5
For those with some knowledge of early church history, the antagonistic posture and disparaging attitude that the New Atheists adopt toward the Old Testament and its portrayal of God are strikingly similar to Marcion and the heresy that bears his name. The similarity is not limited to the surface—what the Old Testament says (at times) about God—but is also found in the deep structure of the New Atheists’ argument, since among other things, Marcion too was profoundly troubled by contradictory presentations of God in the Bible.1 One of his main works, the Antitheses, appears simply to have set biblical statements side by side that, in Marcion’s view, simply could not coexist. Here is a sampling:
• Joshua conquered the land with violence and cruelty, but Christ forbade all violence and preached mercy and peace.
• The prophet of the Creator-God, when the people were locked in battle, climbed to the top of the mountain and stretched forth his hands to God, that he might kill as many as possible in the battle; [but] our Lord, the Good, stretched forth his hands (namely, on the cross) not to kill men but to save them.
• In the law it is said, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” but the Lord, the Good, says in the Gospel, “If anyone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also.”
• The prophet of the Creator-God, in order to kill as many as possible in battle, had the sun to stand still that it might not go down until the adversaries of the people were utterly annihilated; but the Lord, the Good, says, “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.”
• The prophet of the Creator-God commanded the bears to come out of the thicket and to eat the children; but the good Lord says, “Let the children come to me, and do not forbid them, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
• Maledictio characterizes the law, and benedictio characterizes faith (the gospel).
• In the law the creator of the world commands us to give to our brothers, but Christ simply says to give to all who ask.2
It is revealing that this (partial) listing of contradictions includes topics that the New Atheists also find so off-putting, such as divine violence and divine election.3
These parallels between what the New Atheists say about the Old Testament (and its God) and what Marcion said about the same suggest that further discussion of the great arch-heretic, his heresy, and his opponents may prove instructive. In the present chapter, then, I focus especially on those aspects of Marcion’s second-century thought that resonate most closely with the death of the Old Testament as represented in the New Atheism of the twenty-first century. In the process, we will have occasion to take a notable detour into the early twentieth century to examine the work of Marcion’s greatest interpreter, Adolf von Harnack.4
Although certainty remains elusive on many of the details, it seems that Marcion (d. ca. 160 CE) was born in Sinope, in Pontus, and was a well-to-do shipowner.5 By 140, Marcion was in Rome and in the church there, but when he presented his ideas to the church in a formal meeting in 144, he was excommunicated and deemed a heretic because of them.6 Unfazed, Marcion continued to promulgate his ideas and attracted much attention, especially from the orthodox heresiologists (including Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Ephraem the Syrian, and Eznik of Kolb). He gained numerous converts, apparently because he was an effective preacher and organizer.7 As E. C. Blackman put it, “Marcion was the founder not of a school, but of a church.”8 Marcion won many to his cause and established communities that lasted as late as the fifth century.9 Indeed, the fact that so many of Marcion’s positions are reflected not only in the New Atheism, but also among many contemporary Christians’ experience of the Old Testament, indicates that his influence is still felt to this day. Perhaps Marcion wasn’t the very first to identify the problem he addressed, though he is clearly the most (in)famous. Regardless, his perduring legacy demonstrates that he put his finger on a problem that was—and still is—widely felt.10
What was (is) that problem? In many ways it is no different than what bothers Dawkins or other New Atheists: the problem of portrayals of God that seem anything but sublime, and which are, to boot, if not also at root, contradictory (esp. vis-à-vis the New Testament). Apparently taken with Paul’s law/gospel dichotomy—or rather, a particular version of that dichotomy11—Marcion argued that the Christian gospel was completely a gospel of love, to the absolute exclusion of law. He equated the gospel of love with Jesus Christ and the previously unknown (“alien”) God that sent him, while identifying the law with the god of the Old Testament. These were at odds, according to Marcion, with the differences irreconcilable.12 He thus completely rejected the Old Testament as a valid expression of the gospel.13 For Marcion, the god of the Old Testament from Genesis 1 forward was not the true God but an evil, creating god (demiurge) who had absolutely nothing to do with the God of Jesus Christ. This “Jewish [NB!] God constantly involved himself in contradictory courses of action; . . . he was fickle, capricious, ignorant, despotic, cruel”14—a judgment that could have come as easily from Dawkins or Hitchens in the twenty-first century as from Marcion in the second century. Indeed, in Winrich Löhr’s opinion, “Marcion’s defamatory comments on the god of the Old Testament” have much the same function as the New Atheism, since they “can be read as an attempt at character assassination.”15
“Utterly different” from the Old Testament god was “the Supreme God of Love whom Jesus came to reveal. It was His purpose to overthrow the Demiurge.”16 According to Marcion, the apostle Paul was the only one who fully understood the difference between the Old and New Testament deities. The rest of the apostles and evangelists were still too “Old Testament-ish” for him, so he threw them out along with the Old Testament.17 But even some of his beloved Paul’s corpus had to go: the Pastorals in toto, and from the other Epistles many bits and pieces that Marcion deemed to be corruptions of the apostle’s original work.18 As one can suspect by now, one of the main criteria for Marcion’s editing had to do with the relationship of the particular text at hand to Old Testament materials or themes. As a result of this process (so say some scholars), Marcion should be credited as the first person to create a canon of Scripture.19 Marcion called that construction “the Gospel”—which is as telling in its singularity (just one Gospel) as it is in its content (sans law). Marcion’s Gospel was limited to a severely edited version of Luke (lacking, among other things, chaps. 1–2)20 and his redacted version of ten of the Epistles of Paul.21
