Against Marcion 5.7

“And he himself will bring to light the hidden things of darkness”: through Christ, of course, since he promised Christ as a light of the nations and declared himself a lamp searching the reins and hearts. From him too will come praise to each one, from whom also comes the opposite of praise, as from a judge. “Surely,” you say, “here at least he means by ‘the world’ the God of the world, when he says, ‘We have become a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men’; because if he had meant by ‘the world’ the men of the world, he would not have named men afterwards as well.” No: so that you should not argue in this way, the foresight of the Holy Spirit showed how he had said, “We have become a spectacle to the world”: namely, to the angels who minister to the world and to the men to whom they minister. No doubt a man of such constancy (not to say the Holy Spirit), writing especially to the children whom he had begotten in the gospel, was afraid to name the God of the world freely, when he could not have seemed to preach against him unless he did so openly! I do not argue that the man who had his father's wife displeased him on the basis of the Creator's law (the apostle may have been following the rule of a common and public religion); but when he condemns him to be handed over to Satan, he is the herald of a God who condemns. No matter how he said it, “for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord,” since he has passed judgment both on the destruction of the flesh and on the salvation of the spirit; and in ordering the evil to be removed from their midst, he has recalled a sentence very frequent with the Creator. “Purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, as you are unleavened.” So the unleavened loaves were figures of us with the Creator. “So too Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed.” Why is Christ the Passover, unless the Passover is a figure of Christ by the likeness of the blood of the saving lamb and of Christ? Why has he clothed us and Christ with images of the Creator's festivals, if they were not ours? And in turning us away from sexual immorality he makes plain the resurrection of the flesh. “The body,” he says, “is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body,” as the temple for God and God for the temple. Will the temple, then, perish for God, and God for the temple? But you see: “He who raised the Lord will also raise us.” He raised him in the body too, because the body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body. And it is well that he piles it up: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” What will the heretic say? That the members of Christ, which are no longer our own, will not rise? “For we have been bought at a great price.” At no price at all, surely, if Christ was a phantom and had no substance of body to pay out for our bodies. So Christ had something with which to redeem us; and if he redeemed these bodies at a great price, bodies into which sexual immorality must not be admitted, as being now members of Christ, not our own, he will surely keep safe for himself what he bought at a great price. How, then, shall we now glorify, how shall we bear God in a body that is to perish? Next he takes up marriage, which Marcion, more rigorous than the apostle, forbids. For the apostle, though he prefers the good of continence, still permits marriage both to be contracted and to be used, and urges that it be kept rather than dissolved. Clearly Christ forbids divorce, while Moses permits it. Marcion, who takes away all sexual union from the faithful (let his catechumens see to themselves), and orders divorce before marriage: whose sentence is he following, Moses' or Christ's? And yet the apostle, when he commands that a wife should not depart from her husband, or, if she departs, should remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband, both permitted divorce, since he did not forbid it altogether, and confirmed marriage, since he first forbade it to be dissolved and, if it happened to be dissolved, wanted it restored. But what reasons does he give for continence? “Because the time is short.” I had thought it was because there was another god in Christ! And yet from him from whom comes the shortening of the time will also come what befits the shortening of the time. No one provides for another's time. You make your god a petty one, Marcion, if the Creator's time hems him in in any respect. Certainly, in prescribing that one must marry only in the Lord, so that no believer should contract marriage with a heathen, he upholds the Creator's law, which everywhere forbids marriages with foreigners. “But even if there are those who are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth”: it is plain how he said this, not as though they truly were gods, but because there are those who are called gods, though they are not. For he began with idols, being about to discuss things sacrificed to idols: “We know that an idol is nothing.” But even Marcion does not deny that the Creator is God. So the apostle cannot seem to have placed the Creator too among those who are called gods and yet are not, since, even if they had been, still for us there would be one God, the Father, “from whom are all things.” From whom are all things for us, if not from him to whom all things belong? And what are they? You have them in what came before: “All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or things present or things to come.” So he makes the Creator the God of all things, from whom come the world and life and death, which cannot belong to another god. From him, then, among all things, comes Christ too. In teaching that each one ought to live by his own labour, he had given examples first of soldiers, shepherds, and farmers; but they lacked divine authority. So he sets against the ungrateful the law of the Creator, which he was destroying (for he had no such law of his own god): “You shall not muzzle the ox that treads out the grain,” he says, and adds: “Is it for oxen that the Lord cares? …even to oxen kind for the sake of men? For it was written for our sake,” he says. So he proved that the law is allegorical with reference to us, and that it pleads for those who live by the gospel; and for that reason that the preachers of the gospel belong to no other than him to whom the law belongs, which provided for them, since he says, “For it was written for our sake.” But he did not want to use the right the law gave, because he preferred to labour without pay. This he referred to his own glory, which he said no one would make void, not to the destruction of the law, which he proved another would use. But look: blind Marcion stumbles on the rock from which our fathers drank in the wilderness. For if that rock was Christ (the Creator's Christ, of course, whose people they were too), to what purpose does he interpret it as a figure of a foreign mystery? Was it not to teach this very thing, that the old things were figures pointing to Christ, who was to be recognized from them? For when he is about to run through the rest of the people's history, he says first: “Now these things were made examples for us.” Tell me: were examples made by the Creator for the men of another god, and an unknown one at that? Or does one god borrow examples from another, and from a rival at that? He frightens me about the very God from whom he is transferring my faith! Will his adversary make me better for him? Now, if I commit the same sins as the people did, am I to suffer the same things or not? If not the same, he sets before me to no purpose fears of what I shall not suffer. But from whom shall I suffer? If from the Creator, what sort of things is it his part to inflict? And how will it be that the jealous God punishes the sinner of his rival rather than, on the contrary, cherishing him? If from that god, well, he does not know how to punish. So this whole argument of the apostle has no ground at all unless it is in keeping with the Creator's rule of life. Finally, in his conclusion he answers his preface: “Now these things happened to them as they did, and were written to admonish us, upon whom the ends of the ages have come.” What a Creator, already foreknowing and admonishing Christians who belong to another! I pass over, if anywhere, things like those already dealt with; some I also dispatch briefly. A great argument for another god, the permission of all kinds of food against the law! As if we ourselves did not also confess that the burdens of the law have been set aside, but by the one who imposed them, who promised a renewal; and so he who took away foods has also given back what he granted from the beginning. But if there had been some other god, the destroyer of our God, he would have forbidden his own people nothing more than to live on the provisions of his adversary.