Against Marcion 5.4

Under the same mention of Abraham, so long as he is refuted by the sense itself. “I speak still,” he says, “in human terms: when we were little children we were placed under the elements of the world, to be slaves to them.” But this is not said in human terms; it is not an illustration but the truth. For what little child (in understanding, of course, as the nations are) is not subject to the elements of the world, which he looks up to as God? What he did say then in human terms was this: “Yet no one sets aside or adds to a man's testament.” For by the example of a human testament that stands firm he was defending the divine one: “The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He did not say ‘to seeds,’ as of many, but ‘to your seed,’ as of one, which is Christ.” Let Marcion's sponge blush! Except that I am going over, more than I need, what he has taken away, when it is more effective to refute him from what he has kept. “But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son”: surely he who is also God of the very times of which the world consists; who also ordained the signs of the times, suns and moons and constellations and stars; who, in short, both arranged and foretold the revelation of his Son at the end of the times: “In the last days the mountain of the Lord will be manifest,” and, “In the last days I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh,” according to Joel. It belonged to him to wait for the time to be fulfilled whose also was the end of time, as well as its beginning. But that idle god, who has no work and no prophecy and so no time of any kind, what did he ever do to bring it about that the time was fulfilled, or to wait for it until it should be fulfilled? If nothing, it is quite empty that he should have waited for the Creator's times, serving the Creator. And for what purpose did he send his Son? “To redeem those who were under the law”: that is, to make the crooked into a straight way and the rough into smooth ways, according to Isaiah, so that the old things should pass away and new ones arise (“a new law from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem”); “and that we might receive the adoption of sons,” we the nations, of course, who were not sons. For he himself will be the light of the nations, and in his name the nations will hope. So, that it might be certain that we are sons of God, “he sent his Spirit into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father.’” For “in the last days,” he says, “I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh.” Whose is this grace, if not his whose is also the promise of grace? Who is Father, if not he who is also Maker? So after these riches there was to be no turning back “to the weak and beggarly elements.” Now among the Romans, too, the first letters of the alphabet are commonly called “elements.” So he did not want to turn them away from the God of the elements of the world by disparaging those elements. (Although, when he said above, “If then you serve those who by nature are not gods,” he rebukes the error of physical, that is natural, superstition, which holds the elements to be God, yet not even so does he censure the God of the elements.) But he himself declares which elements he wants to be understood, namely the first letters of the law: “You observe days and months and times and years”; and sabbaths, I suppose, and the preparation meals and fasts and great days. For these too, like circumcision, were to cease by the Creator's decrees, who says through Isaiah: “Your new moons and sabbaths and great day I will not endure; your fasting and holidays and ceremonies my soul hates”; and through Amos: “I have hated, I have rejected your ceremonies, and I will not smell the savour in your solemn assemblies”; and again through Hosea: “I will turn away all her mirth and her ceremonies and her sabbaths and her new moons and all her solemn assemblies.” “Has he erased what he himself had established?” you say. Yes, he rather than another; or if another, then that other helped the Creator's sentence, taking away what the Creator too had condemned. But the question here is not why the Creator broke his own laws. It is enough that we have proved that he would break them, so that it is confirmed that the apostle laid down nothing against the Creator, since the very removal of the law comes from the Creator. But as thieves often drop some of their loot, which gives them away, so, I believe, Marcion left behind the last mention of Abraham, though none needed removing more, even if he partly altered it. For Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman; but the one by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, and the one by the free woman through promise. These things are allegorical (that is, they foreshadow something else); for these are the two testaments (or two “showings,” as we find it translated): one from Mount Sinai into the synagogue of the Jews, according to the law, bearing children for slavery; the other bearing children above every principality and power and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come, into which we have been promised, the holy church, which is our mother. And so he adds, “Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman but of the free.” He has certainly made plain that the nobility of Christianity has the sacred sign of allegory in Abraham's son born of the free woman, just as the legal slavery of Judaism has it in the son of the slave woman; and so that both dispensations belong to that God with whom we find the outline of both. The very saying, “For the freedom with which Christ has set us free,” does it not make him the liberator who was the master? For not even Galba set free other people's slaves; he would more readily have released free men. Freedom, then, will be granted by the one with whom was the slavery of the law. And rightly it was not fitting for those who had been set free to be bound again by the yoke of slavery, that is, of the law, now that the psalm had been fulfilled: “Let us burst their bonds and cast their yoke from us,” after the rulers had gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ. So from those released from slavery he persisted in erasing the very mark of slavery, circumcision, on the authority, of course, of the prophetic preaching, remembering what was said through Jeremiah, “And circumcise the foreskins of your heart,” since Moses too says, “You shall circumcise your hardness of heart,” that is, not the flesh. In short, if he was excluding circumcision because he came from another god, why does he also deny that uncircumcision has any value in Christ, as he does circumcision? For he ought to have preferred the rival of what he was attacking, if he came from a god who was the rival of circumcision. But because both circumcision and uncircumcision were assigned to one God, both were void in Christ, because faith was preferred to them: that faith of which it had been written, “And in his name the nations will believe”; that faith which, by saying that it is made complete through love, he shows in this way too to be the Creator's. For whether he means the love that is toward God, this too is the Creator's: “You shall love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength”; or the love toward one's neighbour, “Your neighbour as yourself” is also the Creator's. “But he who troubles you will bear judgment.” From which god? From the best god? But he does not judge. From the Creator? But neither will he condemn one who upholds circumcision. If there will be no other judge than the Creator, then he will not condemn the defenders of the law except because he himself determined that it should cease. What now, if he even confirms it in the part in which he ought? “For the whole law,” he says, “has been fulfilled in you: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Or if he wants “has been fulfilled” to be understood as meaning that it is no longer to be fulfilled, does he then not want me to love my neighbour as myself, so that this too has ceased with the law? But this precept will have to be kept for ever. So the Creator's law has been approved even by its adversary, and has gained from him not loss but gain, its sum reduced to a single precept. But this too suits no one better than its author. And so when he says, “Bear one another's burdens, and so you will fulfil the law of Christ,” if this cannot be done unless one loves his neighbour as himself, it is plain that “You shall love your neighbour as yourself,” through which “Bear one another's burdens” is understood, is the law of Christ, which is the Creator's; and so Christ is the Creator's, since the Creator's law is Christ's. “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked.” And yet Marcion's god can be mocked, since he knows neither how to be angry nor how to avenge. “For whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.” So it is a God of recompense and judgment who threatens. “And let us not grow weary in doing good,” and, “While we have time, let us work what is good.” Deny that the Creator commanded doing good, and then let a different teaching belong to a different deity. Further, if he preaches recompense, the harvest both of corruption and of life will come from the same one. “And in due time we shall reap,” since Ecclesiastes too says, “There is a time for everything.” “But to me too” (a servant of the Creator) “the world has been crucified” (yet not the God of the world) “and I to the world” (yet not to the God of the world). For he spoke of the world with regard to its manner of life, by renouncing which we are crucified to each other and die to each other. [He calls them persecutors of Christ.] And when he adds that he bears the marks of Christ in his body (bodily marks, of course, of fetters), he has confessed that Christ's flesh was not imaginary but real and solid, since he shows its bodily marks.