Marcion
A Reading from the Second Epistle to Timothy:
As for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths. As for you, always be steady, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfil your ministry.
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
A Reading from Against Heresies, by the Church Father Irenaeus:
Marcion of Pontus … advanced the most daring blasphemy against Him who is proclaimed as God by the law and the prophets, declaring Him to be the author of evils, to take delight in war, to be infirm of purpose, and even to be contrary to Himself. But Jesus being derived from that father who is above the God that made the world, and coming into Judæa in the times of Pontius Pilate the governor, who was the procurator of Tiberius Cæsar, was manifested in the form of a man to those who were in Judæa, abolishing the prophets and the law, and all the works of that God who made the world, whom also he calls Cosmocrator.
Besides this, he mutilates the Gospel which is according to Luke, removing all that is written respecting the generation of the Lord, and setting aside a great deal of the teaching of the Lord, in which the Lord is recorded as most dearly confessing that the Maker of this universe is His Father. He likewise persuaded his disciples that he himself was more worthy of credit than are those apostles who have handed down the Gospel to us, furnishing them not with the Gospel, but merely a fragment of it. In like manner, too, he dismembered the Epistles of Paul, removing all that is said by the apostle respecting that God who made the world, to the effect that He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and also those passages from the prophetical writings which the apostle quotes, in order to teach us that they announced beforehand the coming of the Lord.
Here ends the reading.
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
One of my favorite classes, way back in seminary, went by the title of “Creeds and Councils.” It was an exploration of how Christian confessions developed over time primarily in response to challenges. People asked hard questions of faith; and the Church, with much prayer and debate, hammered out replies. This is how we ended up with the three great Creeds and seven ecumenical Councils, ancient formulations of universal Christian belief.
The earliest Christian Creed, of course, is the breathless confession that “Christ is Lord!” Well, that’s great, some might say, but who is this Christ, and what do you mean when you call Him Lord? The world might need a bit more information here. And so we start to tell our story: Oh, well, Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, &c. Before you know it, we’ve got the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds.
These three tell our tale of faith, the basic bones upon which flesh may then grow. There’s a lot they leave unanswered. The Creeds provide us with a generous orthodoxy, in which we have plenty of room for interpretation and opinion. But they also erect a boundary: thus far and no farther. Some beliefs remain beyond the pale. The traditional term for opinions rejected by the Church would be “heresy,” teachings which Christians by and large cannot affirm.
A lot of the early Church Councils, and much of the Creeds we confess, arose in response to such heresies, to opinions beyond those which the community of faith was comfortable formally teaching. These are then the wrongs that clarify the right. Because of this—because the language of our faith has often been shaped in direct response to what we cannot affirm and cannot teach—we as seminarians would wryly refer to Creeds and Councils class as “Creeps and Scoundrels” instead.
And that’s what we’ll be talking about this Lent. Lent is a season for catechetical instruction, teaching the Christian faith to proselytes and baptized alike. I’m going to be talking about five classical Christian heresies which shaped our orthodoxy. And because heresies are typically true things taken too far, most will come in pairs, each representing an extreme of belief, with Christian truth found firmly in the middle.
Thus we start off this evening with a fellow named Macion of Sinope, an early theologian of the first and second centuries. Marcion had a problem: the God whom Marcion saw revealed in the person of Jesus Christ struck him as utterly alien to the God whom he found recorded within the Hebrew Scriptures. And we still joke about this today, right? The Old Testament has a wrathful, violent, vengeful God; but by the New Testament, He has chilled out considerably.
Marcion could not reconcile the frankly wicked acts attributed to God in the Hebrew Scriptures with the loving and merciful Father of Jesus Christ our Lord. And so Marcion figured that these must in fact be two very separate gods. The Jewish god, he believed, could not really be God at all, but instead a wicked demiurge, a Cosmocrator, who created a fallen, broken, evil world. The God of Christ was the true God, yet He had never been revealed to us before.
If the Jewish god wasn’t God, then Marcion had no use for any Jewish Scriptures. He was okay with Hellenism, that is, with Greek philosophy, which was unquestionably important both to Christianity and to Second Temple Judaism more broadly. Yet the only Scriptures he would admit as such were a highly edited Gospel According to St Luke and 10 of the Pauline Epistles. Marcion excised Judaism from his canon, and thus from his Christianity.
This ultimately the greater Church could not condone. We cannot separate Christianity from our Jewish roots. Jesus Christ was a thoroughly Jewish Man. So were Peter, Paul, Joseph, Mary, all the Apostles, every biblical author, and the entire first generation of the Christian Church. We are all spiritual Semites. To pull Christ out of Judaism is to deny the fulness of the Incarnation. Jesus wasn’t human in the abstract; He was culturally, historically, specifically Jewish.
The Creator of the world is the God of Jesus Christ: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the God of Moses, Elijah, and David; the God of the Law and the Prophets. Marcion was wrong, dead wrong, in attempting to remove us from our roots, trying to sever the wild branch of the Gentiles from the cultivated tree of Judea. Yet in attempting to define a canon of Scripture without any Hebrew books, he forced the greater Christian community to affirm those same books, to define a canon.
Here’s where he went wrong: Marcion was neither the first nor the last person of faith to be torn by seemingly irreconcilable depictions of God in the Bible. There are books in which God seems a monster. But that’s because Marcion was a literalist. When the Rabbis and the Church Fathers alike read difficult texts of God being angry or vengeful or violent or cruel, they made it quite clear that of course these were not to be taken literally. They must be interpreted spiritually, allegorically.
We know who God is: He is Jesus Christ our Lord. And if any text, any book of the Bible, contradicts what we know of God in Jesus, then we are to reject not that book but our interpretation of it. God is not a murderer. God is not a monster. God is not evil. To teach otherwise is blasphemy. Literal readings of difficult texts have never been taken seriously within the Christian Church until relatively recently, the last couple centuries.
If Marcion had used Christ to interpret the Scriptures, rather than using the Scriptures to interpret Christ, he would not have had a problem. This is one of the oldest heresies in the Church. And it’s a lesson that Americans in particular ought all to relearn today.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
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