Theopedia

Marcionism

Definition

Marcionism is the teaching that the God of the Old Testament is not the same as, and is inferior to, the God revealed by Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Named for Marcion, the mid-second-century teacher who first proposed it, the position rejects the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, restricts the Christian canon to an edited Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul’s letters, and holds that Christ did not truly take on human flesh.1 The church at Rome excommunicated Marcion for this teaching in AD 144.1

Historical Origin

Marcion’s activity can be dated with some precision: the church at Rome excommunicated him in AD 144 for his teaching, after which he formed a rival group of his own.1 His central argument was that the church could not rightly go on using the Hebrew Scriptures, since these, he held, were addressed only to the Jewish people; he taught that Jesus was not the Messiah sent by the God of the Old Testament but the son of a God previously unknown, first revealed in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, the date Luke’s Gospel gives for Jesus’s baptism (Luke 3:1).1 Having set aside the Hebrew Scriptures, Marcion drew up his own list of writings to serve in their place: the Gospel of Luke, edited by removing material on Jesus’s birth and much of his teaching, and ten of Paul’s letters, also edited in places.1

The wider church rejected Marcion’s position on three counts. First, and foremost, it would not set aside the Hebrew Scriptures, which had constituted the whole of Christian Scripture from the beginning and remained, in Ronald Heine’s words, “the highest written authority recognized in the church.”1 Second, where Marcion recognized only one Gospel, the wider church would insist, within a few years of his excommunication, that there were four, no more and no fewer.1 Third, where Marcion recognized the teaching of only one apostle, the church recognized at least three: Matthew, John, and Paul, and, with them, Peter.1 Heine is careful to say it would be too much to claim Marcion’s own teaching caused the church to draw up its list of accepted writings, but he “must… have caused the church to think seriously about the growing need for such a list.”1 Michael Kruger reports a similarly measured verdict from Bruce Metzger: Marcion’s canon merely “accelerat[ed] the process of fixing the Church’s canon, a process that had already begun in the first half of the second century.”2

Core Tenets

An inferior Creator God

Marcion’s premise, that the God of the Old Testament could not be the true God, made him what Michael Kruger calls the paradigm case of a “quasi-gnostic” reading of the Christian faith: one in which the Creator is downgraded to a “demiurge,” a lesser being distinct from the true God revealed in Christ.3 As Ben Witherington puts it, in a passage Kruger quotes, this kind of move “was a non-starter from the outset because it rejected the very book the earliest Christians recognized as authoritative,” namely the Old Testament.3 Herman Bavinck describes the same move in Marcion’s own terms: he “separated the God of the Old Testament from the God of the New,” and even within the New Testament turned Paul’s own law/gospel and flesh/spirit contrasts into a tool for driving a wedge between Scripture and Scripture.4 John Gill answers the underlying claim: goodness, he argues, is essential to God’s own nature, not a separable attribute he might lack in one dispensation and possess in another, so that “the evil god of Cerdon and Marcion is not the true God.”5

A Christ without a true body

Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament’s Creator carried over into his account of Christ. John Calvin engages Marcion directly in his discussion of Christ’s human nature: “Marcion imagines that Christ, instead of a body, assumed a phantom, because it is elsewhere said, that he was made in the likeness of man, and found in fashion as a man.”6 This is the same family of error Augustus Hopkins Strong later names “the Docetic denial of Christ’s veritable human body.”7

Confessional and Biblical Response

The 1689 London Baptist Confession answers Marcionism on both of its core claims. Against the rejection of the Old Testament, the confession states that “under the name of Holy Scripture, or the Word of God written, are now contained all the books of the Old and New Testaments,” naming both in full as one body of Scripture, not two competing ones.8 Bavinck presses the biblical case directly: “the gnostic and Marcionite disjunction between the Old Testament God of wrath and vengeance and the New Testament God of love and mercy is unknown to Scripture.” The Old Testament’s own Yahweh Elohim, he writes, “though just, holy, zealous for his honor, and full of ire against sin, is also gracious, merciful, eager to forgive, and abounding in steadfast love” (Exod. 20:5-6; 34:6-7; Deut. 4:31; Ps. 86:15).9

Against the denial of Christ’s true humanity, the confession states that in the incarnation “two whole, perfect, and distinct natures were inseparably joined together in one person… which person is very God and very man.”10 Calvin answers Marcion’s phantom-body claim on exegetical grounds, arguing it misreads Paul’s actual point in Philippians 2:7, which describes not what kind of body Christ had but the humility with which he set aside the outward display of his divine glory; Calvin appeals in turn to 1 Peter 3:18 (“put to death in the flesh”) and 2 Corinthians 13:4 (“crucified through weakness”) as texts that hold only if Christ genuinely took on the weakness of human nature, not a mere appearance of one.6

Modern Forms

Bavinck saw Marcion’s own move, of setting God’s goodness against his justice, recurring well beyond the second century. Discussing the church’s teaching on eternal punishment, he writes that arguing from God’s goodness against eternal punishment, “in the manner of Marcion, secretly introduces a conflict between God’s justice and his goodness and offers up the former to the latter,” a move he attributes to “modern theologians” of his own day, not only to Marcion’s ancient followers.11 Elsewhere he groups Marcion with “the Gnostics… and modern theologians who only see God as love and draw sharp divisions between law and gospel, the God of wrath and the God of grace.”12

A more specific modern connection appears in Michael Kruger’s discussion of scholars who treat early Christianity as hostile to written texts. Kruger reports Francis Watson’s assessment that Rudolf Bultmann’s and Friedrich Schleiermacher’s insistence that religion is known only through immediate spiritual experience, not texts, amounts to “actually a neo-Marcionite rejection of Judaism”: “Textuality is identified with Jewishness, the letter that kills by corrupting the original purity of the gospel; and neo-Marcionism proposes to cleanse theology and church from the defilement of the Jewish letter.”13

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 2, “Christian Scripture,” 18-20. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9

  2. Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), chap. 5, “The Date of Canon.” ↩

  3. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 4, “The Divine Qualities of the Canon.” ↩ ↩2

  4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 5, “Holy Scripture.” ↩

  5. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book I, chap. 16, “Of the Goodness of God.” ↩

  6. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), bk. 2, chap. 13, sec. 2, 410. ↩ ↩2

  7. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 681. ↩

  8. Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 2. ↩

  9. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 15, “The Servant Savior: Christ’s Humiliation.” ↩

  10. Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 2. ↩

  11. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 25, “The Consummation.” ↩

  12. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God.” ↩

  13. Francis Watson, Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), quoted in Kruger, The Question of Canon, chap. 3, “The Writing of Canon.” ↩