Against Marcion 5.10–5.13

Let us return now to the resurrection, a subject on which we have given satisfaction elsewhere in a volume of its own, resisting all the heretics; but we do not fail here either, for the sake of those who do not know that little work. “What will they do,” he says, “who are baptized for the dead, if the dead do not rise?” Let that practice see to itself: the Kalends of February, perhaps, will answer for it, praying for the dead. So do not at once brand the apostle as its new author or its supporter, He mentions it so as to uphold the resurrection of the flesh all the more firmly, inasmuch as those who were being baptized for the dead to no purpose did so out of faith in the resurrection. We have him elsewhere laying down one baptism. So to be dipped “for the dead” is to be dipped for bodies (for we have shown that it is the body that is dead) …: “What will they do who are baptized for bodies, if bodies do not rise?” And so we rightly fix our footing here, since the apostle introduced his second discussion also about the body: “But some will say, ‘How will the dead rise? And with what body will they come?’” For once the resurrection, which was being denied, had been defended, it followed to discuss the quality of the body, which could not be seen. But on that point one should engage with others. For Marcion, who does not admit the resurrection of the flesh at all and promises salvation to the soul alone, makes the question one not of quality but of substance. Moreover, he is most plainly refuted even by what the apostle discusses about the quality of the body for the sake of those who say, “How will the dead rise? And with what body will they come?” For he has already proclaimed that the body will rise, if he has discussed the quality of the body. Then, if he puts forward the examples of a grain of wheat or some such thing, to which God gives a body as he wills; if he says that each seed has its own body, so that there is one flesh of men and another of cattle and birds, and heavenly bodies and earthly ones, and one glory of the sun and another of the moon and another of the stars: does he not point to a fleshly and bodily resurrection, which he commends by fleshly and bodily examples? Does he not also pledge it from that God from whom the examples come? “So also is the resurrection,” he says. How? As a grain is sown a body, the body rises. In short, he called the dissolving of the body into the earth a sowing, because “it is sown in corruption, … in honour, in power.” That to which the one sequence belongs in the dissolving is that to which the other belongs in the resurrection: the body, that is. [As the grain too.] But if you take away from the resurrection the body that you gave to the dissolving, where will the difference in outcome lie? Likewise, if it is sown an animal body and rises a spiritual one: even if the soul or the spirit has some body of its own, so that “animal body” might seem to mean the soul and “spiritual body” the spirit, he does not therefore say that the soul will be spirit in the resurrection, but that the body, which, by being born with the soul and living by the soul, can be called “animal,” will be spiritual, when it rises through the Spirit into eternity. In short, if it is not the soul but the flesh that is sown in corruption, when it is dissolved into the earth, then the animal body will not be the soul but the flesh, which was the animal body, since it is made spiritual from being animal, as he also says below: “It is not the spiritual that is first ….” For this is why he laid a foundation about Christ himself: “The first man Adam became a living soul, the last Adam a life-giving spirit”; although the most foolish heretic did not want it so. For he put “the last Lord” in place of “the last Adam,” afraid, of course, that if he kept “the last Adam” we should argue that Christ belongs to the same one, in the last Adam, as the first Adam does. But the forgery shines through. For why is there a first Adam, unless because there is also a last Adam? Things do not stand in order with one another unless they are alike and of the same name or substance or author. For even among different things there can be one that is first and another that is last, but of one author. But if the author is different too, then even though the other can indeed be called last, yet what he brought in is a first, and only “last” if it is like the first; and it is not like the first, because it is not of the same author. In the same way he will be refuted on the word “man.” “The first man,” he says, “was from the ground, earthly; the second, the Lord from heaven.” Why second, if not a man, as the first was? Or is the first a lord too, if the second is? But enough: if in the Gospel he admits Christ as the Son of Man, he will not be able to deny that he is both man and, as man, Adam. What follows also hems him in. For when the apostle says, “As was the one from the earth,” the man, of course, “so are those who are earthly,” men of course, then it follows, “As is the man from heaven, so are the men who are from heaven.” For he could not have set against earthly men anything but heavenly men, so as to distinguish more carefully their state and hope while keeping the name in common. For in state and hope he calls them earthly and heavenly, yet men alike, who according to their end are reckoned either in Adam or in Christ. And so now, to urge them to the heavenly hope, he says, “As we have borne the image of the earthly, let us bear also the image of the heavenly,” referring not to that substance of the resurrection but to the rule of life of the present time. For he says “let us bear,” not “we shall bear”: by way of precept, not of promise, wanting us to walk as he himself walked, and to depart from the image of the earthly, that is, the old man, which is the working of the flesh. In short, what does he add? “For this I say, brothers, that flesh and blood will not possess the kingdom of God”: that is, the works of flesh and blood, from which he also took away the kingdom of God when writing to the Galatians, since he is accustomed elsewhere too to put the substance for the works of the substance, as when he says that those who are in the flesh cannot please God. For when shall we be able to please God, except while we are in this flesh? There is no other time for working, I think. But if, though placed in the flesh, we flee the works of the flesh, then we shall