The Problem With Marcion: A Second-Century Heresy Continues to Infect the Church

In the second century the great Christian apologist Tertullian wrote against the heretic Marcion and the divinity he espoused in words that ring with relevance for today:

What a prevaricator of truth is such a god! What a dissembler with his own decision! Afraid to condemn what he really condemns, afraid to hate what he does not love, permitting that to be done which he does not allow, choosing to indicate what he dislikes rather than deeply examine it! This will turn out an imaginary goodness, a phantom of discipline, perfunctory in duty, careless in sin. Listen, ye sinners; and ye who have not yet come to this, hear, that you may attain to such a pass! A better god has been discovered, who never takes offense, is never angry, never inflicts punishment, who has prepared no fire in hell, no gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness! He is purely and simply good. He indeed forbids all delinquency, but only in word. He is in you, if you are willing to pay him homage, for the sake of appearances, that you may seem to honour God; for your fear he does not want. And so satisfied are the Marcionites with such pretences, that they have no fear of their god at all.1

This “better god” of the second-century heretic Marcion was a god who had nothing to do with law, wrath, or judgment, but was instead only a god of grace, love, and acceptance. There are many yet today who believe in this god of the second-century heretic Marcion.

Marcion believed that the message of the gospel and the New Testament was simply love and grace, that there was no law or wrath in the God of Jesus Christ. Because the Old Testament often portrays him in terms of law and wrath, Marcion said that the God of the Old Testament was not the God of Jesus Christ, but instead another god who had nothing in common with Jesus and his God. Marcion thus espoused a dualistic view that said there are two deities, the Creator God of the Old Testament whose essential attribute is righteousness, and Jesus’ God of the New Testament whose essential attribute is acceptance. In order to sustain this view, Marcion rejected the entire Old Testament and any portions of our present New Testament that did not cohere with his view of Jesus’ God as love. Hence, Marcion only accepted into his New Testament an edited corpus of ten of Paul’s letters and an altered version of the gospel of Luke.

It was the heresy of Marcion that moved the early church to conclude on the books that should be included in the New Testament canon, which task it largely completely by the end of the second century.2 Marcion is always studied in seminary courses pertaining to the development of the New Testament canon, but his significance for hermeneutics (i.e., biblical interpretation), theology, and ethics is less often considered. This is not the dry stuff of dusty church history volumes. This heresy persists today and those who have not learned from that history will find the church doomed to return repeatedly to this conflict. As the translator of Tertullian’s Against Marcion wrote in 1868, “If Marcionism is in the letter obsolete, there is its spirit still left in the church, which in more ways than one develops its ancient characteristics.”3 The spirit of Marcionism is seen in the church where the Old Testament and its teaching on the nature and requirements of God are dismissed, where the concepts of law, wrath, and righteousness are minimized or disregarded altogether. The “ancient characteristics” of this heresy are manifested in aberrant and confused perceptions of God, salvation, and Scripture. Many in the church believe in a god “who never takes offense, is never angry, never inflicts punishment, who has prepared no fire in hell, no gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness, [who] is purely and simply good.” Many do not recognize all scripture as the written Word of God, but instead only accept those portions that fit with their view of God as non-judgmental and accepting of all. The ramifications of this view of God for soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) are an implicit universalism which says that all are accepted by God, regardless of whether they repent of sin. The very nature of the gospel is thus thrown into question, as is what people mean when they say they believe the gospel and are Christians. As Tertullian said, “this will turn out an imaginary goodness, a phantom of discipline, perfunctory in duty, careless in sin,” effects all too readily seen in the contemporary church. The problem of Marcion is, therefore, real and relevant. As occurred in the second century, so today there are those who, as Irenaeus said of Marcion, “set forth, indeed, the name of Christ Jesus as a sort of lure, but in various ways they…destroy multitudes, wickedly disseminating their own doctrines by the use of a good name, and through means of its sweetness and beauty, extending to their hearers the bitter and malignant poison of the serpent, the great author of apostasy.”4 It behooves the church to consider, then, how the problem of Marcion is manifested today in contemporary views of God, Scripture, and salvation.