Debate continues over whether Marcion’s Bible was a catalyst in the construction of the orthodox one.22 Whatever the case, it is clear that Marcion’s canon was a singular, quite reduced canon: “only one Gospel and one Apostle.”23 Later canons recognized by the church catholic are, in contrast, plural: made up of both the Old and New Testaments. The inclusion of the Old Testament stands against Marcion, of course; yet it is equally important to recognize that the full Christian Bible is pluralistic within each of its Testaments, not offering a single, monochromatic, univocal voice even within one Testament, let alone across both of them.24 Marcion didn’t care for such “Technicolor”: proof of this is found not only in his preference for just one “Gospel,” as opposed to the later canonical four, but also in his inability to accept the full Pauline corpus. It was the opinion of the second-century heresiologist, Irenaeus, that Marcion “mutilated the Gospel of Luke” and “dismembered the Epistles of the Apostle Paul,” with the result being that Marcion did not give his disciples the full gospel, “but merely a fragment of it.”25 More recently, John J. Clabeaux has described Marcion’s Gospel as “a summary dissolution of the tensions that characterized Pauline thought, namely, continuity with Judaism vis-à-vis discontinuity and freedom vis-à-vis obligation.”26
It was Marcion’s dislike of or inability to reckon with (if not both) the rich diversity of the preexisting tradition, above all else the difficulties posed by the variegated Old Testament, that led to his radical redaction. In von Harnack’s words:
Marcion saw himself as called to liberate Christianity from this crisis. No syncretism, but simplification, unification, and clarity of what bore the Christian label. . . . A plain religious message was to be set in opposition to the immense and ambiguous complex of what was handed down in tradition. Here, however, Marcion not only stands with Paul, but also together with the Gnostics and over against the church; and just so he most sharply rejects, in opposition to the Gnostics, the new syncretism which they introduced in the mistaken opinion that the material brought in from the mystery-speculations was adequate to the true Christian idea and hence worthy of admiration. Thus here also, as is true in his ruthless carrying through of the paradoxical character of religion, Marcion is the consistent one; true religion must be plain and transparent, just as it must also be alien and absolute-paradoxical.27
To put all this in terms of the linguistic analogy, Marcion didn’t like the full language of Scripture. It was too difficult for him, too complex, too irregular (as all languages, especially ancient ones, are). In its place, Marcion opted for something new and different—something far more reduced, compressed, and simple; something far more consistent, coherent, and logical (cf. Dawkins and the New Atheists). What Marcion preferred, linguistically speaking, was nothing less than a pidginized form of Christian Scripture. Or, perhaps better, what he preferred and produced was an abbreviated language artificially constructed from the full language of Christian Scripture.
But more must be said. Pidgins are contact languages, which means that more than one language is at work in their genesis. The Marcionite pidgin clearly favors the Pauline corpus, and the New Testament more generally, to the absolute eradication of the Old Testament.28 Is that the end of the matter, the Old Testament as the infinitesimally small substrate (or rather, nonstrate), with the New Testament the predominant if not exclusive superstrate (monostrate)? Put differently, is Marcion here (as some would have it) nothing more than a “biblical theologian,” an ancient iteration of more recent New Testament–only Christians?29 The situation is not that simple, if only for the rather obvious fact that in the case of Marcion, cutting the Old Testament meant cutting a good bit of the New Testament as well: even his beloved Paul had to be edited and trimmed. As Fleming Rutledge quips, “It has been said of Marcion that he understood Paul so well that he misunderstood him.”30
In this light, the guiding principle in Marcion’s editorial work, in his Antitheses, and in his theology was not biblical at all but extrabiblical: it was the principle of consistency, logic, or noncontradiction, as he, Marcion, judged those things.31 According to von Harnack, Marcion was completely flummoxed in the face of the complexity of the scriptural tradition, especially that of the Old Testament but equally so with that of the New Testament taken in ipse (hence the editing of his “Gospel”). Using the linguistic analogy, this means that it was the language of consistency (or some such thing) that served as the superstrate and thus took precedence in the construction of Marcion’s linguistic pidgin. It was contact between that “language” and the (substrate) language of the Bible that led to Marcion’s greatly reduced, pidginized idiolect.
In this regard Marcion shares much indeed with the New Atheists, who are altogether bewildered by irregularities in the linguistic system that is the Bible more generally and the Old Testament more specifically. The New Atheists, too, have a different superstrate drawn from elsewhere: in the case of writers like Dawkins and Dennett, it is from the realm of science or “scientism.” This superstrate becomes the critical determinant in judging the biblical language; it is the latter that must accommodate to the superstrate’s power. Such power imbalance marks all contact languages, but the problem in this particular case is that the scientific method simply isn’t the best judge of a linguistic system. Why, for example, should the German word for “knife” (Messer) be neuter, with “fork” (Gabel) feminine, and “table” (Tisch) masculine? Such a system is remarkably odd, hard to replicate in the lab, and not entirely rational.32 Or if it is rational, the rationale is not completely transparent, at least not anymore, or at least not scientifically, meaning empirically. As John McWhorter puts it, the existence of three different genders for nouns in German “is not indication that Germans are mentally sophisticated, but rather that their language drags along an unnecessary complication, now meaningless, that arose via a series of accidents.”33 These types of oddities and irregularities are (empirically!) part and parcel of languages, especially ancient languages, which are, let it be stressed once more (and not for the last time), usually very complicated ones.34
The insufficiency of this “scientific-logical superstrate” (to coin a term) to assess language can also be demonstrated with reference to poetry. An example is found in Hitchens’s book. After stating that many of Jesus’s sayings in the New Testament are “flat-out immoral,” Hitchens writes, “The analogy of humans to lilies, for instance, suggests—along with many other injunctions—that things like thrift, innovation, family life, and so forth are a sheer waste of time. (‘Take no thought for the morrow.’)”35 It is hard not to laugh out loud at this point. Certainly other things Jesus says suggest quite the opposite or at least put things differently (e.g., Luke 9:62), and the same holds true for other parts of the Bible. Hitchens’s failure here stems from the fact that he doesn’t know how to read a parable or an image or a poem (despite his correct identification of the lily statement as an analogy)—or perhaps he has simply forgotten how to do so. What would Hitchens say about the opening lines of Robert Burns’s poem, “Oh, My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose”?
