The Laws That Were Not Good
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For the children of Israel shall dwell many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or teraphim. Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king; and they shall come in fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days.
— Hosea 3:4–5
Giving the Devil His Due
Whatever Marcion might say, the Church never has put her faith in a God stormy, emotional, vindictive, bloodthirsty, petty, pitiless, or changeable — nor, really, did the Old Testament saints. Though both Testaments do frequently employ anthropomorphic imagery, both warn us as well not to take such devices literally. The Epistle of St. James, for instance, tells us that in God “there is no change nor shadow of alteration” (James 1:17, Douay-Rheims) — no chance, that is, of His being caught off guard or changing His mind based on altered circumstance. The psalmist, likewise, asserts that while both heavens and earth will perish, “thou dost endure . . . they pass away; but thou art the same, and thy years have no end” (Ps. 102:26–27). God is not only immutable then, but impassible as well; incapable of suffering change or diminishment of any kind, subject neither to moods nor temper. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:8–9). Time is nothing to God, since He existed without time before creating it Himself: “Do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Pet. 3:8). “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). Though the use of man-scaled imagery is perhaps unavoidable, “we must,” in the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God — ‘the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable’ — with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God.”149
Yet we are forced to admit that the Marcionites were not simply wrong to see some kind of disconnect between the volcanic Deity displayed in the Pentateuch and the Eternal Mind revealed through the proper use of right reason. After we’ve said everything that can be said about the legitimate and purified use of metaphorical language, we are still forced to concede that Marcion had a point, just as the Judaizing issues had been valid enough to cause trouble among the Apostles themselves. There is anthropomorphism in the Old Testament, no doubt about it: from the God who looks down upon Noah’s world and decides He is sorry He ever made it, to the God of the Exodus, who throws angry fits until Moses can calm Him down. To Marcion and his followers, the Old Testament attributed cruelty, falsehood, injustice, and childish tantrums to Him who should, in reality, always be depicted as wholly reasonable, entirely truthful, and full of beauty, justice, and truth. Interestingly, St. Augustine had practically the same reaction himself at one point in his life. Prior to his dramatic adult reconversion, he found the Hebrew Scriptures savage, crudely anthropomorphic, and badly written. They contrasted so poorly, in fact, to Plato, Cicero, Plotinus, and his other pagan favorites, that the experience of reading them actually delayed his return to the faith.
Justin seems willing to give the devil his due as well. The Trypho dialogue contains a striking passage wherein Justin blames the rise of Marcionism on the Jesus rejecters and their continued insistence on the perfection of the Deuteronomic Code:
If we do not accept this [that the Second Legislation was only temporary], then we shall fall into absurd ideas, as the nonsense that our God is not the same God who existed in the days of Enoch and all the others who were not circumcised in the flesh, and did not observe the Sabbaths and the other rites, since Moses only imposed them later; or that God does not wish each succeeding generation race of humanity always to perform the same acts of righteousness. Either supposition is ridiculous and preposterous. Therefore, we must conclude that God, who is immutable, ordered these and similar things to be done only because of sinful men, and at the same time we confess him to be sympathetic toward all men, prescient, needful of nothing, just and good. (23)
Here we can see that many of the same arguments Justin used against the Judaizers were necessary to defeat Marcionism as well. Ironic, too, is the fact that the Marcionites could quote most of the same Scripture passages employed by the Judaizers! The same verses that called curses down on those who might dare to neglect Yahweh’s laws were excellent proofs, for Marcion, that Yahweh had been a capricious tyrant from the start.
Also very interesting is the way that Marcion uses (and abuses) the writings of St. Paul. Like everyone who tries to tell the exact and precise truth, even when it seems to concede points to the opposition, Paul could sound like a Marcionite at times. His teaching, for instance, that the Second Law does not come directly from God, but “was ordained by angels through an intermediary” (Gal. 3:19), would seem to come perilously close to Marcion’s notion that the Hebrew Law is the production of a lesser, imperfect demiurge. This is because every truth comes perilously close to heresy — if and when it is distorted, taken out of context, or made to stand in isolation from the rest of the Catholic system. In reality, what few similarities there were between Marcion’s doctrine and that of St. Paul merely illustrates the fact that the Apostle (and those following his trajectory) sounded too Jewish to the Marcionites and too Marcionite to the Judaizers — a pretty good place to be.