Marcion’s View of God

Marcion was a native of Sinope in Pontus of Asia Minor, a trading axis of the upper-Mediterranean and a crossroads of intellectual exchange. It was a place of religious syncretism, where the Iranian and Babylonian dualistic theologies of Mithra and Ahura Mazda existed alongside a Judaism that as a result of the Jewish revolts of 66-135 AD was indifferent toward the Law.5 These factors combined to influence the system of Marcion, the son of a church bishop. Marcion was eventually excommunicated by his father from the church, allegedly for seducing a virgin.6 Marcion then made his way to Rome around 140, attaching himself to a local orthodox church. Apparently well off as a ship owner, Marcion made a large donation to the church which was rejected and returned once his heretical views were discovered.7 In the next few years he systematized his views and began to organize his followers into churches that appeared to the untrained eye to be orthodox churches.8 Though espousing a heresy, Marcion’s churches had every appearance of being fully Christian. A contemporary of Marcion, the apologist Justin Martyr, said that “by the aid of devils, [he] has caused many of every nation to speak blasphemies, and to deny that God is the maker of this universe, and to assert some other being, greater than He, [who] has done greater works;” notwithstanding, “all who take their opinions” from him were still “called Christians.”9 Many of Marcion’s followers died alongside Christians in the persecutions. “They say that they have a multitude of martyrs for Christ; yet they do not confess Christ himself in truth.”10 Though Marcion was formally excommunicated in 144, he continued to propagate his heretical views, gather followers, and organize churches that in some places persisted into the fifth century. Strains of Marcion’s heresy remain in the Church to this very day.

The basis of Marcion’s system was dualism, a belief in two competing divine persons and principles. This system was set forth in his no longer extant work Antitheses, wherein he set forth the opposition of law and gospel, flesh and spirit, Old Testament Creator God and New Testament God of Jesus Christ. Although from the time of the early apologists, efforts have been made to locate the source of Marcion’s dualism in Iranian speculation, Jewish cosmology, Gnosticism, and philosophers as diverse as Plato, Empedocles, and Epicurus, there can be little doubt that Marcion’s views were largely derived from his peculiar reading of the Pauline epistles. The apostle Paul stated that God in Jesus Christ had overcome the “god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4), who Marcion construed to be the Creator God of the Old Testament. Paul wrote to Christians who were tempted to return to the rites and ceremonial practices of the Old Testament law, “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable principles?” (Gal. 4:8-9). Marcion understood this to mean that the Old Testament God was not the God of salvation, but rather of enslavement. The many passages in the Pauline epistles which contrast God and false deities or the devil, spirit and flesh, gospel and law, were all taken by Marcion to entail a radical discontinuity between the Old Testament and the New.

Marcion thus believed that the Creator God of the Old Testament was a demiurge, a lower God who must be distinguished from the higher God of the New Testament, the “alien God” unknown prior to his revelation in Jesus Christ. The Creator God of the Old Testament was full of darkness and evil who enjoyed keeping people in slavery to sin, which is why he gave them the law. The justice and judgment of this Creator God of the Old Testament was severe, harsh, and unbending. “There can be no doubt that Marcion identified righteousness as the essential characteristic of the Creator-God.”11 The Creator offered no redemption, but instead tyrannically demanded absolute obedience to the most minute demands which he would change arbitrarily in order to bewilder humanity. Adolf von Harnack summarizes Marcion’s criticism of the Old Testament Creator-God in its two key aspects, cruel wrath and temporal fulfillment:

First, it was intended to bring to light the unmerciful “righteousness,” harassing strictness and cruelties, passions, zeal, and wrath of the creator of the world; further, his evil partialities, pettinesses, and limitations; and finally his weakness and self-contradictions, his unprincipled whims, and his precepts and commandments which were so often ethically doubtful. This criticism reached its climax in the proof that he was even the “conditor malorum,” the author of evil, the one who incites wars, is deceitful in his promises, and is wicked in his deeds. Second, this criticism was intended to show that all the promises of the creator of the world are earthly and temporal and, insofar as they were not altogether insupportable, had already been fulfilled in the history of the Jewish people or would yet be fulfilled there. For this reason also the promised Messiah is an earthly warrior-king who would actually yet come; but the prophecies that pointed toward him are not numerous, since most of them have already been fulfilled in David, Solomon, and others, and are falsely assigned to the future Messiah.12

Such a god was not only unworthy of worship, but one to be despised and condemned.

