Discussion 13: Marcionism

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Richard

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HERESY SERIES: PART 4

[Click here for the companion YouTube video]

QUESTION: Does is ever seem like God in the Old Testament sometimes exerts His wrath disproportionately? Consider Passover, where God goes from house to house, systematically killing the firstborn of all non-Jewish children. Does this seem to be something that the loving and forgiving God of the New Testament would do?

MARCION OF SINOPE. Somewhere between 85 and 110, Marcion was born as the son of a Bishop. He was raised in Sinope, Pontus, which was the most important Greek commercial city on the south shore of the Black Sea. Marcion came to believe that the God of the OT and the God of the NT were different Gods. The God of the OT was a lesser creator God (Yahweh or the Demiurge) who is primarily concerned with legalism, justice, and retribution. The Redeemer God of the NT is the supreme God and is primarily concerned with love, forgiveness, and redemption. Marcion traveled to Rome to present his theology to church officials and was summarily excommunicated. Undeterred, Marcion started his own church and developed the first semblance of a NT consisting of a modified gospel of Luke and ten Pauline epistles. The Marcion church rivaled the orthodox church for several hundred years. The following reading is from a journal article by Gabriel Andrade that describes the theology of Marcion.

READING: There is not one God, but rather two Gods. The first God, frequently called Yahweh, but called the Demiurge by Gnostics, is the creator of the material world. This world is intrinsically evil, as all matter is corrupt, according to Marcionite doctrine. Yahweh, whose actions are described in Jewish scriptures, is not absolutely evil, as opposed to, say, Satan. Yahweh is above all a legalistic, rigorous and severe God, willing to punish sins with violence. In the Marcionite understanding, this rigor, although well-meaning, eventually leads to evil, as the deity winds up far from the elevated concepts of love and forgiveness. The counterpart to Yahweh is a good God, wholly spiritual and totally disconnected from the corrupted matter created by Yahweh. This God sent Christ, a wholly spiritual and nonmaterial being, to teach human beings the path to escape from the material world created by Yahweh, and whose death atoned for the sins of humanity. [Gabriel Andrade, “Marcion of Sinope’s Relevance in the Contemporary World Vis-à-Vis Religious Violence,” Acta Theologica, 38-2, 2018: 18-19]

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4 responses to “Discussion 13: Marcionism”

  1. Kraig Stanforth Avatar
    Kraig Stanforth

    This theology of Marcion is much present today although not well thought out by the erroneous view that love and wrath are polar opposites. Marcion saw in his own culture the polytheism that had “good” gods and bad gods and this was to reconcile the existence of evil in the world in an all omnipotent loving God – therefore there must be two Gods. This is close to the idea of some views today that God must have evolved – he was this angry teenager god in the OT and then matured into this loving parent god in Jesus. How did Marcion incorporated the idea of God the Redeemer without the view of God’s wrath on sin is puzzeling. How was the price paid? …..the God of Wrath was somehow satisfied by punishing the loving God on the cross? The question remains: what is the source of this god’s anger? To Marcion it had to generate from within this god himself before the world was created? Bad theology begets bad conclusions. The Biblical view is that God’s anger is focused on the sin – sin and evil are the source of God’s wrath. God can love the sinner but hate the sin. Wrath and love – are mingled as the lion lays down with the lamb. The crucification of Christ is the crossroads of where the wrath and love of God are displayed.

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    1. Richard Avatar
      Richard

      Kraig – thanks for the great thoughts on Marcion and his “bad theology and bad conclusions.” This said, there are (I feel), some difficult things about the OT and its representation of some of God’s actions. Consider Exodus 34:6-7, “Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in faithfulness and truth; who keeps faithfulness for thousands, who forgives wrongdoing, violation of His Law, and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, inflicting the punishment of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.” It is hard for me to understand how it is just (and God is just) to inflict the punishment of fathers onto future generations.

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  2. Nicholas Villarreal Avatar
    Nicholas Villarreal

    Apologies that I didn’t get a response posted sooner than this. You already brought up in the YouTube video what I had originally intended to present – Richard Dawkins’ flawed understanding of the Old Testament God as somehow being separate from the New Testament God echoing Marcion. If an atheist can come to the same conclusion as a theist about their interpretation of a text, something is truly wrong with the theist’s understanding.

    As a further examination of that wouldn’t add anything, I will say that I appreciate the clarification of Marcionism that I don’t believe that I’ve ever fully explored. I was aware that Marcion had rejected the Old Testament, and essentially all Jewish writings, as not belonging to the Christian faith. For some reason, I had been led to believe that he did this specifically because the larger Jewish population had rejected Jesus as the Messiah. The logic that I was given was that if the Hebrew Scriptures and the Jewish disciples were from a people who did not accept Jesus as Savior, what these Israelites and Jews wrote could have no bearing on the Christian faith. I was unaware that Marcion took it so much drastically further, to the conclusion that the Creator God of the Jews and the Saving God of the Christians had to be separate deities if the people following the God of the Old Testament rejected the Savior proclaimed in the New Testament.

    Part of me suspects that what Marcion was actually doing in his rejection of the Old Testament was doing away with Scripture that could effectively contradict his doctrine. When one reads certain Old Testament prophecies, they clearly point to Jesus – but then that would beg the question as to why a God of Wrath and Judgment would send his messengers to provide ways to confirm the Chosen One of the God of Salvation and Grace. An actual reading of the Old Testament shows that the judgment from generation to generation was because the generations leading up to God’s judgment showed that they would never turn away from their evil, idolatrous, and/or depraved practices. To call wrong or unjustified the putting a permanent end to the promulgation of the approval and performance of evil deliberately misunderstands how God reveals his divine attributes in the Hebrew Scriptures. Marcion’s theology falls apart specifically because its entire basis is formed on a false premise; I imagine that he didn’t want his followers discovering that fact.

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    1. Richard Avatar
      Richard

      Thanks for the great thoughts, Nick. I agree with you, but still have a hard time with some of the OT representations of God’s actions, such as cursing future generations and things like the Passover killing of children. I tend to find the OT as more allegorical the further in time you go back, and I think that this helps me a bit.

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