Against Marcion 2.27

Now, to dispose of the rest in brief — whatever else you collect as petty, weak, and unworthy, in order to destroy the Creator — I shall set out one simple and sure reason: God could not have entered into dealings with men unless he had taken on human feelings and affections, by which he might temper with humility the force of his majesty, which human smallness surely could not bear. This humility was unworthy of himself but necessary for man, and so already worthy of God, since nothing is so worthy of God as the salvation of man. I should treat this more fully if I were dealing with pagans — although the encounter with heretics is not very different — but since you yourselves already believe that God has lived in the form and the whole order of the human condition, you will surely not require long persuading that God conformed himself to humanity; you are refuted by your own faith. For if God — and a loftier god at that — laid low the height of his majesty with such humility as even to be subjected to death, and the death of the cross, why should you not think that some pettinesses befitted our God too — more tolerable, at any rate, than the insults of the Jews and the gibbet and the tomb? Or are these the pettinesses which must from now on prejudge that Christ, exposed to human sufferings, belongs to that God whom you reproach with human traits?

For we too profess that Christ always acted in the name of God the Father; that it was he himself who lived among men from the beginning, he himself who met with the patriarchs and prophets: the Son of the Creator, his Word, whom by bringing him forth from himself he made his Son, and thereafter set over his whole arrangement and will, making him a little lower than the angels, as is written in his Scripture. By this lowering he was also appointed by the Father to those things which you censure as human, learning even from the beginning what he was to be at the end. It is he who comes down, he who asks, he who demands, he who swears. Moreover, even the gospel we hold in common will testify that the Father has been seen by no one, since Christ says: “No one has known the Father except the Son.” For he himself had declared in the Old Testament too: “No one shall see God and live,” marking the Father as invisible, in whose authority and name he himself was God who was seen, the Son of God. But with us too Christ is received in the person of Christ, because in this way too he is ours. Whatever, then, you require as worthy of God will be found in the Father, invisible and unapproachable and serene, the god, so to speak, of the philosophers; but whatever you censure as unworthy will be reckoned to the Son, who was seen and heard and met with, the Father's agent and minister, mingling in himself man and God — God in mighty works, man in weaknesses — so that he confers on man as much as he takes from God.

In short, the whole of what you count my God's disgrace is the sacrament of human salvation. God lived among men in human fashion so that man might be taught to act in divine fashion. God dealt with man as an equal so that man might be able to deal with God as an equal. God was found small so that man might become very great. You who disdain such a God — I do not know whether you believe, in faith, in a crucified God. How great, then, is your perversity toward both aspects of the Creator! You designate him a judge, and reproach as cruelty the judge's severity, which fits the merits of the cases; you demand a supremely good God, and belittle as pettiness his gentleness, which fits his kindness and has been conducted more humbly to suit the capacity of human smallness. Neither the great God pleases you nor the small, neither the judge nor the friend. What if the same things are now detected in yours as well? We have already shown in its own book that he too is a judge, and, being a judge, necessarily severe, and, being severe, of course cruel — if severity is cruel at all.