We will have to concur, however, with at least one aspect of Marcionite argumentation. Taken by itself, without any further meditation, the case against Judaism that we find in the earliest sources is too narrow, too legalistic, too excessively focused on the punitive aspects of the story. It may have failed to persuade Marcion for just this reason. A long, repetitive tale, after all, about a Heavenly Judge, constantly forced to lower His standards to accommodate an incorrigible repeat offender really might, if taken in isolation, come across as a little petty, a little unworthy — as if God had nothing better to do but act the part of a small-town sheriff putting the same old tramp into the drunk tank night after night. This is why it will be well to include a good deal of material from Justin’s later inheritors as well — and not just because Justin’s book Against Marcion has been lost. Where Justin speaks almost wholly in terms of crime and punishment, a new note comes in with later apologists such as Origen and Eusebius. This note continues to grow subtler and more sophisticated throughout the rest of the patristic era, as expressed in the writings of such thinkers as Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, and Ephrem of Syria. Driven by the challenge of Marcion, these later saints took Justin’s tentative guesses about divine accommodation and peered at them so deeply, for so long, that they gradually flowered into something much more astonishing and beautiful, something that touches even us modern Christians in a personal way these many centuries later.
A Bridge Too Far
In the earlier portions of this book we puzzled over a mysterious passage in St. Paul; namely, over his contention in Galatians 3 that a temporary law was added to the original on account of human sin. Now, an equally confusing set of Bible verses will need to be taken under consideration, including that strange — even shocking — passage we promised to discuss later, the one Marcion may have used to prove Yahweh’s evil intent toward the Jews.
As we’ve already noticed, even the Hebrew prophets seem to grow disgusted with the Mosaic legislation as time goes by. Surely the climax of this process came in Ezekiel 20 — the “God’s-eye view of the Exodus” chapter we followed so carefully before. “I swore to them in the wilderness that I would scatter them among the nations and disperse them through the countries, because they had not executed my ordinances, but had rejected my statutes and profaned my sabbaths, and their eyes were set on their fathers’ idols. Moreover I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not have life; and I defiled them through their very gifts” (20:23–26). In its chronological context, this “swearing in the wilderness” appears to come after the sin at Beth-peor. Likewise, Ezekiel’s reference to the inevitability of the scattering shows that these “statutes that were not good” can only be the Second Legislation imposed there by Moses, since this detail is unique to the book of Deuteronomy.150 Here, then, is a straight-up scriptural affirmation of the futility of these secondary laws for salvation, something that is intelligible only if we accept the idea that God merely allowed them to be written, rather than writing them Himself. As the Didascalia puts it, in a comment on this very passage: “The secondary legislation is that which [Ezekiel] calls judgments which are unprofitable, and they are incapable of saving.”151
Verse 26, however, goes well beyond this, insisting that the new laws were not only vexing and useless but caused the people to defile themselves. This claim has been so troubling to Bible students through the years that several rather desperate attempts have been made to discount it. Some scholars have tried to prove these verses to be an interpolation, an accidental or deliberate inclusion of material not originally part of the text. Others have claimed that Ezekiel is merely expressing Israel’s distorted view of the Law by this point, a blasphemous misconstrual born out of their weariness and exasperation. There are, however, good reasons to believe that the prophet means exactly what he says.
The key, once again, lies in the contradictions between the laws given at Sinai and the later codes instituted in the wake of Beth-peor. In addition to the inconsistences we’ve looked at — harsher treatment for the Canaanites, permission to divorce, and so forth — we find that Deuteronomy’s laws concerning animal sacrifice are significantly different from those given to Aaron’s Levitical priests. In Leviticus, Israel’s priests are ordered to offer only clean sacrificial animals and to slaughter them only within the sanctuary, where some of the blood can be dashed around the altar to make expiation for the offerer (Lev. 17:1–9). Clean game animals, intended for eating, may also be slaughtered, yet even their blood cannot be simply discarded but must be ritually poured on the ground and carefully covered with earth (Lev. 17:11). Deuteronomy ignores all this completely. In the Second Law, the blood of sacrificial animals is treated with even less concern than Leviticus had applied to mere game. Not only is the blood not dashed against the altar; it is simply dumped out like water (Deut. 12:16) — not even to be covered with earth. Here is a contradiction that was more than just a contradiction. Here is biblical sanction for a practice that other (equally scriptural) laws had already classified as sacrilege, resulting in the defilement of both the land and the people.