My love is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June.
My love is like the melody,
That’s sweetly played in tune.36
Would Hitchens say Burns is somehow insane, thinking his love to be a flower; but worse still, Burns must be a schizoid, because he immediately states that his love is now a musical composition? And how terrible that Burns only loves her in the month of June! What of the other eleven months? And what of Burns’s promise later in the poem to love his beloved “Till a’ the seas gang dry.” “An impossible proposition, to be sure, Mr. Burns!” Hitchens would no doubt protest. “No one lives that long!” Now that much is true; people don’t outlive their own lives, though great poetry can and often does.
The point of this brief foray back to the land of New Atheism is to underscore that (1) in terms of the linguistic analogy, there is another language or linguistic system that has gone into the construction of the pidgin that Marcion speaks and shares, to no small degree, with more recent despisers of the Old Testament; and that (2) the critical criterion that he and they bring to bear may be ill-suited to the task at hand or, more properly, to the subject matter under discussion, which in this case is the Old Testament. The criterion is ill-suited because the Old Testament is an ancient, dense, and highly literary—even poetic—linguistic system. It too has its fair share of neuter knives, feminine forks, and masculine tables, not to mention irregular verb forms and complex moods and modalities. Of course contact languages don’t have to gel. The dominant group imposes their will on the weaker group. The pidgin that results from the language contact favors the former; the latter are not asked if the shoe fits. Linguistically speaking, then, it doesn’t matter if Marcion’s or the New Atheists’ superstrate “fits” the Old Testament, and that is true. But it is equally true from a linguistic perspective that the pidgin that has resulted in both scenarios is far from an accurate reflection of the full language of Scripture before its rather brutal subordination.
Historically, Marcion’s pidgin resonated with many; it still does, with the New Atheists a recent case in point. But the church catholic overruled Marcion in the matter of a reduced canon sans Old Testament (and so much of the New). The orthodox response to Marcion is informative in this regard and casts light on the problem with other Marcions of more recent vintage.
As previously noted, many tried their hand at refuting Marcion. Irenaeus and Ephraem are notable examples, but no one stands out like Tertullian (ca. 160–ca. 225 CE), who wrote no less than five books “against Marcion.”37 The full range of Tertullian’s arguments in Against Marcion cannot be engaged here, so I will focus on two significant points that have direct bearing on both the linguistic analogy of the Old Testament as (like) a language, and the critique of the Bible offered by the New Atheism. Before doing so, however, it is worth observing that Tertullian took great delight in pointing out the inconsistency of Marcion’s system—a point that has also been mentioned by scholars of early Christianity.38 In other words, Marcion was unable to attain to his own standard of consistency!39 So, as dominant as Marcion’s superstrate was, it appears to have failed both him and his followers. In the words of Jules Lebreton and Jacques Zeiller, it was “not sufficient to act as a basis for a doctrine.”40
First, then, Tertullian takes up the challenge of Marcion’s distinction between “the just Old Testament god” and “the good Alien God”—a distinction predicated on a sharp division between law and gospel. Tertullian argues that Marcion’s good god is actually not so good after all. Indeed, by the time Tertullian is through, Marcion’s god has all the same qualities that made Marcion so upset with “the Old Testament god”:
What would your opinion be of a physician who by delaying treatment should strengthen the disease, and by deferring remedy should prolong the danger, so that his services might command a larger fee and enhance his own repute? The same judgement will have to be pronounced upon Marcion’s god, for permitting evil, favouring wrong, currying favour, offending against that kindness which he did not immediately exercise when cause arose. Evidently he would have exercised it if kind by nature and not by afterthought, if good by character and not by rule and regulation, if god since eternity and not since Tiberius, or rather—to speak more truly—since Cerdo and Marcion.41
Even more striking than Tertullian’s satirical prose, however, is that he goes on to discuss “whether a god is to be accounted such by virtue of goodness alone, to the exclusion of those other adjuncts, those feelings and affections, which the Marcionites deny to their god and attach to the Creator, but which we recognize in the Creator as no dishonour to God.”42 Since the true God does, in fact, have other attributes, Marcion’s “simplistically good god” (who is not so good after all) is not the true God.43
The problem with Marcion’s “simply good” deity is that he is, in the final analysis, entirely devoid of justice. In this regard, Marcion’s god is weak and decidedly un-godlike; he may dislike evil, but he does nothing to put a stop to it:
For if he displays neither hostility nor wrath, if he neither condemns nor distrains, if, that is, he never makes himself a judge, I cannot see how his moral law, that more extensive moral law, can have stability. To what purpose does he lay down commands if he will not require performance, or prohibit transgressions if he is not to exact penalties, if he is incapable of judgment, a stranger to all emotions of severity and reproof? Why does he forbid the commission of an act he does not penalize when committed? It would have been much more honest of him not to forbid an act he was not going to penalize, than to refrain from penalizing what he had forbidden. In fact he ought openly to have allowed it: for if he was not going to penalize it, he had no reason to forbid it. . . . So this [god] is exceptionally dull-witted if he is not offended by the doing of that which he dislikes to see being done. . . . But as he does not punish, it is plain that he is not offended. . . . There is nothing so unseemly for a god as to abstain from prosecuting an act he has disapproved of, an act he has forbidden. . . . For a god to be merciful to evil is more unseemly than for him to punish it, especially if he is a god supremely good: for he can only be completely good if he is the enemy of the bad, so as to put his love of the good into action by hatred of the bad, and discharge his wardship of the good by the overthrowing of the bad.44