not be “in the flesh”: not in the sense that we are outside the substance of the flesh, but that we are outside its guilt. And if under the name of flesh we are told to put off the works, not the substance, of the flesh, then under the name of flesh the kingdom of God is denied to the works of the flesh, not to the substance of the flesh. For what is condemned is not that in which evil is done, but what is done. To give poison is a crime; yet the cup in which it is given is not guilty. So too the body is the vessel of fleshly works; but it is the soul that mixes in it the poison of some evil deed. And what sort of thing is it, if the soul, the author of the works of the flesh, is to earn the kingdom of God through the expiation of what it committed in the body, while the body, merely its servant, remains under condemnation? Is the cup to be punished while the poisoner goes free? And yet we do not claim the kingdom of God for the flesh, but the resurrection of its substance, as the door of the kingdom through which it is entered. For resurrection is one thing and the kingdom another. First comes the resurrection, then the kingdom. So we say that the flesh rises, but obtains the kingdom when changed. “For the dead will rise incorrupt” (those, namely, who had been corrupted when their bodies fell into ruin) “and we shall be changed in an atom of time, in the twinkling of an eye. For this corruptible” (the apostle was holding his own flesh, surely, when he said it) “must put on incorruption, and this mortal immortality” (so that the substance may be made fit for the kingdom of God; “for we shall be like the angels”). This will be the change of the flesh, but of flesh raised up. Or if there is to be none, how will it put on incorruption and immortality? So, made something else through the change, it will then obtain the kingdom of God, no longer flesh and blood, but whatever body God has given it. And so the apostle rightly says, “Flesh and blood will not obtain the kingdom of God,” ascribing this to the change that follows the resurrection. And if then will come to pass the word that is written with the Creator, “Where, O death, is your contention? Where, O death, is your sting?” (and this word is the Creator's, through the prophet Hosea), then the thing too, that is, the kingdom, will belong to him whose word comes to pass in the kingdom. Nor does he give thanks to any other God for having granted us to carry off the victory, over death of course, than to him from whom he received the word that mocks death and triumphs over it.

If “God” has become a common word through the fault of human error, since many gods are spoken of and believed in the world, yet “the blessed God of our Lord Jesus Christ” will be understood to be none other than the Creator, who both blessed all things (you have Genesis) and is blessed by all things (you have Daniel). Likewise, even if a barren god can be called “father,” [by no one's name more than the Creator's,] yet the Father of mercies will be the same one who has been called merciful and compassionate and abounding in mercy. You have in Jonah the example of his mercy itself, which he showed to the Ninevites when they entreated him; he was easily moved by the tears of Hezekiah, ready to pardon Ahab, Jezebel's husband, for the blood of Naboth when he begged, and at once indulgent to David when he acknowledged his sin, preferring, of course, the repentance of a sinner to his death, out of the feeling of mercy. If Marcion's god has done or declared anything of this kind, I will acknowledge him as the Father of mercies. But if he ascribes this title to him from the time he was revealed, as though he has been the Father of mercies from the time he set about freeing the human race, then we deny him from the very time from which he is said to have been revealed. For if it were first established that he exists, then something could also be ascribed to him. For what is ascribed is an accident, and accidents are preceded by the showing of the thing itself to which they belong. So one cannot ascribe anything to him whom he shows at the very moment he ascribes something to him; especially since what is ascribed to one who has not first been shown already belongs to another. For he will be all the more denied to exist, the more that by which he is affirmed to exist belongs to one who has already been shown. So too the new covenant will belong to no other than the one who promised it, “not of the letter but of the Spirit”: this will be its newness. In short, the one who had cut the letter on tablets of stone is the same who had also declared of the Spirit, “I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh.” And if “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life,” both belong to him who says, “I will kill and I will make alive; I will strike and I will heal.” We have already claimed for the Creator a twofold power, both of judge and of good God, killing by the letter through the law and giving life by the Spirit through the gospel. Things that, though different, were already reckoned to belong to one cannot make two gods. He also recalls the veil of Moses, with which he covered his face, which the children of Israel could not look upon. If he does so to uphold the greater brightness of the new covenant, which remains in glory, than that of the old, which was to be done away, this suits my faith too, which puts the gospel above the law. And see whether it does not suit mine more: for something can be put above only where there is also the thing it is put above. But when he says, “But the minds of the world were blunted” (not, of course, of the Creator, but of the people who are in the world; for he says of Israel, “To this day that same veil is upon their heart”), he shows that the veil on Moses' face was then a figure of the veil on the people's heart, because even now Moses is not seen by them with the heart, as he was not then seen with the face. What, then, is still veiled in Moses that concerns Paul, if the Creator's Christ, foretold by Moses, has not yet come? And how (to put it more plainly) are the hearts of the Jews marked as still veiled, if Moses' prophecies, that is, about Christ, in whom they ought to have understood him, have not yet been fulfilled? What does it matter to the apostle of another Christ if the Jews did not understand the mysteries of their own God, unless the veil on their heart meant the blindness by which they had not seen