The God of the New Testament, on the other hand, had been unknown until the revelation made in Jesus Christ. This alien God is a higher God who redeems as a free gift of his love. Marcion characterized this higher, alien God as supremely good, as goodness itself, and primary and perfect goodness. As altogether good and therefore loving, he was considered incapable of becoming angry or condemning anyone. His justice was the justice of love that accomplished the redemption of all in Christ Jesus.

Marcion’s reading of the Pauline epistles was clearly idiosyncratic, an easy prey for acute apologists such as Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Origen, among others. They showed from the Old Testament how the God manifested there is regularly spoken of as “good” (Ps. 73:1; Lam. 3:25, e.g.). They also made clear that the Creator God must necessarily be the same as the God manifested in Christ by reason of the manifold Old Testament allusions and explicit citations concerning him in the New Testament. Moreover, these apologists show how goodness cannot be separated from justice into two gods. Tertullian explained the necessity of God’s judgment to the demonstration of his goodness:

We dread the Creator’s tremendous threats, and yet scarcely turn away from evil. What, if He threatened not? Will you call this justice an evil, when it is all unfavourable to evil? Will you deny it to be a good, when it has its eye towards good? What sort of being ought you to wish God to be? Would it be right to prefer that He should be such, that sins might flourish under Him, and the devil make mock at Him? Would you suppose Him to be a good God, who should be able to make a man worse by security in sin? Who is the author of good, but He who also requires it?13

The essence of God’s very character is holiness— righteousness and goodness cannot, therefore, be separated.14 While distinctions may be made in the metaphysical and moral attributes of God, the idea of goodness entails perfection in both. “In our ascription of goodness to God the fundamental idea is that He is in every way all that He as God should be, and therefore answers perfectly to the ideal expressed in the word ‘God’.”15 It is because God is holy, righteous and altogether good that he demands his people be holy (Lev. 11:44-45; 19:2, 20:7, cited in 1 Pet. 1:16). The sinner in himself is unable to comply with these good (i.e., just and righteous) demands of this one and holy God, but in his goodness (i.e., love, grace, and mercy) he has provided in Christ for the forgiveness of his people, chosen “before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight” (Eph. 1:3).

The questions Tertullian raised concerning the nature of God are fundamental to theology in the church today. What kind of God is being preached in Presbyterian pulpits? Is it the God of orthodox Christian faith and the Reformed confessions, “abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek him; and withal most just and terrible in his judgments; hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty?”16 Or is it “Marcion’s god: tolerant of evil, encouraging wrong, wheedling about his grace, prevaricating in his goodness?”17 The extent to which what Scripture calls sin is diluted (or deleted) from the pulpit and what Scripture declares evil is commended is the extent to which the heretical god of Marcion is being proclaimed and not the God of historic, orthodox Christian faith. The goddesses of feminist theology and the god that accepts sexual perversion are only the most blatant examples of the heretical deities who are being proclaimed in the name of Christ and leading others astray. These are all versions of “the better god who never takes offence, is never angry, never inflicts punishment, who has prepared no fire in hell, who forbids all delinquency, but only in word,” as Tertullian observed. This god may let people do whatever they want and freely accept their “justice-love,” but this is not the God of orthodox Christian faith. The true God commands the obedience of all and will judge those who refuse to repent of what Scripture clearly calls sin.

The effect of proclaiming and believing in Marcion’s weak and indifferent god is moral and spiritual weakness and indifference. “If you do not fear God as being good, why do you not boil over into every kind of lust?,” asked Tertullian.18 Because many in the Church today have imbibed a Marcionite view of the God of Jesus Christ and believe they are accepted regardless of how they think or live, they have indeed boiled over into lusts of every kind. This raises questions as to the nature of the salvation to which they lay claim.

