Text/Notes of the Heretics series: 1. Marcion

There is some repetition of material already posted here, but I have posted the full text of the Necessary Heresies series given at St Ebbe's for the benefit of those who came (largely). I crave your indulgence!

1. Are heresies necessary?
I have rather provocatively entitled this series ‘Necessary Heresies: What the Heretics Have to Teach Us’. This seems at first to be rather counter-intuitive: surely the heretics of Christian history are to be avoided at all costs? Surely their teaching was precisely (and by definition) false teaching as opposed to the truth of the gospel? Surely the obvious thing is to steer well clear of them?

I would actually argue rather the opposite. The heretics of Christian history were not obviously wrong in their time: in almost every case their teaching was persuasive and powerful. All heretics made the claim that their teaching was Biblical and Christian. And, I want to suggest, every heretic gets at least something right – and often, they have an insight that is profoundly true. All the best untruths are of course half-truths.

And, further, it is because heresies have arisen in the history of the church that the church has been prompted again and again to decide what it thinks on certain essential questions: what books are and are not in the Bible? Is Jesus fully God and fully man, and if so, how is this possible? Is there a new revelation of God? Are human beings basically good or basically sinful? Without the heretics, a clear Christian answer to these questions – what we call ‘orthodoxy’ - might not have been given.

Heresy is by its nature attractive. This may run counter to our modern image of the heretic as the lone voice against the herd mentality of the group, the outsider crushed by the power that can’t face the truth. But that is manifestly not the case in Christian history: heretics posed a threat precisely because they did attract followers. What’s more, heretics posed a threat because they offer plausible explanations of the Christian faith; they bring clear answers to difficult questions, and they offer to smooth over the bumps in Christian experience. Heresy is not simply a matter of wrong teaching as opposed to right; it is frequently a matter of presenting a short cut, a cheap or easy explanation, or a philosophically or morally more acceptable answer to some of the most vexing issues for Christian believers. And so, for its part, orthodoxy, or ‘right-teaching’, frequently persues a more difficult path. Think of the Trinity: well, actually, that itself is the problem. How does one think of the Trinity? Well, an easy way to explain it would be to say ‘there is one God who wears three masks’. Or, ‘there are three gods who act together by agreement’. Or, ‘there are three parts to the one god’. These are all intelligible, but they are all heresies. The great councils of the early church decided instead that God was to be described as having one being in three persons. We search in vain for a nice analogy to make this intelligible, or a formula to explain it. Yet this accords with the Biblical truth most faithfully and with the experience of the churches as they received and lived out the gospel. This was orthodoxy.

The purpose of these three lectures is to listen hard to the heretics. I am not interested in them for their own sakes, but because each of them identifies something which is real challenge for us as modern-day believers, and for which we may be tempted – as indeed they were – to take an easy way out.

2. The monstrosity of God
The Old Testament – if you haven’t noticed – has some very difficult passages for a modern person to read. For example:
Is 45:7 ‘I make weal and create woe, I am the Lord, who do all these things,’

Or:
1 Samuel 15:2-3 2 Thus says the LORD of hosts, 'I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. 3 Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'"

What kind of a God is this? Is it possible that the God of Jesus Christ could speak of himself as the author and engineer of evil? Do we read here of the deity authorizing – even commanding – genocide, whose horrors we know only too well? Is he somehow murderous? Does he have a dark heart, a demonic side?

We could go further: can the creator of such a world in which we live – a world in which good and evil wrestle with one another, a world of tsunamis and famines and wars – could he really be a good God? Could he really have his creation’s best interests heart to be responsible for such chaos and impurity? Is not the mess we see somehow a reflection on the creator’s character? And this God, what’s more, declares that he will judge the world according to a law that his given that nobody is able to keep!

Consider how this contrasts with the gospel of love and faith and freedom preached by Jesus and Paul – the words of healing and forgiveness. Can we really accept these as being from the same God?


3. Enter Marcion
Marcion was a wealthy Christian ship-owner and a member of a Roman church in the mid-second century. As a respected member of the church, when he began to expound his teachings he soon won a following. Even though he was excommunicated in 144 AD, and his large financial contributions returned, he went around the empire propagating his version of Christianity and apparently succeeded in developing a network of churches.

He only wrote a single work, the Antithesis, which has now been lost. He was often labelled a Gnostic, and there are considerable similarities with Gnostic teaching in his system. He drove a wedge between the supreme God of goodness and the inferior God of justice – naturally Jesus reveals and represents the supreme God. Jesus' emphasis on love and forgiveness was incompatible with the teaching of Moses on retributive justice. The OT is full of contradictions and cannot be reconciled to the NT writings.

Marcion, therefore, rejected the whole of the OT. But he went even further. The Twelve had misunderstood Jesus as the Messiah of the OT God. This corruption of the true gospel Marcion sourced to Galatians. Only Paul understood the real significance of Jesus; and perhaps because of his link to Paul, only Luke's gospel was held to be trustworthy.

But even within this pruned canon, there needed to be some editing. Marcion refused to accept passages which he regarded as Jewish additions. References to the OT were expunged. Galatians 3:16-4:6 was removed because of the mention of Abraham. It was radical surgery indeed.