the Christ of Moses? Finally, what follows, “But when he turns to God, the veil will be taken away,” he says properly of the Jew, on whom Moses' veil lies, who, when he passes over to faith in Christ, will understand that Moses preached about Christ. Otherwise, how will the Creator's veil be taken away in the Christ of another god, whose mysteries the Creator could not have veiled, being, of course, things unknown of one unknown? He says, then, that we now, with unveiled face (the face of the heart, of course, which is veiled in the Jews), beholding Christ, are transfigured into the same image from glory, the glory by which Moses too was transfigured by the glory of the Lord, to glory. So, setting out Moses' bodily illumination from his meeting with the Lord and the bodily veil because of the people's weakness, and adding over them the spiritual unveiling and spiritual brightness in Christ (“as from the Lord,” he says, “of the spirits”), he testifies that the whole order of Moses was a figure of Christ, unknown among the Jews but recognized among us. We know that some sentences can admit of ambiguity from the sound of the pronunciation or from the way they are punctuated, when a double possibility arises. Marcion seized on this by reading thus: “in whom the God of this age,” so that, showing the Creator as the God of this age, he might suggest another god of another age. We say, on the contrary, that it should be punctuated thus: “in whom God,” and then, “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers of this age.” “In whom”: in the unbelieving Jews, in whom the gospel is still hidden from some under the veil of Moses. For God had threatened them, who loved him with their lips but whose heart stood far off from him: “With the ear you will hear and not hear, with the eyes you will see and not see,” and, “Unless you believe, you will not understand,” and, “I will take away the wisdom of the wise, and the understanding of the prudent I will bring to nothing.” And he surely was not threatening these things in order to hide the gospel of an unknown god. So, even if he is the God of this age, yet it is the heart of the unbelievers of this age that he blinds, because they did not of their own accord recognize his Christ, who was to be understood from the Scriptures. And content to have dealt this far with a point that depends on the ambiguity of punctuation, so that it should not profit the adversary, … I could also have passed over this contention altogether. A simpler answer will be at hand: to interpret the god of this age as the devil, who said, as the prophet relates, “I will be like the Most High; I will set my throne in the clouds,” just as the whole superstition of this age has been made over to him, so that he blinds the hearts of unbelievers, and above all of the apostate Marcion. In short, he did not see the conclusion of the sentence that confronts him: “For God, who said that light should shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of his glory in the person of Christ.” Who said, “Let there be light”? And who says to Christ about the enlightening of the world, “I have set you as a light of the nations,” of those, that is, who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death? To whom the Spirit answers in the psalm, out of foresight of the future: “The light of your countenance, O Lord, has been signed upon us.” And the countenance of God is Christ the Lord, which is why the apostle said above, “who is the image of God.” So if Christ is the countenance of the Creator who said, “Let there be light,” then Christ and the apostles and the gospel and the veil and Moses and the whole series, according to the testimony of the conclusion, belong to the Creator, the God of this age; certainly not to the one who never said, “Let there be light.” (Here I pass over another letter too, which we have headed “To the Ephesians” but the heretics “To the Laodiceans.” For it says that the nations should remember that at that time, when they were without Christ, aliens from Israel, without its way of life and the covenants and the hope of the promise, they were also without God in the world, even though it were of the Creator. So if he said that the nations were without God, and their god is the devil, not the Creator, it is plain that the god of this age is to be understood as the one whom the nations received as god, not the Creator, whom they do not know.) And how can it be that the treasure in earthen vessels, that is, in our bodies, should not be held to belong to the same one to whom the vessels also belong? Now if it is to God's glory that so great a treasure is held in earthen vessels, and the earthen vessels are the Creator's, then the glory is the Creator's, whose vessels taste of the surpassing greatness of God's power; and so is the power itself, since it was entrusted to earthen vessels for this reason, that its surpassing greatness might be proved. But it will not then be the glory of another god, and therefore not his power either (rather his disgrace and weakness), whose surpassing greatness earthen vessels, and others' vessels at that, have contained. And if these are the earthen vessels in which he says we suffer so much, in which we even carry about the dying of the Lord, then God is quite ungrateful and unjust if he is not going to raise up this substance too, in which so much is endured for faith in him, in which the death of Christ too is carried about, in which the surpassing greatness of his power is consecrated. For he puts it forward: “that the life of Christ too may be manifested in our body,” just as, that is, his death is carried about in the body. Of what life of Christ, then, is he speaking? Of that by which we now live in him? And how is it that in what follows he urges us not to things visible and temporal but to things invisible and eternal, that is, not to things present but to things to come? And if he is speaking of the future life of Christ, saying that it will appear in the body, he has plainly preached the resurrection of the flesh; saying that our outer man is being corrupted, yet not as by an eternal destruction after death, but by labours and hardships, of which he spoke before, and adding, “and we shall not lose heart.” For in saying that our inner man is being renewed day by day, he shows both here: the corruption of the body from the harassment of trials, and the renewal of the mind from the contemplation of the promises.

