Marcion is Alive and Well

Marcion's views: alive and well in the XXI century.

Another break from the series on the atonement.

If you are not familiar with early church history, you might not be familiar with Marcion of Sinope.  If Judaizing was the most virulent heresy that the church faced in its earliest years, the opposite extreme--the complete rejection of the Old Testament--was one of the many challenges that the church faced in the second century.

Essentially, Marcion's view was that the God of the Old Testament was not the Father of Jesus in the New Testament.  Rather, the Old Testament God was a different being who was not wholly good, but morally and spiritually inferior.  He thus rejected the Old Testament Scripture, and made his own New Testament canon (a selection of Paul's epistles and an edited version of Luke's gospel) that supported his position.  (In this, Marcion actually helped spur the early church on to more exactly define her own canon, to recognize what he rejected and to recognize the measure of orthodox belief.)

Marcion was rejected by the early church, but fast-forward to today and we see his belief system actually quite easily accepted among many, both in the church and without her.  To be sure, unlike Marcion of Sinope, modern Marcionites do not necessarily believe that there was a literal "evil god" behind the Old Testament stories.  However, they do draw a sharp distinction between Jesus and the Old Testament.  Jesus becomes the True Image of God; the Old Testament becomes not just incomplete, but out-and-out wrong about God.

In today's psedu-Marcionism, Old Testament law is no longer the inspired Word of God (given for a certain time and place for a particular reason); rather, it becomes the musings of a wandering tribe of ex-slaves, and reflective more of their human point of view, and less of their relationship with God.  The brutality of someone like Samuel in contrast to Jesus is summed up with a conclusion (not always stated in as many words, but sometimes this stark): Samuel was wrong, and Jesus was right.

Yet there are several problems with this point of view.  I'll look at just two today.

(1) Jesus Himself did not seem to subscribe to it.  Remember what He said:

"...Scripture cannot be broken..." (John 10:35) (Scripture, of course, was not at this time the 66 books that we call the Bible today--the entire New Testament hadn't been written yet).

He condemned the Scribes and the Pharisees for ignoring "the Word of God" (His words; not the "word of man" or "word of confused desert goat-herders") and substituting their own traditions (Mark 7:13)

 He declared the Law of Moses to be authoritative, even in the smallest letter or least stroke of pen ("jot and tittle...") (Matt 5:17) 

There are many, many other passages that reveal Jesus' view of the Bible and His support for its contents.  Jesus constantly quoted from the Bible of His time (what we call the "Old Testament") and never indicated that it had a wrong picture of God.  Rather, He indicated that the twisting of Scripture (either by Satan or Jesus' critics) was the enemy--not Scripture itself.

And Jesus' favorite Old Testament books?  Psalms, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and Exodus, in that order.  And each one of these books has some "troubling" passages...yet Jesus never said "uh, this here, it's  a little harsh, so please skip this part."

(Yes, yes...some will point out Jesus saying "You have heard it said...but I say to you" as an indication that He was saying that Moses and others got it wrong.  But keep in mind He said this immediately following His statement that He came not to abolish the Law.  And indeed, rather than relaxing the requirements of the Law, He actually made it more difficult.  For example, "You think you're ok by not committing adultery?  Fine...but if you're lusting, you're still guilty.")

So Jesus--at least the Jesus of the gospels--cannot be used to say the Old Testament was wrong.  I suppose one can say "Well, Jesus never really said those things about the Old Testament...they were later added by others!"  Interesting theory (with zero textual evidence); and it's quite arbitrary.  If the gospels are unreliable, why believe that Jesus didn't say the "nice" things, and the "disagreeable" things are His actual words?  Like it or not, we only have the evidence we have, and to move beyond it is pure speculation.  We arbitrarily edit the gospels, like Marcion, to support our preconceived ideas about Jesus...rather than reading what we have, and consider what was said.

(2)  In the end, pseudo-Marcionism doesn't deliver what it promises.  Look, I understand the sincere desire to present God as wholly good (as we define it) and a champion of our ethical system (at least the current one in early 21st century western society).  But even if one succeeds in "rescuing" the Bible from a belief that God sometimes does troubling things in it, it does absolutely nothing to "rescue" God from the reality we see around us every day.

We see children getting sick, and dying.  We see evil men prospering, and no divine judgment striking them down before they do evil.  We see the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, floods and hurricanes killing thousands, tsunamis, horrible diseases, wars, famines, et cetera, et cetera ad nasuem.  These things are inarguable facts.  And though you might think you relieve God from the burden of, say, the Biblical flood or the destruction of the Amalekites, you're still faced with tomorrow's newspaper that will no doubt have stories of the innocent dying and the guilty flourishing.

No; the reality is that we live in a world where the inescapable God, the God who is powerful enough to create extravagant wonders that we discover year after year--but who choses to act in a way that often confuses us, upsets us, even enrages us.  Job was faced with this; so was Habakkuk.  Indeed, we all are faced with this.  The false relief of pseudo-Marcionism is not going to make this reality retreat from our view.

So, with apologies to Lewis:

(1) You can reject the God of Jesus as non-existent, that we live in an absurd universe.

(2) You can say Jesus may have existed (and God might exist), but we cannot know what He was really like (and pretty much end up with the first proposition.)

(3) You can reject this God as evil, and shake your fist in rage against Him.

(4) You can say Jesus was a fuzzy-minded idealist who made incoherent statements (some nice ones, some weird ones, even some evil ones).

...or, finally, (5) You can accept Him as Lord, and bow down and worship Him.

Marcion would not necessarily accept the metaphysical system of modern pseudo-Marcionites--twenty centuries of changing worldview would make that difficult.  However, his basic premise is reflected today in many ways.  Sometimes people aren't really aware of the implications of what they say about God or the Bible.  I pray that we become more thoughtful in this regard.

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