Marcion’s challenge was essentially two pronged:
a) on the one hand it was a challenge as to the source of our knowledge about God and authorised teaching, the Bible. While there had been some attempts to collect a list of the agreed and approved books of the Christian scriptures prior to Marcion’s appearance, Marcion was now offering an alternative and established list of authorised writings, held together in his mind by a common theme. Marcion and his followers could, they claimed, point to a common body of teaching in written form. Here, he said, was an end to disagreement about the extent of the new scriptures. Here was an end to Christian embarassment about the sheer Jewishness of the OT with its irascible and cantankerous God.

b) But, on the other hand, Marcion’s challenge emanated from a particular vision about the nature of the Christian faith itself. What he had picked up on was the radical nature of Paul’s challenge to our natural religious assumptions; the sheer newness that is offered in a faith of the resurrection and the Spirit; the attack on dead legalism. This was the genius of Christianity, Marcion had decided, and he went about cutting out pieces of Scripture that didn’t fit, to such an extent that he was left with not much.

4. Marcion was right…
Things is: Marcion had a point. He had sensed that in Christ something radically NEW had come, something that couldn’t have been foreseen. Here was indeed a message of the triumph of love over the law, of the triumph of grace over condemnation. Here indeed was a way in which all peoples could participate in a divine life regardless of their fleshly condition – whether as Jew or Gentile. Here was the grounds for a new community that would be marked as no community had before it by its love one for another without need for rule or judge. Here in the gospel of Jesus that Paul preached was indeed a message of transformation and liberation, a heavenly vision of a life of faith and love instead of an earthly yoke of dreary law.

Indeed, in the 19th Century, historian Adolf von Harnack considered Marcion about the greatest church theologian between Paul and Martin Luther:
"…That in the century of the great mixture of religion the greatest apparent paradox was actually realized: namely, a Paulinism with two Gods and without the Old Testament; and that this form of Christianity first resulted in a church which was based not only on intelligible words, but on a definite conception of the essence of Christianity as a religion, seems to be the greatest riddle which the earliest history of Christianity presents. But it only seems so. The Greek, whose mind was filled with certain fundamental features of the Pauline Gospel (law and grace), who was therefore convinced that in all respects the truth was there, and who on that account took pains to comprehend the real sense of Paul's statements, could hardly reach any other results than those of Marcion. The history of Pauline theology in the Church, a history first of silence, then of artificial interpretation, speaks loudly enough. And had not Paul really separated Christianity as religion from Judaism and the Old Testament? Must it not have seemed an inconceivable inconsistency, if he had clung to the special national relation of Christianity to the Jewish people, and if he had taught a view of history in which for paedagogic reasons indeed, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort had appeared as one so entirely different?"

That is the appeal of Marcion: he tidied it all up! Can we really imagine that the God of law is also the God of grace? Can we really imagine that the God of the Jews is ALSO the God of the Gentiles?

5. Responses
But Harnack was badly wrong; as indeed was Marcion! The church of old 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.

F.F. Bruce points out that:
...the chief importance of Marcion in the second century lies in the reaction which he provoked among the leaders of the Apostolic Churches. Just as Marcion’s canon stimulated the more precise defining of the NT canon by the Catholic Church, not to supersede but to supplement the canon of the OT, so, more generally, Marcion’s teaching led the Catholic Church to define its faith more carefully, in terms calculated to exclude a Marcionite interpretation.

The church had to respond to both of Marcion’s challenges, then: to clarify which books would be in its canon or list of the Christian scriptures and to clarify what their relationship was the OT; and also to define its faith more carefully. The Churches had to recognize the rootedness of their faith in the Jewish testament, to recognize that their Lord was the Jewish messiah: in fact, he was only intelligible against his Jewish background.

There was the obvious textual issue against Marcion, of course: it was clear that he had decided beforehand what was inconsistent with his vision of say Paul’s teaching and had no textual grounds for his editing other than his personal whim. Further, the apostles had from the earliest times practiced together the reading of the OT as God’s holy word. Certainly too it was the case that the writers of the NT and Jesus himself made explicit appeal to the OT. For Christians then, it would just not be an option, no matter how new and radical their gospel was, to consider the OT obsolete.

The question of whether the Church's canon proceeds or follows Marcion's is not yet settled among scholars. The Fathers assert that he was selecting and rejecting books from a pre-existing church list. Von Harnack claimed that it was the other way around – the church responded to Marcion's canon with its own, adding Petrine or Johannine elements to counterbalance the Pauline. Perhaps the safest historical judgement is that Marcion's canon accelerated the process of fixing the Church's canon. It was a process already begun; but Marcion's criticisms forced orthodox Christians to examine why and what they already believed.
Metzger: “Although the fringes of the emerging canon remained unsettled for generations, a high degree of unanimity concerning the greater part of the New Testament was attained among the very diverse and scattered congregations of believers not only throughout the Mediterranean world but also over an area extending from Britain to Mesopotamia."

The Christian Bible then is directly a result of Christian theology: the decision to include the OT was in part necessitated by who the Christian gospel said that God himself was. The Bible does not merely generate Christian theology; it reflects it. Well: that's not quite right, or at least, not quite the full story. But certainly, the rootedness of the gospel in salvation-history is very early on discovered to be non-negotiable; and so: yes, we read the OT as Christian scripture.
Theologians like Irenaeus now appealed explicitly to the dramatic narrative of the whole Bible to show how Jesus fit in to the promises and patterns given in the OT as the second Adam. They realized that Jesus was not revealing a new God, but the same creator and law-giving God. Whatever Christian theology did from that point on, it had to do with the creator and law-giver as identical with the God revealed in Jesus. One significant implication of this realization was the affirmation of the created world, and the human body: if the true God, the God of Jesus Christ, was the creator of the world, then the creation itself must not in essence be bad. Whatever chaos and corruption we observe must be on some other account.

So, the church chose the harder way: it decided that even if having the whole bible meant coping with and addressing some apparent tensions, it would have to do this if it were to be a faithful and obedient church and true to its nature – true to its Lord. Though it had to cope with some tricky parts of scripture, it had far more to lose by going with Marcion than it stood to gain.