Thursday, February 17, 2011

The Return of Marcion

OK, not exactly. But there certainly are parallels between what Marcion did back in the second century and what is done by many today. (One of the reasons I find the second century so fascinating is the connections that can be seen between the way Christians interacted with their culture then and the way we need to interact with our culture now.) Marcion, who ended up labelled as a heretic, would actually fit well in some seminaries of the 21st century.

Marcion is of course best known for his attempt to produce a canon of Scripture that fit what he saw as the truth. He found the concept of God in the Old Testament and that of God in the New as incompatible. In order to salvage Christianity, Marcion had to reshape the Bible. While the New Testament books were circulating at that time, the Old Testament was still the primary Scriptures of the church. To Marcion, this was unacceptable, and he set about to "correct" this.

First, he totally rejected the Old Testament. In doing so, he had to propose another source as the definitive Scriptures of the church. He took Luke, the gospel most closely associated with Paul (and, perhaps not coincidentally, written by a Gentile), and ten of Paul's epistles as his canon. Even these books required editing to remove their Jewish elements. Each of these books was already circulating in the church, and were widely accepted (in their original form).

This situation was untenable to the orthodox church, and the formalization of the accepted canon of Scriptures began to take place. Although a final canon would not be definitively established for another 200 years or so, the New Testament as we have it today was largely accepted as canonical shortly after Marcion's time, and it was given equal status with the Old Testament as God's Word.

So how does this match what we see today? There are many who still attempt to create a canon of Scripture for themselves from what has been the Bible of the church. This generally involves the rejection of certain passages or even books whose teachings the modern churchgoer wants to ignore. While they may not go to the extreme of removing these passages physically, they effectively "de-canonize" certain Scriptures by refusing to acknowledge them as authoritative for us today. In doing so, they make for themselves a Bible that teaches what they want it to teach, and lines up nicely with what our society and culture teach as well.

There are also those who still teach that the God of the OT and the God of the NT are radically different. Rather than moving in a Gnostic direction, as Marcion did, contemporary "splitters" speak in evolutionary terms of the development of religion, and of the progress of faith from primitive superstition to ethical purity. The net effect is the same, however; Jesus is given a makeover into a 21st century teacher of ethics and love far removed from the real picture we have of Him in the Bible, and God is removed from His throne and placed outside of our experience.

My opinions, of course, are not those of allegedly "mainstream" Christian scholarship. I admit that I am often suspicious of scholarship that finds that what is in the Bible and what a society teaches happen to line up perfectly. This isn't just a function of our era; this has happened many times throughout the history of the church, even back in its earliest days. I think that the hard work of studying the Bible and working out not only its meaning but its application for today provides a much more rewarding and challenging experience than finding ways to make the Bible match what we already believe. The difficulty is, of course, in acknowledging that God is indeed on His throne, and that what we find may require us to change our lives to be more like Him.

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