Marcion’s View of Salvation

Marcion’s dualism was thoroughgoing and based ultimately on his radical distinction between the law and the gospel. He saw no goodness in the God of the Old Testament, but only judgment stemming from the imposition of law. On the other hand, the God of the New Testament was altogether good, because he had nothing to do with law, but was accepting of all and did not judge. Once again, this radical disjunction follows from Marcion’s idiosyncratic reading of the Pauline epistles. Paul does speak of “a righteousness from God, apart from the law” made known in Christ, but it is the righteousness “to which the Law and the Prophets testify” (Rom. 3:21). This demonstrates again the continuity that exists in the righteous demands of the one God of both covenants. While “we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law,” this does not in any way nullify the law, Paul says, but rather confirms it (Rom. 3:31) as the righteous expectations of God for his people. While the law does reveal to humanity its sin (Rom. 3:20) and its curse of death (Gal. 3:10) so that no human can be justified by the law (Gal. 3:11-25), this does not mean the law is defective; instead, it means human beings are defective, i.e., enslaved to sin. “What the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature,” God sent Christ to do in the likeness of sinful humanity “in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:3-4). The flesh is hostile to God’s law and will not submit to it (Rom. 8:7), but those who walk in the Spirit will fulfill God’s law, not in order to be justified, but because they are already justified. Thus, while “Christ is the end of the law” as a means of justification for everyone who truly believes (Rom. 10:4), “the law is holy and the commandment is holy, righteous and good” (Rom. 7:12) and is enacted by the one living in the Spirit in demonstration of justification.

Reformed theology has always maintained the interrelation of law and gospel, not the opposition of the law and gospel.

The Churches of the Reformation from the very beginning distinguished between the law and the gospel as the two parts of the Word of God as a means of grace. This distinction was not understood to be identical with that between the Old and the New Testament, but was regarded as a distinction that applies to both Testaments. There is law and gospel in the Old Testament, and there is law and gospel in the New.19

The law is fundamentally the revelation in Scripture of God’s expectations for humanity. The Second Helvetic Confession says, “The will of God is explained for us in the law of God, what he wills or does not will us to do, what is good and just, or what is evil and unjust. Therefore we confess that the law is good and holy.”20 The law shows sinful humanity what God’s holiness commands, revealing the innate depravity and utter inability of anyone to come unto God or do any spiritual good apart from his grace. The law thus convicts sinners of their condemnation and need, which by the Spirit’s enabling grace moves them to repent of their sin and seek God’s mercy in Christ. The law is essentially the means of grace unto repentance and the gospel is the means of grace unto faith in the salvation God has provided in Christ, which results in a life of new obedience to the law through the transforming power of the Spirit.

The law is thus imperative to recognizing God’s holy expectations. Without law, there cannot be a genuine recognition of sin or of need for true repentance. Thus, by doing away with the law, Marcion did away with sin, for “sin is not taken into account when there is no law” (Rom. 5:13). “Marcion emphasized Rom 5.13 as the explanation of 5.12, 19: It is the aemulatio [jealousy] of the Creator, as expressed in the law, that brings about the disobedience of man and the ‘death that reigned from Adam to Moses’. But in Marcion’s thought, ‘sin’ in the sense of a guilt-accruing or punishable transgression is unknown.”21 Sin, according to Marcion, was imposed on human beings by an evil God through the law. “He is a sinner not in virtue of being a descendant of Adam, but because he is a child of the lesser God.”22 Marcion believed that the God of Jesus Christ had done away with the law and thus with any recognition of sin. Hence, without the law, Marcion and his followers were no longer conscious of sin (Rom. 3:21; 7:7-8). “In contrast with Paul, Augustine, and Luther, Marcion is a stranger to the consciousness of sin.”23 There is little question that a Marcionite view of sin has infected the Church. There is a tacit antinomianism afoot amongst liberals implying that baptism into Christ frees one from the demands of the law in order to do anything one wishes.24 This has nowhere been more evident than in the discussions held on the amendments pertaining to the requirements for the ordination of officers of the church. Those who politic for a loosening of the historic standards of the church have based their views largely on the subjectivity of personal experience, that they feel good about their aberrant sexuality and believe God must therefore accept it, despite the fact that Scripture categorically condemns such behavior. No explanation was offered for how one could affirm homosexual or any other extra-marital practice when Scripture explicitly condemns it (Gen. 19:5; Lev. 18:22; 20:13; Rom. 1:27; 1 Cor. 6:9; 1 Tim. 1:10). Instead, proponents of lessening the standards laughed off such condemnations as vestiges of a bygone era (of a bygone God?) and stressed instead the need to be loving, just and welcoming.