Marcion’s “better god,” Tertullian observes, is thus one “who is neither offended nor angry nor inflicts punishment,” but one who forgives evil “by not avenging, and excuses it by not punishing.” The result, he continues, is a divine
defaulter against the truth, one who annuls his own decision. He is afraid to condemn what he does condemn, afraid to hate what he does not love, allows when done that which he does not allow to be done, and would rather point out what he disapproves of than give proof of it. Here you will find the ghost of goodness, discipline itself a phantasm, casual precepts, offences free from fear.45
Unfortunately, there is not space here to engage the full range of Tertullian’s work or the subtleties of his positions. There can also be little doubt that many today would take issue with a goodly number of Tertullian’s points. His strict insistence on the rather stern justice of God, for example, does not fully solve the problem of divine wrath that occasioned Marcion so much difficulty, so much as show the deficiency of Marcion’s solution. Tertullian does this, in part, by justifying or accounting for God’s wrath—no mean feat. But what is crucial is how Tertullian insists with equal strength on God’s justice and not only God’s goodness. These two must proceed together. God’s justice is fully compatible with God’s goodness; indeed, the combination of God’s goodness with God’s justice enhances the perfection of God’s character.46 This is part of what it means to speak of the oneness of God: God’s goodness is God’s justice is God’s love. Marcion’s notion of God’s goodness is anything but divine, since it is devoid of God’s justice. As a result, Marcion’s god is simplistically and solipsistically “good,” meaning “nice” and “without judgment.” That is why Marcion’s god is a false god.
When Tertullian is assessed through the lens of the linguistic analogy and Marcion’s pidginized idiolect, what one sees is that the great heresiologist is going to great lengths to understand the entire linguistic system, not just part of it.47 “How does the goodness of God go together with God’s wrath?” is a legitimate question. Rather than adopt Marcion’s arbitrary favoring (a true case of what Dawkins et al. would call “picking and choosing”) of the former and complete discounting of the latter, Tertullian is at pains to show how they function within one and the same language. Yes, God is angry in the Bible, but angry at what? To what end, which is to ask, for what purpose? Is the object of God’s wrath and its telos sufficient to somehow understand it, to even warrant it as good? If so, there is no contradiction at all in God’s presentation in the Bible, let alone God’s character; instead, God’s wrath would be completely understandable within the larger grammar of Scripture. This is, of course and in fact, exactly what Tertullian argues in pointing out that God’s goodness was not met with any severity until the inauguration of sin and disobedience. Thus “the goodness of God came first, as his nature is: his sternness came afterwards, as there was reason for it. The former was ingenerate, was God’s own, was freely exercised: the latter was accidental, adapted to need, an expedient,”48 though Tertullian is quick to point out that “since the beginning . . . the Creator is both good and just, both just and good.”49
To put the matter in slightly different terms taken from the twentieth-century Jewish scholar Abraham J. Heschel, there is a great difference between “the wrath of God” (ira Dei) and “a God of wrath” (Deus irae).50 The latter suggests a kind of stative verb: God is wrathful, perhaps even always.51 The former suggests that God’s wrath is a transitive verb: it takes an object; God is wrathful about something.52 When that something changes, so also does the verb; God is now something else altogether—no longer wrathful, perhaps even happy.53 According to Heschel, this transitivity is the whole point behind the prophet’s preaching of repentance: it is not yet too late to turn (שׁוּב/šûb; cf. Greek μετανοέω/metanoeō). Such turning may, in turn, turn the judgment of God (see, e.g., Jer. 3:12–14; 18:7–10; Jon. 3:10). What Marcion and so many others dislike, seemingly above all else—God’s anger—could in the end be salutary, even therapeutic.54
Absolutely not to be missed here is that what God is typically mad about, according to both Tertullian and Heschel, is injustice. In Heschel’s memorable words, “The wrath of God is a lamentation. All prophecy is one great exclamation: God is not indifferent to evil! He is always concerned, He is personally affected by what man does to man. He is a God of pathos. This is one of the meanings of the anger of God: the end of indifference!”55 Equally memorable is Tertullian’s identification of the problem with Marcion and Marcion’s god when one is missing this concern to end injustice:
You will be forced, no question of it, to lay accusation against justice itself—for this it is that causes any man to be a judge—classing it as one of the varieties of evil: which means that you will have to include injustice among the subheadings of goodness. Justice is an evil thing only if injustice is a good one. But since you are compelled to pronounce injustice one of the worst of things, by the same method of reckoning you are forced to rank justice among the best things: for everything hostile to evil is good, even as nothing that is hostile to the good can help being evil. Consequently, in so far as injustice is an evil thing, to the same extent justice is a good thing. Nor is it to be reckoned as merely a variety of goodness, but as the safeguard of it, because unless goodness is governed by justice so as itself to be just, it cannot be goodness: for it will be unjust. Nothing that is unjust can be good, and everything that is just is bound to be good.56
Or back to Heschel, “Man’s sense of injustice is a poor analogy to God’s sense of injustice. The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor; to God, it is a disaster. Our reaction is disapproval; God’s reaction is something no language can convey. Is it a sign of cruelty that God’s anger is aroused when the rights of the poor are violated, when widows and orphans are oppressed?”57
