by CCW | 6 December 2016 22:00
Advent is the season of watching and waiting. In our Advent meditations we are watching and waiting upon the meaning of Revelation as the counter to Gnosticism which underlies two of the earliest heresies – false teachings – of the early Church, Docetism and Marcionism. Last week[1] we considered Docetism which is an explicit denial of the Incarnation because of its gnostic dualism which regards the material and physical world as something intrinsically evil as opposed to and distinct from the spiritual which is good. Thus redemption can only be a flight from the physical and the material. All of the accounts of Christ’s birth and crucifixion are subsequently regarded as fiction, as mere appearance, a kind of seeming, hence the word, docetism, from the Greek meaning to seem to be or appear.
The most explicit counter to Docetism in the New Testament is found in the Gospel of St. John in the idea of “the Word was made flesh” which is the great Christmas Gospel and in his first Epistle in such things as “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life” which echoes and affirms the Christmas Gospel and which is read in the Christmas holy days on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist (Dec. 27th). This suggests something of the importance of the writings of John in the formation of the canon of the New Testament, the coming to be of the collection of gospels, letters, and other writings such as Acts and Revelation that comprise the Christian Scriptures but always, interestingly enough, in tandem with the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures.
Paradoxically, Mariconism is actually the first canon of Scripture, the first attempt to say what Scriptures should be included and read and which ones should not. This is where our attention turns to the idea of Revelation and to the necessity of thinking about what we read and how we read. Marcion was a figure from the second century, c. 144 AD, who looked at the writings of the Jewish Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, as well as at many of the writings of what would come to be part of the New Testament. Some things he liked, other things he didn’t. What he didn’t like he simply threw out. What he liked he kept in. Upon what basis? That is the interesting question, an important question.
The paradox is that the first canon of Scripture is an heretical canon. It is not too much to say that Marcion’s views forced the early Christian communities to think more closely and clearly about the Christian faith in terms of Scripture and Creed which in turn define the esse or being of the Church. For Marcion, Jesus is Saviour, but what kind of Saviour? Well, he is a gnostic saviour, one who frees us from the tyranny of the angry vengeful God of the Old Testament in Marcion’s view. He presents us with a dualist belief system and one which has a long pedigree and history largely based upon the complete separation between the ‘vengeful God’ of the Old Testament and the ‘love God’ of the New Testament. That separation, I suspect, is one which is familiar to many of you.
Certainly it is the basis of some of the so-called ‘New Atheists’, like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. God is Not Great is the title of one of Hitchens’ books, a deliberate slam on Islam but which extends to Jew and Christian alike. And as Dawkins puts it, there is a no more despicable figure than the God of the Old Testament which, of course, means, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks pointed out to Dawkins, that he is “a Christian atheist”, a point which Dawkins did not particularly appreciate but which remains undeniably true. In a way, though, both Hitchens and Dawkins follow some of the same thinking as Marcion. The God of the Old Testament is viewed as a vengeful and vindictive ogre, a kind of tyrant, and that idea of God never fully goes away even in the New Testament and appears in the Qur’an or at least in some of the Salafist Islamic communities.
Like Marcion, Hitchens and Dawkins utterly reject the Hebrew Bible because of how they view the God of Israel. But Marcion did not simply deny the existence of the Old Testament God, rather he posits two principles, the God of the Old Testament – a God of evil – and the God of the New Testament – the good God. Two separate principles. This is the gnostic understanding of reality which reifies evil in a way, making evil more of a principle or a thing in itself rather than being the privation or perversion of the good which is always prior. It means, of course, that Jesus the Saviour is not and cannot be a Jewish Messiah. Thus while Marcion rejects the Hebrew Scriptures, he also throws out great chunks of the Christian Scriptures precisely because of the presence of Jewish ideas and concepts. The Scriptures are reduced to something quite small, not unlike the Qur’an. It consists of parts of St. Luke and ten epistles of Paul. For Marcion, Paul is the chief apostle, not altogether unlike the view of many evangelicals where Pauline theology is all and wittingly or unwittingly distinct and even opposed to Johannine theology. We are left with distinct and opposing views of Scripture and theology.
What is intriguing and important is that Marcionism served to highlight a critical principle for the development of the Christian faith, namely, the theological idea of God which in turn orders the Scriptures and the Church in terms of what the Scriptures are and what the Church is. Thinking the God of the Old Testament as a lesser and evil God and the God of the New Testament as a good and greater God leaves us with a complete separation between the Old and New Testaments and contorts the understanding of Jesus as Saviour. It is this aspect of Marcionism that sparked debate and controversy and, ultimately, led to the rejection of Marcionism. It impelled the subsequent movement towards the establishment of the Canon of the Scriptures and the definition of the essentials of the Christian faith encapsulated in the great Catholic creeds.
