Tertullian, Against Marcion 13

Since the pamphlet is being dismantled, I must briefly revisit the arguments that crop up again and simply pass over those that have surfaced repeatedly. I am sick of still contending about the law; I have proved time and again that its concession supplies no argument for a different God in Christ — specifically, the Christ preached and promised to the Creator — especially since this very epistle appears to exclude the law almost entirely. Yet we have also shown repeatedly that the apostle carries God around as judge, and in that judge the avenger and the Creator are one in the avenger.

So here too, when he says, "For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, Jew and Greek alike, because the justice of God is revealed in it from faith to faith" (Rom 1:16-17), he undoubtedly assigns both gospel and salvation to the just God, not the "good" one — to put it in the heretic's own terms — transferring from the faith of the law to the faith of the gospel, His own law and His own gospel, since he also declares that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against the impiety and injustice of men who suppress the truth in injustice. Whose wrath? The Creator's, of course. Therefore the truth also belongs to the One whose wrath it is, a wrath slated to be revealed for the vindication of that truth.

He adds: "We know that the judgment of God is according to truth" (Rom 2:2), and he has validated that wrath, from which judgment comes for the truth, and he has confirmed the truth of the same God whose wrath he validated by validating the judgment. It would be a different matter if the Creator in anger were avenging the truth of another God suppressed in injustice. But the ditches Marcion has dug in this epistle — rather, the supreme epistle — by cutting out whatever he pleased, will be exposed by the integrity of our text. It suffices for me that he did not see fit to excise the passages I cite as evidence of his negligence and blindness.

If God judges the hidden things of men — both those who sinned under the law and those who sinned without it — since even the latter, though ignorant of the law, do by nature what the law requires, then that God will judge whose law and nature they are, a nature that serves as a likeness of the law for those who do not know the law. And how will He judge? "According to the gospel, through Christ" (Rom 2:16). Therefore both the gospel and Christ belong to the same God whose law and nature will be vindicated by that God through the gospel and Christ in the judgment spoken of above: "according to truth."

Just as the wrath revealed from heaven can come only from the God of wrath, so this interpretation, cohering with the earlier one in which the Creator's judgment is proclaimed, cannot be transferred to another God who neither judges nor grows angry, but must belong to the One whose judgment and wrath these are, and necessarily also the gospel and Christ, through whom these transactions take place.

That is why he launches an attack on transgressors of the law who teach "do not steal" yet steal — acting as a man of God's law, not as the Creator Himself being touched in these ways, since the One who forbade stealing commanded fraud against the Egyptians for gold and silver, just as other passages are twisted against Him. Clearly the apostle feared to make a public reproach against the God from whom he did not fear to turn away. Yet he pressed the Jews so hard that he inserted a prophetic rebuke: "Because of you the name of God is blasphemed" (Rom 2:24). How perverse, then, that he himself would blaspheme the very One whose blasphemy he denounces in the wicked!

He also prefers circumcision of the heart to circumcision of the flesh. But with God circumcision of the heart, not the flesh, has been effected — by the Spirit, not the letter. If this is the circumcision of Jeremiah — "Circumcise the foreskins of your hearts" (Jer 4:4) — and of Moses — "Circumcise your hardened hearts" (Deut 10:16) — then the Spirit who circumcises the heart belongs to the same God whose letter cuts the flesh, and whose Jew is both the hidden one and the open one, because the apostle would not have named the Jew if he were not serving the God of the Jews.

"Once the law, now the justice of God through the faith of Christ" (Rom 3:21-22). What is this distinction? Did your God serve the Creator's arrangement, giving Him time and His law? Or the One who was then and is now? Whose law, and whose faith of Christ? The distinction is one of arrangements, not of gods. He warns those justified by the faith of Christ to have peace with God (Rom 5:1). With which God? The one whose enemies we never were, or the one whose law and nature we rebelled against? For if peace is offered to the One with whom there was war, we will be justified to Him; and Christ will be His, through whose faith we are justified, to whose peace it belongs that His enemies be subdued.

"The law entered so that the trespass might abound" (Rom 5:20). Why? "So that grace might abound all the more" (Rom 5:20). Whose God's grace, if not the One whose law it also is? Unless the Creator inserted the law to procure an occasion for the grace of another God — and a rival at that, not to say an unknown one — so that just as sin reigned in death, so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ (Rom 5:21) with His own adversary. For this reason the Creator's law shut up everything under sin and brought the whole world under guilt and stopped every mouth, so that no one might boast through it, so that grace might be preserved for the glory of Christ — not the Creator's Christ, but Marcion's!

I can even establish the substance of Christ here from the prospect of the coming question. For he says: "We have died to the law through the body of Christ" (Rom 7:4). Therefore Christ has a body. One may dispute whether it is a body, not immediately flesh! But whatever its substance, since he calls it a body and subjects it to having risen from the dead, no other body can be understood than one of flesh, in which the law of death is spoken. Yet he also bears witness to the law and excuses its cause: "What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means!" (Rom 7:7). I abhor it, Marcion — by no means! — the apostle abominating the accusation against the law: "I would not have known sin except through the law" (Rom 7:7). O supreme praise of the law, that through it sin was not allowed to hide! Therefore it is not the law that deceived, but sin through the occasion of the commandment. What do you impute to God's law, which the apostle dare not impute? And yet he piles on: "The law is holy, and the commandment is just and good" (Rom 7:12). If he venerates the Creator's law in this way, I do not know how he destroys it. Who distinguishes two gods, one just and the other good, when one must believe that the commandment of the one God is both good and just? But if he also confirms the spiritual law, then certainly the prophetic, certainly the figurative. I must therefore establish Christ as having been prefigured in the law, so that He could be recognized by all the Jews.