To put this more explicitly in the terms of the linguistic analogy: Tertullian and Heschel know the full language, not just the pidgin, and as experts in the language, they are able to account for the “bad” parts within the larger linguistic system.58 It turns out these “bad” parts aren’t so “bad” after all! Tertullian’s exposé of Marcion’s failure at precisely this point is, to my mind, rather compelling—especially when seen within the linguistic analogy.59 But Tertullian’s is not simply a reclamation project, salvaging a few words left in the trash by Marcion. In a deft passage in book 2, he supplies a catena of passages drawn from the Old Testament (esp. from Isaiah and the Psalms) that demonstrate, in stark opposition to Marcion’s blunt amputation, that it is replete with the “same goodness of God” and teaches “godly conduct.”60 He summarizes, in a rhetorical flourish, “These few sentences have I adduced out of all the Creator’s scriptures, and I suppose nothing is now lacking for testimony to a God exceedingly good: for this is well enough certified by his precepts of goodness and by its rewards.”61 Note well, “out of all the . . . scriptures,” and “out of all the Creator’s scriptures,” which is to say from the Old Testament (and its God) as well as the New.62
The second significant point is to consider Marcion’s rejection of figural reading, another disposition he shares with the New Atheists.63 Not unlike Dawkins and Hitchens (see chap. 4), Marcion’s “bent of mind was literalist and prosaic.”64 Blackman deems Marcion’s rejection of allegorical exegesis an indication of that “literal-mindedness,” and believes that his “lack of imagination was bound to misinterpret much of the prophetic literature,” among other things.65 Indeed, “it is patent that with his rigid exegetical rules he was precluded from perceiving some of the deepest truths of Scripture.”66
At this point too Tertullian proves the more dexterous reader and fluent language user. An illuminating example is found in his consideration of martial imagery in the Psalms and the New Testament and its application to Christ. The following passage is worth quoting in full:
Gird thee with a sword upon thy thigh, says David [Ps. 45:3]. But what do you find written of Christ just before this? Thou art timely in beauty more than the sons of men, grace is poured forth on thy lips [Ps. 45:2]. It is ridiculous to suppose that he was flattering, in the matter of timeliness of beauty and grace of lips, one whom he was girding for war with a sword. So also, when he goes on to say, And stretch forth and prosper and reign, he adds [the reason], because of truth and gentleness and righteousness. Who is going to produce these results with a sword? Will not that rather produce the opposites of these, guile, and severity, and unrighteousness? These are surely the particular purpose and effect of battles. Let us inquire then whether there is a different meaning for that sword, which has so different an activity. Now the apostle John in the Apocalypse describes a sharp two-edged sword as proceeding from the mouth of God, exceeding sharp: and this has to be understood as the divine word. . . . But if you refuse acknowledgement of John, you have Paul, . . . who girds our loins with truth, and with the corselet of righteousness, and shoes our feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace—not of war—and bids us take to us the shield of the faith, that by it we may be able to quench all the fiery darts of the devil, and [to take] the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which, says he, is the word of God [Eph. 6:14ff.]. This is the sword which our Lord himself came to cast on to the earth [Matt. 10:34], not peace. If this is your Christ, then he too is a warrior. If he is not a warrior, but advances an allegorical sword, then it was permissible for the Creator’s Christ in the psalm, without warlike intent, to be girt with the figurative sword of the word—and in keeping with this is the above-mentioned timeliness and grace of lips—the sword with which he was at that time girt upon the thigh, as David puts it, but was afterwards to cast upon the earth. . . . This is how the Creator’s Christ is a warrior and an armed man, this is how he is even today taking the spoils, not of Samaria only but of all the nations. . . . Admit then that his spoils are figurative. As then our Lord speaks, and the apostle writes, figuratively of these matters, we do then with good confidence make use of those interpretations of his, instances of which even our adversaries acknowledge: and so the Christ who has come will be Isaiah’s Christ, for the very reason that he was not a warrior, because he is not by Isaiah described as such.67
Here again not all contemporary readers (let alone critics) will be convinced by Tertullian’s reading; nevertheless, there are at least three main takeaways from a passage like this: as an expert in the full language of Scripture, Tertullian is able to (1) weave and interweave the two Testaments of Scripture together into a unified whole—a whole that (2) is more than the sum of its parts because it uses the whole to make sense of the parts. This leads, finally, to the third point, that (3) flatfooted, overly “literal” reading of the Old Testament—a reading “without criticism and spiritual insight”—“leads to the destruction of the N[ew] Testament” as well.68 It was Marcion, not Tertullian, who threw large portions of the New Testament out of his “Gospel.”
Tertullian did not create figural reading; it was practiced in Christian and Jewish circles long before him.69 Indeed, the Bible itself has allegories and many other types of figures and tropes. Neither is it only the arch-heretic Marcion or the New Atheists who denigrate figural readings. For centuries figural reading has been out of fashion due to the dominance of historical-critical methodology. Although historical criticism’s dominance in the field of biblical studies, along with its rejection of figural reading strategies, has begun to loosen in recent years,70 there are many who still think readings like Tertullian’s above to be substandard in some way. Interestingly enough, the criticism comes not only from those committed to a strict historicist understanding of original authorial intent, but also from those deeply concerned with somehow accounting for or assessing problematic depictions in the Old Testament.