“What did Jesus say about homosexuality?,” was commonly asked, as though his silence on this issue implies his affirmation of it. This again tacitly presumes the Marcionite view that Jesus and the gospel stand in contradiction to the law and the prophets. The words of Jesus printed in red ink in so many Bibles have no greater value than the rest of God’s Word printed in black. The first words recorded of Jesus in the earliest gospel testify to the centrality of repentance to the gospel: “Repent and believe the good news!” (Mk. 1:15). There can be no good news to believe unless one believes the bad news that he is condemned in his sinful state. “Unless you repent, you too will all perish” (Lk. 13:5).

“Repentance unto life is an evangelical grace, the doctrine whereof is to be preached by every minister of the gospel, as well as that of faith in Christ.”25 By the grace of true repentance the sinner recognizes his sinfulness “as contrary to the holy nature and righteous law of God,” so that he “grieves for, and hates his sins, as to turn from them all unto God, purposing and endeavoring to walk with him in all the ways of his commandments.”26 There can be no genuine conversion without the true repentance of the sinner. The dying of the old self in repentance means, the Heidelberg Catechism says, “sincere sorrow over our sins and more and more to hate them and to flee from them” (Q. 89). True repentance does not justify and vindicate what Scripture calls sin, but demands the turning away from such. Grace granted by the Holy Spirit in the new birth effects “a strong desire to live according to the will of God in all good works,” which are only those done “out of true faith, in accordance with the Law of God, and for his glory, and not those based on our own opinion or on the traditions of men” (Qs 90-91).27 Opinions of “justice-love” that oppose God’s love as revealed in his law thus stand condemned as works not done out of true repentance and saving faith. True love for God is demonstrated in the keeping of his law from a heart and life transformed by the efficacious grace of the Holy Spirit.

“Evil for Marcion is not so much moral as physical evil; not sin so much as suffering. Marcion was more concerned over the ugliness and misery of man’s environment than the ugly passions of man’s heart.”28 Because evil was largely physical, Jesus could not have been fully human; for Marcion, he only appeared to be human. This ancient heresy was known as docetism, from the Greek dokeö. meaning “to seem.” Jesus only seemed to have a human body; in reality he did not and therefore he only seemed to die on a cross and be raised from the dead. While Marcion spoke of the death of Christ as purchasing the salvation of those who believe, the nature of this death was suspect, since Christ did not have an actual body.

Marcion spoke of Christ’s death in terms of a purchase from the Creator. He acquired those who were not his by means of being put to death by the Creator. The point of Christ’s death, therefore, “was not so much to make possible the forgiveness of sins as to cancel the Creator’s claims upon his creatures.”29 By Christ’s death, believers were freed from the demands of the Creator’s law. While Marcion and many of his followers lived very ascetically, his view of salvation meant the believer “needs no standards of what is moral and no justification for it.”30 Marcion was basically a universalist as to the extent of salvation. Thus Harnack says, “Because the good God intended to redeem sinners, he brought his redemption to the whole of humanity. He knows no partiality for one people but brings a universal redemption.”31 There were two important exceptions, however, to this universalism. First, it was only the soul that was redeemed, not the body. “According to what Marcion taught about matter and the flesh, the decision could not be in doubt for him: only the soul is saved.”32 Marcion thought the flesh contained nothing essential to humanity. Second, those who renounced the Creator by faith in the new God of Jesus Christ were saved, as were those rejected by the Creator in the underworld. According to Marcion, in the underworld there were the Creator’s outcasts as well as his righteous ones. By his descent into that underworld after his death, Christ was said to have freed those who had not surrendered themselves to the Creator’s law, whereas those who had lived according to that law were left unredeemed.33 The consequences of this are utterly astounding: all who had ever lived contrary to God’s law were redeemed by Christ, while those upheld in the Bible as paragons of faith were denied entrance into God’s kingdom.

Salvation will be the attainment only of those souls which had learned his doctrine; while the body, as having been taken from the earth, is incapable of sharing in salvation. In addition to this blasphemy against God Himself, he advanced this also, truly speaking as with the mouth of the devil, and saying all things in direct opposition to the truth,—that Cain, and those like him, and the Sodomites, and the Egyptians, and others like them, and, in fine, all the nations who walked in all sorts of abomination, were saved by the Lord, on His descending into Hades, and on their running unto Him, and that they welcomed Him into their kingdom. But the serpent which was in Marcion declared that Abel, and Enoch, and Noah, and those other righteous men who sprang from the patriarch Abraham, with all the prophets, and those who were pleasing to God, did not partake in salvation.34

