too I ought to establish that Christ was preached in the law figuratively, in such a way that he could have been recognized even by all the Jews.