The work of Eric Seibert might be mentioned at this point. According to Seibert, a figural reading strategy like that of typology (which relates the Old Testament in various ways to Christ or the church) is wrongheaded because it “evades problems related to the characterization of God in the Old Testament.” In his judgment, “troubling questions about God’s character . . . are completely ignored by the typological approach, which passes over the grittier aspects of the text. Instead, this approach creatively uses Old Testament passages, even ones with problematic portrayals of God, to provide positive lessons about Christ and the church.”71 Seibert’s remark is only partly accurate. Figural readings can certainly be “creative,” with the lessons drawn “positive,” but such creativity is not entirely fanciful (as opposed to deeply rooted in the textual details);72 neither is it true that difficult problems or “grittier aspects” of the text are “completely ignored” by figural reading. To the contrary, it is precisely the difficulties and grittiness that give rise to the need for subtler and defter interpretation, as seen in the passage on Christ’s militancy from Tertullian.73 The most important thing to stress, however, is that figural reading strategies, whether of ancient or recent vintage, are not just simplistic attempts at “salvaging” the Old Testament (or New) or at rendering it harmless in some way by “neutralizing” its most offensive parts.74 Figural readings are far more than that. They should not be viewed primarily as a defensive posture but rather as a proactive and generative strategy that “enabled Christians to use the whole Bible as the church’s book.”75 But even this way of putting things isn’t fully satisfying because, in a very real sense, the church already had (and has) the whole Bible as its book—or at least the whole Old Testament.76 Tertullian, Irenaeus, Origen, and all the rest are not, therefore, performing some sort of herculean feat of interpretive magic by which the Old Testament is saved (and without which it is doomed), so much as they are making sense of the entire linguistic system they inherited, which they had mastered, and which they were able to speak—and speak better and more fluently than Marcion and more recent critics of figural readings.77 It was Marcion, not these church fathers, who was dumbfounded in facing the complexity of the Old Testament and who simply couldn’t master its grammar.
Von Harnack pro Marcion, or the New Marcion(ism)
Like any good heresy, Marcion’s never fully died out. It is no exaggeration to say that Marcion’s ghost animates many people’s continued problems with the Old Testament (both within the church and without), which in turn contributes to the Old Testament’s slow and steady demise. One can find Marcionite traces or inclinations in a host of places. It can be too easy, if not tempting, to accuse any anti–Old Testament issue of being “Marcionite.” While that isn’t always accurate, what are we to say about the phenomenon of New Testament–only Bibles?78 or “New Testament Churches”? or hermeneutical approaches that always and invariably favor the New Testament as the final judge and jury of all matters pertaining to the Old Testament?79 These presenting problems, and thousands like them, are not necessarily shackled with all of Marcion’s gnostic- or docetic-like tendencies, but they do smack of his fundamental proclivities regarding the relationship of the two Testaments.
A stunning example of modern Marcionism is found in the work of his greatest biographer, Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930). Much of what was said above about Marcion stems ultimately, if not directly, from von Harnack’s groundbreaking historical work, though scholarly debate and discussion of the arch-heretic continues and will persist for years to come. For present purposes, what is most important about von Harnack’s work on Marcion is how the great church historian found himself in rather marked agreement with the arch-heretic and his position on the Old Testament.
Von Harnack’s fascination with Marcion was long-standing. Indeed, he called Marcion “my first love in church history,”80 since his first award-winning paper was on the arch-heretic, written when he was only nineteen as a university student at Dorpat.81 Although he frequently had occasion to discuss Marcion in his many writings, von Harnack did not return to round out his early work on Marcion into a full and mature monograph until late in life. The first version of Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God was published in 1920; von Harnack released a second edition, his last published book, in 1924, at the age of 73.82 In this now-classic work, von Harnack makes the following, now infamous, remark:83
The thesis that is to be argued in the following [pages] may be stated thus: the rejection of the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake which the great church rightly avoided; to maintain it in the sixteenth century was a fate from which the Reformation was not yet able to escape; but still to preserve it in Protestantism as a canonical document since the nineteenth century is the consequence of a religious and ecclesiastical crippling.84
Lest there be any confusion about the force of this statement, von Harnack goes on to summarize his position a few pages later, “[Marcion] was obliged to reject the Old Testament as a false, anti-godly book in order to be able to preserve the gospel in its purity, but rejection is not in the picture today at all. Rather this book will be everywhere esteemed and treasured in its distinctiveness and its significance (the prophets) only when the canonical authority to which it is not entitled is withdrawn from it.”85 Rejection is not an option today, von Harnack says, but one thinks he “doth protest too much” since what he advocates is exactly and explicitly a withdrawal of canonical authority from the Old Testament. And what is withdrawing canonical authority if not, in fact, a rejection of the Old Testament’s canonical status as Christian Scripture?86 Pressing his point, von Harnack is so bold as to state that the Old Testament is not entitled to such canonical authority. It is impossible to imagine how such denigration and withdrawal will eventuate (so von Harnack) in universal and ubiquitous esteem for the Old Testament, though here too von Harnack’s gloss is revealing. Apparently the Old Testament’s “distinctiveness” and “significance” comes down to just this: “the prophets.”87
Gerhard May is no doubt correct in observing that “Harnack’s book [on Marcion] is not only a historical study; it represents also a document of the theology of its author.”88 Such a judgment is true of every study, in one way or the other, to greater or lesser degrees—even supposedly “objective” or “dispassionate” historiography. The problem is not, therefore, that von Harnack was somehow personally invested in his study of Marcion; the problem is rather that von Harnack’s personal investment—his own “theology,” according to May—is aligned with the arch-heretic’s! Indeed, von Harnack’s Marcionism is on display elsewhere in the corpus of his work. One example from his book Militia Christi (1905) can suffice: “Marcion undoubtedly understood the Christian concept of God in an essentially correct way. . . . It will always be to the glory of the Marcionite church . . . that it would rather cast away the Old Testament than tarnish the image of the Father of Jesus Christ by mixing in traces of a warlike God.”89