… of our earthly dwelling, he does not mean that we have an eternal house, not made with hands, in heaven, in the sense that what is made with hands, being the Creator's, perishes altogether, dissolved after death. For he is plainly treating these things to console the fear of death and the grief at that very dissolution, as is clear also from what follows, when he adds that we groan in this tabernacle of the earthly body, longing to put on over it what is from heaven, “since, having been stripped, we shall not be found naked,” that is, we shall receive back what we have been stripped of, that is, the body. And again: “For we who are in this tabernacle of the body groan, being weighed down, not wishing to be unclothed but to be clothed over.” For here he has spelled out what he touched on briefly in the first letter: “And the dead will rise incorrupt” (those who have already died) “and we shall be changed” (those who will have been found by God here in the flesh). For the former will rise incorrupt, having received back the body, and that whole, so as to be incorrupt from this; and the latter, because of the very last moment of time and as the reward of the harassments of Antichrist, will obtain a short cut past death, but changed, clothed over with what is from heaven rather than stripped of the body. So if these put that heavenly thing on over the body, the dead too will surely receive back the body, over which they too may put on incorruption from heaven, since of them also he says, “This corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal immortality.” The former put it on when they have received back the body; the latter put it on over, because they have not lost the body. And so not idly did he say, “not wishing to be unclothed of the body, but to be clothed over,” that is, not wishing to experience death but to be overtaken by life, “that this mortal may be swallowed up by life,” while it is snatched from death by being clothed over with the change. Because he shows that this is better, so that we should not grieve if perhaps we are overtaken by death, he says too that we have from God the pledge of the Spirit, as though given in security for the same hope of being clothed over; and that we are away from the Lord as long as we are in the flesh, and that we ought therefore to think it good rather to be away from the body and to be with the Lord, so that we may even welcome death gladly. And so he says that we must all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive what he has done through the body, whether good or evil. For if the recompense of deserts is then, how can some be reckoned as already with the Lord? And by naming a judgment seat and the reckoning of good and evil work he both shows a judge who pronounces both sentences and confirms the bodily presence of all. For what was done in the body cannot fail to be judged in the body. For God would be unjust if one were not punished or rewarded in that through which he acted. “If, then, there is any new creation in Christ, the old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new”: Isaiah's prophecy has been fulfilled. If also he commands us to cleanse ourselves from the defilement of flesh and blood, it is not the substance … to receive the kingdom of God. If he also means to present the church as a holy virgin to Christ, as a bride to a bridegroom, surely an image cannot be joined to what is hostile to the reality of the thing itself. If he also calls the false apostles deceitful workers who disguise themselves, through hypocrisy, of course, he taxes them as guilty of adulterated conduct, not of adulterated preaching. So the dispute was about the rule of life, not about deity. If Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, this cannot be directed at the Creator. For the Creator, being God and not an angel, would have been said to disguise himself as a god of light, not as an angel; unless he meant by it that Satan whom both we and Marcion know as an angel. (Paradise has its own treatise for every question it raises. Here I shall perhaps wonder whether a god who has no earthly arrangement of his own could have had a paradise of his own; unless he used the Creator's paradise too on sufferance, as he used the world. And yet taking a man up into heaven is a precedent of the Creator's, in Elijah.) But I shall wonder more that the best god, a stranger to striking and to harshness, applied to his own apostle, to buffet him, an angel of Satan, not even his own but the Creator's, and did not grant it when entreated by him three times. So Marcion's god too corrects in the Creator's way, who is jealous of the proud and brings down the mighty from their thrones. Or is he perhaps the very one who gave Satan power even over Job's body, that strength might be proved in weakness? And why does the chastiser of the Galatians still keep to the form of the law, laying down that every word will stand on three witnesses? Why does the preacher of the gentlest god threaten that he will not spare sinners, and even affirm that the very power to act more harshly when present has been given him by the Lord? Deny now, heretic, that your god is feared, whose apostle was feared!

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.