Several Bible translators have tried to make Ezekiel’s “defiling sacrifices” more intelligible by linking the word he uses to other passages, where it is employed to describe later acts of human sacrifice offered by apostate Jews to the Canaanite idol Molech. This attempt seems as great a reach as the others, however, since Ezekiel uses the same word in numerous places where the legitimate sacrifice to Yahweh is undoubtedly meant.152 “What is shocking about Ezekiel’s formulation,” according to scholar John Bergsma, “is that he accepts the divine authority of both the [Deuteronomic and Levitical laws] . . . and concludes that the [later] laws were intentionally given to render Israel so defiled that exile would be inevitable. Scattered among the nations, Israel would thus be compelled to recognize the Lord’s sovereignty (‘that they might know that I am the Lord’).”153
This perspective certainly does shed a new light on Moses’ prophecy of inevitable exile, but, honestly, doesn’t this next step amount to “a bridge too far”? Certainly we should concede to Marcion all of his legitimate points, but don’t we fall right into his hands at this stage? It was Marcion, recall, who also insisted that the Old Testament law, because it was full of contradictions, was impossible to keep and could not possibly, therefore, be the creation of an all-wise, infallible God. And is it really possible that an all-holy God could deliberately lead His people into sacrilege? Can we really entertain an interpretation of the Bible in which Yahweh seems to have become Israel’s tempter? And how can we Christians square such a notion with St. James’s word on the subject: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one” (1:13)?
Giving the devil his due is one thing, but doesn’t all this bring us very close to making a devil of God?
The Dispensation of Condemnation
Could a good God ever give His beloved children “laws that are not good”?
This question, we might suggest, is rather like asking whether a doctor could ever give medicine that is not good — a query to which most any cancer patient will give an answer pretty quick. Chemotherapy drugs are poison to cancer cells and, sadly, poison to the patient as well. When such drugs are administered, the patient and the cancer are essentially competing in a race — to decide which of them the chemo will kill first. Many of these drugs qualify as Class One carcinogens themselves. Caregivers must take great pains not to spill any of the material or to let it come in contact with their own bodies, even as they are introducing it directly into another person’s bloodstream. Doctors are usually careful to offer a frank warning in advance: “Yes, these drugs may save your life, but make no mistake: this stuff is not good.”
Several chapters back, we compared the Levitical sacrifices to methadone. Here, we will compare the full Deuteronomic Code to chemotherapy. Israel and sin are in a race, to decide which one of them the Second Legislation will kill first. And while the laws of Deuteronomy aren’t intrinsically evil, they were most certainly “not good.” This is the distinction Marcion had lost. Though he believed himself to have loftier, more philosophical ideas about God than the Hebrews did, he was all too quick to demote Him whenever Yahweh dared to do anything Marcion couldn’t square with his own superficial ideas of “good.” Yes, to a patient suffering under chemotherapy, his doctor might give every appearance of being a torturer. And yet the very thing that tempts his subject to see him as evil is actually the doctor’s being good — overcoming his own natural reluctance to poison a man, making a desperate attempt to save his patient’s life with a desperate remedy. It will take everything the patient has got to stay on his medicine, all his willpower not to suddenly decide, that is, that his malady isn’t perhaps so bad as it has been made out. And, in fact, it’s part of the very nature of sin that it always blinds its devotees to the seriousness of their predicament. St. Paul, however, makes the truth of the matter very clear in Romans 6:23: “The wages of sin is death.” Overcoming it, therefore, must be seen as a life and death struggle — not a hobby.