It is not hard, given von Harnack’s location in Berlin and the specific dates of his book on Marcion (1920, 1924 [2nd ed.]), to see how his affirmation of the arch-heretic’s position on the Old Testament slides easily into a Christian supersessionism laced with anti-Semitism.90 Note, for example:
As Christianity is the only true religion, and as it is no national religion, but somehow concerns the whole of humanity, or its best part, it follows that it can have nothing in common with the Jewish nation and its contemporary cultus. The Jewish nation in which Jesus Christ appeared, has, for the time at least, no special relation to the God whom Jesus revealed. Whether it had such a relation at an earlier period is doubtful (cf. here, e.g., the attitude of Marcion, Ptolemaeus the disciple of Valentinus, the author of the Epistle of Barnabas, Aristides and Justin); but certain it is that God has now cast it off, and that all revelations of God, so far as they took place at all before Christ, (the majority [of Christians] assumed that there had been such revelations and considered the Old Testament as a holy record), must have aimed solely at the call of the “new people,” and in some way prepared for the revelation of God through his son.91
This passage is epitomized in a later abridgement as follows:
Since Christianity is the only true religion and is not a national religion, but belongs to all mankind and pertains to our inmost life, it follows that it can have no special alliance with the Jewish people, or with their peculiar cult. The Jewish people of today, at least, stand in no favored relationship with the God whom Jesus has revealed; whether they formerly did is doubtful; this, however, is certain, that God has cast them off, and that the whole Divine revelation, so far as there was a revelation prior to Christ (the majority believed in one and looked upon the Old Testament as Holy Scripture) had as its end the calling of a “new nation” and the spreading of the revelation of God through his Son.92
The different formulation (italicized above) is chilling. Although it may be the result of a different translator making different translation choices (the German originals are highly similar and the specific phrase in question, zur Zeit, identical), one sees clearly that this passage, too, in both editions, reflects the theology of its author—and horribly so. In this section of his history of dogma, von Harnack is supposedly summarizing “common beliefs” held by “the great majority of Christians” during the first century,93 but his accent betrays him. The dispassionate objectivity of a historian is lost; in its place and more than evident are the fraught judgments of a modern-day Marcionite supersessionist.94
I do not mean to imply that the early church did not struggle with the Old Testament, nor that the early church was somehow guiltless when it came to the problem of anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism. The examples to the contrary are all too well known. Neither is von Harnack wrong when he states that the Old Testament was often used by early Christian writers to
refut[e] Judaism as a nation, i.e. to the proving that this people had been cast off by God, and that they had either never had any covenant with him (Barnabas), or had had a covenant of wrath, or had forfeited their covenant; that they had never understood the Old Testament and were therefore now deprived of it, if, indeed, they had ever been in possession of it (the attitude of the Church as a whole toward the Jewish people and their history appears to have been originally as indefinite as the attitude of the Gnostics toward the Old Testament). . . . Attempts to correct the Old Testament and to give it a Christian sense were not wanting; in the formation of the New Testament there were rudimentary efforts toward this end.95
But not all of these “refutations” are of a piece, nor are they all of equal merit. Here again, then, von Harnack reveals a Marcionite preference for coherent logic above all else. The New Testament certainly does a lot more (and much less!) than “correct” the Old Testament and “give it a Christian sense.” Indeed, as Robert Jenson has noted, it is more accurate to say that the Old Testament accommodated the Christian church than it is to say that the church accommodated the Old Testament.96 Moreover, the efforts made in the New Testament vis-à-vis the Old Testament may not be “rudimentary” at all, but altogether necessary, if not also sufficient, such that newer attempts at “refutation” or “correction” like Marcion’s and von Harnack’s are both unnecessary and insufficient (see chap. 9). Options like those offered in The Epistle of Barnabas are, at any rate and at the very least, noncanonical.97
To be as fair as possible, one should admit that von Harnack has better moments. As a historian, von Harnack admits that even if “nearly all Gentile Christian groups that we know, are at one in the detachment of Christianity from empiric Judaism,” it is still true that “the greater part of Christians did not” detach themselves from the Old Testament.98 Elsewhere he acknowledges that early Christian opinion differed on the history of Israel and its relation to God,99 and he remarks that at least some statements in the Old Testament “were too exalted for any caviling, and intelligible to every spiritually awakened mind.”100 And yet von Harnack indicates that “this treasure” that is the best of Scripture was “handed down to the Greeks and Romans,” without so much as mentioning the Jewish community.101 Finally, von Harnack seems aware of Marcion’s problems here and there, speaking at one point of the arch-heretic’s “crass dualism” that reflected “a Paulinism without dialectics.”102 He even invoked the specter of Marcion in his debate with Karl Barth, when von Harnack accused the Swiss theologian of a Marcionite move, by severing “every link between faith and the human.”103
But all that is prior to or outside von Harnack’s final, culminating monograph on Marcion, with its notorious affirmation of the arch-heretic’s views on the Old Testament. That affirmation lines up with the generally negative tenor one sees in von Harnack’s assessment of the Old Testament (and Judaism). In the disparaging passages, while von Harnack frequently makes recourse to the New Testament, he does not, as far as I can see, ever cite Rom. 9–11, a unit where, among other things, Paul says things like this:
So I ask you, has God rejected his people? Absolutely not! (Rom. 11:1 CEB)
So I’m asking you: They [God’s people, Israel] haven’t stumbled so that they’ve fallen permanently, have they? Absolutely not! (Rom. 11:11a CEB)