The vestiges of such a view of salvation remain today. The Sophia cult’s disdain for the broken body and blood of Jesus demonstrates a quasi-docetic view of Christ, since salvation is not dependent on his actual death on the cross. The insistence by feminists, pro-choicers, and gays that they may do what they want with the body demonstrates the Marcionite view that salvation does not pertain to the body. In developing “with utmost consistency the religion of inwardness,”35 Marcion paved the way for the prevalent view among liberals that religious experience is subject not to the objective norm of Scripture, but is instead validated by personal subjectivity. Having been freed from law through Christ, the Marcionites of today believe they need not fear any judgment by the God of the Old Testament, but instead may exalt a host of deities or reimagine God as they themselves wish. The Marcionite view of salvation as freedom from all divine commands, as an inward experience with no affect on the body, and as universal acceptance regardless of repentance or faith aptly characterizes much of what is called “Christian” today.

Marcion’s View of Scripture

Marcion was a pivotal influence in the development of the New Testament canon. Although some have been so bold as to say, “Marcion is primarily responsible for the idea of the New Testament,”36 this seems overstated. “Much controversy still surrounds the exact role of Marcion in relation to the process.”37 Overall, it seems best to say that the idea of a compilation of New Testament books into a canon, that is, a normative standard of authority (Greek, kanön), was endemic to and patterned after the Church’s acceptance of the Old Testament, which was never in question. The Church’s recognition of Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the promises made in the Old Testament to Israel for a consummate prophet, priest, and king elicited the need to record his teachings and deeds as well as those of his specially authorized representatives, the apostles.

Marcion was the first person known to have published a fixed collection of New Testament books. His understanding of the gospel, however, required that his collection be a truncated version of the New Testament canon. Not only did he reject the Old Testament, but he also maintained that the original apostles had corrupted Jesus’ teaching with a mixture of legalism. Only Paul had truly understood the gospel and for this reason the Pauline epistles were central to Marcion’s New Testament. For Marcion, “the apostles are neither more nor less enlightened than other men, Paul (because of his special revelation) being the only exception.”38 Even Paul’s letters were not without accretions of law, thought Marcion. It was for that reason that he altered even the corpus of ten Pauline letters that he accepted.39 He therefore removed from Paul’s letters anything that appeared to contradict his dualistic system, attributing it to a Judaizing editor. Even the book of Galatians, which Marcion believed provided the strongest case for his perspective and which was thus the first epistle in his New Testament, was beset with purported corruptions which had to be removed, such as the mention of Abraham as the father of all who are justified (Gal. 3:6-9) and the continuity of relationship between law and gospel (Gal. 3:15-25). Marcion’s edition of Romans lacked 1:19-2:1; 3:21-4:25, all of chapters 9-11 except 10:1-4 and 11:33-36, and everything after 14:23. The idea of establishing the law through faith (Rom. 3:31), the importance of Abraham in Romans 4 and the concentration of Old Testament proof-texts in chapters 9-11 were all incompatible with Marcion’s view and so were excised. In addition to his alterations of the text, Marcion also supplied each book with a “prologue” in which he subtly portrayed the character of the book from his vantage point.

Marcion utilized this same method with the only gospel he accepted, Luke. Why he chose Luke is unclear, but it may be that he believed it had some association with Paul.

Marcion’s edition of Luke began with 3:1 and then removed all the subsequent material relating to John the Baptist’s ministry and his baptism of Jesus, the genealogy of 3:23-38 tracing Jesus’ ancestry back to Adam and through Abraham and David, and the temptation narrative (4:1-13), since they demonstrated the continuity and validity of the Old Testament. Since Marcion could not tolerate the idea of Jesus preaching in a synagogue that he was the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy (4:16-30), Marcion removed this as well. Thus, Marcion’s edition of Luke began with our 3:1 and then continued with 4:31, with alterations he deemed necessary continuing thereafter.40 There can be little question that Marcion’s early foray into textual criticism was driven by hermeneutical interests sustaining his dualistic views. Some have thus questioned his honesty in artificially joining sentences which in the text lay far apart in order to bring out an entirely different idea and frequently turning an idea into its exact opposite by the addition or subtraction of syllables or words. “We should not take it amiss in those who stood nearer to Marcion when under the impact of his spiritual significance they were more doubtful of his honesty than of his rationality and therefore more often accused him of audacious forgery than of fanatical blindness.”41 Commentators on Marcion often mention the continuing discomfort of some in the Church with the Old Testament. The Lutheran pastor Hemchand Gossai has well said that the church is content with simply having the Old Testament “being there” without having it form the basis for the teaching of the New Testament. “The Old Testament is not seen to be the Word of God,” and “where this is the perception of the minister, it is inevitably transmitted to the laity.”42 The result is a theology that is bereft of its firm foundation, with leaders who do not know the basis for the faith. Though they may pay lip-service to the canonical authority of the Old and New Testaments, the reality is they have discounted those portions that do not suit their preconceived notion of what God and the gospel ought to be.