Justin establishes this approach in the Trypho dialogue:
Thus, as your sinfulness was the reason why God first issued those precepts [the keeping of Sabbaths, etc.], so now because of your enslavement to sin, or rather your greater inclination to it, by means of the same precepts he calls you to remember and know him. . . . If this had not been the reason, God could be accused of not having foreknowledge and of not teaching all men to know and observe the same just precepts . . . and the Scripture would be judged false that says, “God is true and just, and all his ways are judgments, and there is no iniquity in him [Deut. 32:4; Ps. 91:16].” (27, 92)
Justin was able to say this because he had a bigger picture of God than Marcion had, a God who, like a firm physician, could be strong enough to exhibit what C. S. Lewis once called “a severe mercy.”
Eusebius is the first to use a medical metaphor explicitly. He explains the rules of sacrifice as “a lower law” but a necessary one, a “physician” working to cure the “disease of Egypt.” Augustine picks up the simile a few years later, using it to illustrate how the same good God could adjust His own laws downward:
The art of medicine remains the same and quite unchanged, but it changes its prescriptions for the sick, since the state of their health changes. So the divine providence remains entirely without change, but comes to the aid of mutable creatures in various ways, and commands or forbids different things at different times according to the different stages of their disease.154
And this, really, was the key to a whole set of new insights into divine accommodation. Not only was their Heavenly Judge willing to put the Israelites on probation for a while (rather than immediately meting out the death penalty to which they had all so solemnly agreed); he’s also willing to become their family physician and take them under His long-term care.
Yet what kind of a medicine is this “divine chemotherapy”? How exactly is rendering obedience impossible supposed to make avoiding sin more likely in the future? As we’ve noted, Moses himself had prophesied that his law would prove impossible to keep. St. Paul took this theme up in Galatians. When he contrasted the saving faith of Abraham (prior to and apart from the Law) with the Judaizers’ hopes of obtaining salvation by means of the Law, he called their burden a “curse” — since only “He who does them shall live by them” (Gal. 3:12) and nobody actually does them. The Apostle completes this train of thought later in the same chapter: “Is the law then against the promises of God? Certainly not; for if a law had been given which could make alive, then righteousness would indeed be by the law. But the Scripture consigned all things to sin” (Gal. 3:21–22). Scripture, after all, contains both Leviticus and Deuteronomy — and seems to insist on both, despite their hopeless contradictions. Elsewhere, in 2 Corinthians 3:9, Paul refers to the entire period of the Mosaic Legislation as “the dispensation of condemnation” — a period that had, it is true, its own kind of “splendor” but depends, ultimately, on “a written code which kills” (2 Cor. 3:6). What did Paul mean by “the dispensation of condemnation”? In what sense did Moses’ Law “kill” its devotees? Here’s where we can turn to some of our later Church Fathers.
Augustine uses, once again, the language of medicine: “The Old Law was given to reveal the wounds of sinners, which the grace of blessings heals. The Law was given to make the proud aware of their own weakness, to urge the weak to do penance.”155 Israel’s illness, for Augustine, remains in the “denial stage.” Borrowing, once more, the phraseology of twelve-step recovery, we might say that the people needed to admit their own powerlessness and their utter dependence upon a Higher Power for salvation. And they hadn’t yet reached that point. The sin at Beth-peor proved this beyond any question: Israel was complacent — complacent and blithely presuming upon God’s eventual forgiveness. Why give a law that cannot be obeyed? — because such a law can, like the futile efforts of an addict in denial, drive a nation to despair.