God’s gifts and calling can’t be taken back. (Rom. 11:29 CEB)104
Only an egregious oversight like that enables von Harnack to make a statement like this: “Israel was thus at all times the pseudo-Church.”105
Again, the majority of von Harnack’s work on the history of Christian doctrine preceded his last, most mature and considered statements on Marcion, found in his biography of the arch-heretic. It is there that von Harnack concurs with Marcion, recommending that we do away with the Old Testament altogether in a move that previous generations of Christians, for various reasons, didn’t have the nerve to make. Rumscheidt puts it bluntly, but altogether accurately: “Harnack was anti-Judaistic in his interpretation of the Old Testament: for him it was an anachronistic work.”106 The accusation is irrefutable but becomes all the more disturbing in light of the publication of the Marcion monograph in the 1920s and contemporaneous events in Germany, both before and after its two editions.107
Contra von Harnack, or the Deadly Ramifications
Perhaps the most important of the events preceding the publication of von Harnack’s Marcion was the Babel-Bibel controversy, in which the noted Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch, in a highly public venue, argued that the Old Testament was little more than a secondary derivation from Babylonian culture.108 Delitzsch followed his two public lectures with the publication of his Die grosse Täuschung (The great deception), the great deception in question being the Old Testament itself, particularly its claim to reveal the true God.109 In this book, Delitzsch asserts that Germans would receive better help from their own national myths than from the Old Testament, which he recommended setting aside altogether and forever. Delitzsch’s reasoning in the early twentieth century reminds one of Marcion’s in the second and the New Atheists’ in the twenty-first: “The more deeply I immerse myself in the spirit of the prophetic literature of the Old Testament, the greater becomes my mistrust of Yahweh, who butchers the peoples with the sword of his insatiable anger; who has but one favorite child, while he consigns all other nations to darkness, shame, and ruin.”110 While Delitzsch’s lectures preceded the publication of von Harnack’s Marcion, Emil Kraeling is correct when he states that, in Delitzsch, von Harnack got what he wished for: someone who did, for all intents and purposes, withdraw canonical authority from the Old Testament.111
The comparison between Delitzsch and von Harnack was not lost on observers at the time,112 such that von Harnack himself felt the need to address the issue in the second edition of Marcion: “Hereby I object to the classifying of my arguments with those of Friedrich Delitzsch (Die grosse Täuschung), which has happened several times. The latter are as outdated from a scholarly standpoint as they are objectionable from a religious standpoint.”113 But with all due respect to von Harnack, it is exceedingly difficult to see how one could not relate his comments to Delitzsch’s work. On the status of the Old Testament, both scholars are nothing if not Marcion redivivus.114 What is more disturbing than their rhetoric, however, is the dating of the same to that particular moment of German history. It is hard to believe that such sentiments did not have a profound effect on, and were thus partially culpable for, the anti-Semitism of Germany, which came to its most horrific result in the Final Solution of the Nazis.115
The problem of pidginization of the Old Testament, therefore, is pressed upon us not only by Marcion in the second century, but by the Holocaust in the twentieth. Like any heresy worth its salt, Marcionism has endured. According to church historians, its effects lingered for centuries, and von Harnack, a church historian himself, is proof of the point. So is Delitzsch, and so are, I would argue, the New Atheists (New Marcionites of a sort), not to mention many others.
But Marcion’s ghost is also seen in other, less conspicuous ways as well—say, in the way the New Testament is favored and the Old Testament neglected week in and week out, not just in the “best sermons” but also in the hymns and the readings of the church at worship (see chap. 2). In light of Marcion, von Harnack, and the Holocaust, the pidginization reflected in Christian liturgy takes on an increased and dread significance. It is no longer a matter of simple liturgical preference or inclination; it is far more serious than that.
One final proof of the point: According to Doris L. Bergen, the Nazis were able to enjoy success among German Christian groups in part because of widespread biblical—and here one should be specific: Old Testament—illiteracy.116 The Nazi movement succeeded, at least to some degree, among German Christians because they didn’t know their Bibles, especially their Old Testaments. Bergen has chronicled the Nazi’s systematic elimination of the Old Testament—how that began with denying the canonicity of the Old Testament and then moved to censorship of liturgical elements and church hymnody.117 This type of censorship is nothing if not forced language death,118 executed (literally) within a linguistic community wherein the language is supposed to be practiced and so flourish—in worship.119 But once the community of faith no longer sings the Old Testament, it is a short step to removing it altogether, from pulpit, prayer, and liturgy. The ontological connection that exists between Israel and the church is thus severed. It is no wonder—though at the same time it is simply unfathomable—that when the death squads came for the Jews, the “German Christians” looked the other way . . . and worse.120
We saw in chapter 3 that when languages are dying, they revert to pidgin-like forms. A language undergoing repidginization is a language on its way to death. In the light of Marcion—both the Old and New varieties, from the second century to the Holocaust in the twentieth, even up to the present day—the repidginization of the Old Testament and its movement toward death become even more ominous and far more deadly. It is no longer simply a matter of language learning or biblical literacy, certainly not of the trivial kind. It is a matter of life and death—death of the most physical and horrific kind. The stakes are nothing less than the lives of human beings, not solely the health of a human language.
In this light, the anti–Old Testament sentiments of more recent vintage from the New Atheists take on a rather deathly pallor.121 Sadly—and this is Marcion’s legacy within Christianity—it is not only atheists who make such comments. As Fleming Rutledge has observed, “Many Christians continue, unthinkingly, to speak of ‘the God of the Old Testament’ as though this supposedly wrathful and judgmental God had been supplanted by an endlessly tolerant and indulgent Jesus. This ill-formed attitude is not exactly anti-Semitic, but it can be called into the service of anti-Semitism.”122 The death of the Old Testament is one example of such anti-Semitism, but it is equally also a contributing factor to the same.