Harnack on Marcion

The legendary church historian Adolf von Harnack wrote about Marcion:

The innovations of Marcion are unmistakable. The way in which he attempted to sever Christianity from the Old Testament was a bold stroke which demanded the sacrifice of the dearest possession of Christianity as a religion, viz., the belief that the God of creation is also the God of redemption. And yet this innovation was partly caused by a religious conviction, the origin of which must be sought not in heathenism, but on Old Testament and Christian soil. For the bold Anti-judaist was the disciple of a Jewish thinker, Paul, and the origin of Marcion's antinomianism may be ultimately found in the prophets. It will always be the glory of Marcion in the early history of the Church that he, the born heathen, could appreciate the religious criticism of the Old Testament religion as formerly exercised by Paul. The antinomianism of Marcion was ultimately based on the strength of his religious feeling, on his personal religion as contrasted with all statutory religion That was also its basis in the case of the prophets and of Paul, only the statutory religion which was felt to be a burden and a fetter was different in each case. As regards the prophets, it was the outer sacrificial worship, and the deliverance was the idea of Jehovah's righteousness. In the case of Paul, it was the pharisaic treatment of the law, and the deliverance was righteousness by faith. To Marcion it was the sum of all that the past had described as a revelation of God: only what Christ had given him was of real value to him. In this conviction he founded a Church: Before him there was no such thing in the sense of a community, firmly united by a fixed conviction, harmoniously organized, and spread over the whole world. Such a Church the Apostle Paul had in his mind's eye, but he was not able to realize it...

Harnack could see the real power of Marcion's idea. He felt the temptation that Marcion felt, to make a separation between the two testaments, to put the stress on the radical newness of Paul's gospel and to highlight his critique of the old faith. Marcion was a remarkable planter of church communities - Harnack even goes so far as to make him the inventor of the Catholic church. Without Marcion the church would not have been able to conceive of its scriptures; it would not have been able to conceive of itself.