The totality of Scripture is not viewed as authoritative by many who exercise leadership in the Presbyterian Church. All who are ordained in the church affirm “the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church universal, and God’s Word” (G-14.0207b., 14.0405b.[2]). Notwithstanding, the “Call to Covenant Community,” issued by the Covenant Network of Amendment A promoters and supported by Presbyterians for Lesbian and Gay Concerns, Voices of Sophia, and other liberal “inclusivists,” speaks of “the process of discerning God’s Word in the words of scripture.” This is implicitly the Marcionite procedure, which denies as authoritative and canonical that which fails to support one’s theological or ethical predispositions. Every confession in the Book of Confessions says that Old and New Testaments in their entirety are the unique and authoritative written Word of God and as such are the only rule of faith and practice.

We believe and confess the canonical Scriptures of the holy prophets and apostles of both Testaments to be the Word of God, and to have sufficient authority of themselves, not of men. For God himself spoke to the fathers, prophets apostles, and still speaks to us through the Holy Scriptures.

And in this Holy Scripture, the universal Church of Christ has the most complete exposition of all that pertains to a saving faith, and also to the framing of a life acceptable to God; and in this respect it is expressly commanded by God that nothing be either addressed to or taken from the same.43

Moreover, while the “Call to Covenant Community” acknowledges the importance of “the faithful reading of the Bible by those who seek the Holy Spirit,” one cannot help but wonder how their “faithful reading” can be so at odds with those by whom the Holy Spirit has spoken throughout church history in the formulation of the confessions and ethical stance of the church and who continue to uphold those fundamentals yet today. It is hard to avoid the impression that the “process of discerning God’s Word in the words of scripture” is being driven by hermeneutical interests in opposition to the Holy Spirit’s voice in the church throughout history and yet today. Indeed, the way Scripture is treated by proponents of alternative lifestyles in the church is often a travesty. What is worse, that methodology is carried out with greater subtlety than Marcion’s more flagrant excision of whole portions of Scripture. Thus, Gossai rightly says, “what we face in the church today, with respect to the value and use of the Old Testament is decidedly more dangerous than Marcion’s design,” since today “the indifference to the value and relevance of the Old Testament leads to the interpretation of the New Testament in a vacuous state.”44 The danger is that people will embrace the views of God, the gospel, and Scripture for which Marcion was rightly condemned.

Conclusion

The church today is infected with vestiges of an ancient and very subtle disease, the heresy of Marcionism. God is viewed by many as accepting all people and as tolerating all evil. He is, therefore, not feared, but instead is invoked through the name of Christ by a host of political operatives in the service of other deities, resulting in the leading astray of many. The gospel is viewed apart from law, grace apart from sin, faith apart from repentance, and Christ apart from his bodily nature. He who came to save and transform the entire person and the whole of culture for his glory is reduced to a subjective idea of acceptance. Finally, Scripture is viewed as bearing witness to God by the Marcionite method of abandoning the Old Testament and all portions of the New Testament that do not agree with a God of complete acceptance.

Just as Marcion “might have been teaching for years without being recognized as a false teacher,”45 there are those in the church today who have been teaching for many years without having their false teaching exposed. While they may view their work of changing the church’s historic teaching as “evangelism,”46 they are leading people astray. “Far from segregating themselves, sectlike, from the great church, the Marcionites constantly sought to exert a missionary influence upon that church and to absorb the whole of Christendom.”47 May the God of orthodoxy preserve his church from the problem of Marcion.

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 4, No. 5 (Sep/Oct 1998).