|
Tuesday, 21 November 2006 14:39 |
 | | Marc Mullinax |
"I will divide your Church and cause within her a division, which will last forever."
ÇƒÏ Marcion (circa 140 A.D.)
ï
MARS HILL ÇƒÓ A favorite New Yorker cartoon has a heavenly messenger arriving in Godës heavenly office suite. Because he bears potentially negative news, he queries Godës secretary, "Is he the God of the Old Testament or the New Testament today?"
We get this. Weëve said as much. Why we believe it is where Iëd like to go this week. May I assume that many believe it, and may I pose the challenge early-on, that if one does, itës anti-Semitic?
Itës an understandable mis-taking of the character of God. For it separates God into two epochs, with different characters, aims, chosen peoples, messiahs and scriptures.
As
history, the "God of the Old Testament" formally began just a century
after Christës death on the cross. Marcion was a deposed bishop of the
church who wanted to form another kind of Christianity. His version
included:
A Christian
faith unalloyed with Judaism; only the New Testament was true, and its
covenant with a Jewish messiah could, ironically, stand alone without
Jewish background or intellectual/faith support.
The God depicted
in the "Old" Covenant/Testament was too crude, cruel, despotic and
judging to be the father of Jesus Christ. He could be a Creator God,
but not the Saving God. This cruel God is a demiurge, or secondary
deity.
Jews may have their Messiah, but he would be in no way related to the Christ of Christians.
The Old
Testament, at best, is "preparatio evangelica," an appetizer for the
main course: Christianity. Jews, however well-intentioned, are
incomplete and deluded believers.
In matters of
salvation, only Paul got it right. There had to be a complete reliance
upon grace. "Grace" developed and grew into the accepted gospel of
Christ, a salvation totally independent of goodness, morality and
actions.
Marcion was
denounced by many Christian writers as a heretic, but his influence
remains. His spirit lives still today. (Warning: Controversial
statements ahead!)
If you have a "Bible" that is only the New Testament (with perhaps the Psalms), then do you have a heretical Bible?
If you have an
intrinsic opposition to the Old Testament and nurse the sense that the
Old Testament has been supplanted by the New such that the Old equates
to being out of date, then are you a "heretic-in-spirit" in the Marcion
sense?
Even if the pages of the Hebrew scriptures in your full Bible are mostly unread, could there be a problem?
There is no "God
of the Old Testament" distinct from the God of Jesus. The "Bible" that
Jesus read and in which he found his portraits of God was the Old
Testament, which speaks in many places of a God of love, with
ultra-marathon endurance in demonstrating that love. To say otherwise
is to participate in one of the earliest, and most abiding of heresies.
Some Christians
allow Marcionism to live again when they teach bi-theism: there was an
Old Testament God who has been superseded by the New. Nothing of any
real salvific value resides in the Jewish tradition before Jesus (who
died a Jew, not a Christian).
Others resurrect
Marcionës bitheistic heressy when they emphasize "mal-theism," that the
God of the Old Testament is blood-thirsty, vindictive and petty. One
can find such in those writings, but these are much more easily
recalled than the many-more words about Godës relentless love.
To read half a
Bible, or to divorce Christianity and its thought from Jewish
environments, can only be explained as anti-Semitism, however latent or
blatant it may be. Marcion thought he was doing faith a favor. Do we
still?
ï
Dr. Marc S.
Mullinax, chairman of the philosophy and religion departments at Mars
Hill College, can be reached at mmullinax-at-mhc.edu.
|
