This week at St Ebbe's I am starting a series of three lectures entitled Necessary Heresies: What the Heretics Have to Teach Us.
We start on Wednesday with Marcion. Marcion - the wealthy son of a bishop (how did THAT happen?) - gained a great deal of influence in the 2nd century church and beyond for his teaching that the wrathful God of the Old Testament was in fact a different deity to that of the New. He rejected the OT as scripture, and also everything but the letters of Paul - and edited those as well! The Christian gospel was as he saw it a repudiation of everything that the OT stood for. Creation was the product of a malicious and wrathful demiurge, from whose clutches we were to be saved by the Son.
What is interesting here is the interplay between the scriptural/textual issue and the theological one. Marcion would have no truck with allegorising the distasteful bits of the OT away to make them palatable. He just wouldn't see them reconciled with the loving deity of the New - and so he rejected them on the basis of this theological criterion.
It is significant that Adolf von Harnack, the great German liberal-Protestant church historian, thought Marcion was the most significant theologian between Paul and Luther. Partly, this is because Marcion did get something right: he did understand the radical newness of the gospel - its breaking out of boundaries and its dissolving of religious strictures and superstitions. He did understand the import of Paul's radical critique of the torah. He did understand the heart of the gospel is not bare law but divine love.
But Harnack was badly wrong; as indeed was Marcion! It was of course the mission of 19th century liberal Protestantism to follow Marcion in his excision from the canon of the Bible parts that did not apparently square with gospel as they had determined it. The church of yore determined that this was not a step that was true to its own identity as a listening church, or as a Church of Jesus the Messiah: and this crisis forced it into recognition of the authoritative list of books that comprise the Bible, including the canon of the OT.
Is this heresy alive and well today?
6 comments:
Thanks for posting on this. I'm sadly in Northampton on placement so I won't be able to go to the Toolbox classes, except perhaps the last one.
Congratulations on your M.St - the robes do indeed look fun.
Thanks.
happy healing in Northants!
It's alive and well, though not always cutting the same bits out.
I think we see it in any church that restricts which bits of the Bible are preached to only the bits the leaders like, and that's most of them.
old blog post about it here
I've picked up a lot of scholars modifying the heresy a bit by pitting certain parts of scripture against others - i.e. they read the gospels as more authoritative than the epistles. Especially those who are pro 'incarnational' ministry. It's often done in practice more than open declaration.
Christian pacifists display Marciontie tendencies when they claim that God must be anti-war. The God of the OT wasn't.
Michael,
Helmut Koester (Harcard Uni) has quite a lot of stuff to say about Marcion in his books on early Christianity and you get the impression that Koester is a clauset fan of Marcion. Since he was the last guy to do a Ph.D under Bultmann I cannot say that I am not surprised.
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