That there is scholarly debate about Marcion as a gnostic is hardly surprising given the fluid and loose nature of Gnosticism which has a wide range of expression. While Marcion, it seems, would have had no truck with the wilder forms of gnostic speculations and some of its mythic structure, his approach nonetheless remains more or less within the basic orbit of gnostic thought. There are, we might say, many degrees of Gnosticism, past, present and future.
Like all heresies, it never really goes away. It has its resurgence in modern times, both in the Enlightenment and in some contemporary approaches to the reading of the Scriptures. In the Enlightenment, for example, Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, took a kind of Marcionite approach to the New Testament by cutting out all references to the miracles and acts of Christ and leaving the moral teachings as somehow independent and separate from the mystical and miraculous elements. Aspects of Marcionism appear in many ecclesial communities today where the Old Testament is significantly overlooked or where certain passages are ignored and kept firmly out of the realm of public worship.
This is not to say that there aren’t many, many difficult and challenging passages of Scripture. There are but the ‘when in doubt cut it out’ kind of approach does not do justice to the concept of Revelation, to Paul’s notion that “whatsoever was written aforetime was written for our learning”. “How do you read?” Jesus asks this question to the questioning lawyer and the question leads to how we act and live and have our being by way of the parable of the Good Samaritan. It will not do to cherry-pick the Scriptures, reading only what pleases us but even there, upon what basis? No. The greater danger lies in taking a dualistic approach such as Marcion does with respect to the idea of God. It is too easy and too easily misleading to portray the God of the Old Testament as a vengeful and wrathful God and to portray the God of the New Testament in completely contrary terms. This does no justice to the integrity of the Old or the New Testaments. The Scriptural viewpoint and witness is much richer than anything so limited and dualistic.
More importantly, Marcionism is intellectually unsustainable and theologically unsatisfactory in terms of the idea of God. And perhaps that is where we ultimately need to begin. Taking scissors to the Scriptures is not the way to go. Our watching and our waiting upon the Revelation of God is something intellectually and spiritually active. It is about thinking through and making sense of the manifold images for God and for the nature of the divine engagement with our humanity ultimately realised in Jesus Christ. He cannot be understood or thought about apart from the Jewish story (or apart from Greek thought) and that is made abundantly clear in all of the Gospels and in the Creeds. “He that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity” as the Athanasian Creed puts it, thinking about God through the figure of Jesus Christ, true God and true man, the one whose wrath is nothing less than the love of his own righteousness through which he seeks our good.
Ultimately, it would be more thoughtful theologians like Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Irenaeus and Athanasius, for instance, who worked through the kind of problematic raised by Marcion. The Canon of Scripture, the Creeds, and the nature of the catholic Church all begin to take shape concurrently, arising out of the cauldron of controversy and out of a kind of confusion. But are they simply about who has the most power? About who shouts the most or the loudest? Or are they about truth and goodness and about transcending the easy, all too easy, dualisms of our own world and day?
The development of the Canon, the Creeds and the Church belong to our active engagement with the Scriptures in the tradition of the Church where such things are passed on and thought through. Tonight we commemorate St. Nicolas of Myra in what is modern day Turkey, a fourth century figure who in many distortions and guises contributes to the figure of Santa Claus in part on account of his giving gifts. But to think of the traditions of St. Nicolas in whatever form of Santa Claus independently of the Scriptures would be a great mistake. “Love is the great gift through which all other gifts are given”, as Thomas Aquinas notes. That love is incarnate in Jesus Christ, the one in whom the love of God and the love of man are fulfilled. We can make little sense of anything in the New Testament without reference and engagement with the Old Testament. A dualist view leaves things in a simple, untenable and meaningless opposition. It is ultimately a static view of reality that denies the real force and idea of the living God who engages our humanity in all of our sinful disarray but whose love transforms and redeems, sanctifies and saves.
Through Marcion’s dualism, the Christian Church came to define itself more dynamically and more completely. It meant engaging the complexities of the Scriptures and the confusions of human experience more thoroughly but as seen through the eyes of God, as it were. There is a unity to the Scriptures. It is found in a deeper and profounder understanding of the spiritual reality of God, the God who seeks the redemption of our humanity and the world. Our task is to be watching and waiting upon the motions of God’s word coming to us, letting that Word in all of its fullness take shape within us. That is surely one of the great gifts of the Advent.
Fr. David Curry
Comm. of St. Nicolas
December 6th, 2016
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