Commenting upon this idea, Robert Grosseteste offers another of his helpful analogies:
Let us suppose that there are two weak men and one who commands that something be done, that neither of the weak men can accomplish by himself, though they could accomplish with the help of the commander. And let us suppose that one of the weak men knows his own weakness and humbly awaits the help of the commander. The other weak man, however, presumes upon his own powers as if he could keep the command without help. . . . Is it not right and just that the humble weak man be given at the same time [both] the command and the help of the commander, whereby he can keep it, and that the weak man who presumes upon his own powers be given the command alone without the added help of the commander? The result would be that he would be goaded by the command toward what must be done, struggle, and fail to do it, and in his failure perceive and mourn his own weakness. Thus he would humbly run to the source of help and seek out his help, without which he has already learned that his attempts are vain. And so he will be justly crushed by the weight of the command and mercifully restored to the power of acting when help is conferred after it is humbly sought out.156
Grosseteste goes on to apply this analogy directly to Old Covenant Israel:
The numerical multiplication of commands in their own ceremonial Law fittingly subdued the proud who presumed that they had abilities beyond those of men and even beyond those of holy men. And so, a burden was rightly imposed on them, a burden that exceeded the capacity even of holy men . . . [to teach them] the knowledge of their own weakness, so that they may humbly run to grace as if to the medicine for illness and weakness.157
The Mosaic system commanded obedience, but it did not offer the supernatural graces needed to succeed at the endeavor. Augustine’s mentor Ambrose expressed it this way, in a comment on Romans 4:15: “ ‘The Law works wrath’ — it was given to make wrongdoers guilty not as an efficient cause, but because grace does not help. Again, the Old Law commanded with threats and did not offer the grace to keep the Law.”158 The Law showed the people their need but did not meet their needs. Yet in another sense, it did address their most crying need at that moment — the Israelites needed to know that they were needy. So the Lord vexes them, defiling them even with their own religious rites.
Several alternate translations of Ezekiel 20:26 tell us that God did it to “make them desolate” (NJB, KJV). Augustine says the “not good” laws “caused the people to desire” — implying that such desires were initially weak, or absent altogether.159 Which desires were these? Nothing else but the desire for God’s own redemption, surely — an appeal for His direct intervention, as Moses had promised . . . along with His curses. “And when all these things come upon you . . . then the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live” (Deut. 30:1, 6). Before the people could make profitable use of a New Covenant, it seems, they needed to have despaired of the old one. And so far, they hadn’t. And until Israel was ready to cry out for this new kind of heart, from the very depths of their souls, the dispensation of condemnation had not yet completed its work. God’s full program of chemotherapy had to run its course completely, bringing His people to the end of their rope, for only then could they offer, once again, sacrifices pleasing to God. “Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God. . . . For thou hast no delight in sacrifice; were I to give a burnt offering, thou wouldst not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Ps. 51:14, 16–17).
A Circumcised Heart
Please note that “circumcision of heart” is a medical metaphor as well. Physical circumcision was a surgical operation that made each Hebrew male into a “child of the promise,” an heir to the legacy that God granted to their father Abraham. The need, then, for an additional circumcision — one that will penetrate all the way to the heart of a man, to his innermost, spiritual being — implies that ordinary circumcision was still a job half done. Those who would appeal to Abraham as their father must, as Christ later puts it, “do the works of Abraham” (John 8:39, KJV). As St. Paul explains more fully: “Circumcision indeed is of value if you obey the law; but if you break the law, your circumcision becomes uncircumcision. . . . For he is not a real Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. He is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal” (Rom. 2:25, 28–29).
Ezekiel takes Moses’ medical metaphor a step further. What each Israelite really needs is a complete heart transplant. “I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances” (Ezek. 36:25–27). Here, it becomes perfectly clear that Israel will not save itself by any attempt at obedience, however sincere; God Himself is going to have to intervene redemptively, to save a people that cannot save themselves. So the Divine Oncologist steps aside for a Divine Cardiologist. Yet heart transplantation is a painful, rigorous ordeal. Convincing the patient that such radical surgery is necessary is at least half of the battle — and thus the necessity for such a long period of futility and self-condemnation. Once a man is truly convinced that his original heart is broken — then and only then can he be persuaded to accept a new one.
This fact expresses the essential meaning behind all the medical imagery. “God employed various devices to bring us back to him,” writes Jewish scholar Stephen Benin, summarizing the Christian understanding of St. Gregory of Nyssa, “including the Law, the prophets, signs, natural disasters, and rewards, but since humanity’s diseases were growing worse, especially that first and last of all evils — idolatry — mankind needed a stronger remedy. At the proper time the Word became flesh.”160 “For the law was given through Moses,” according to St. John’s Gospel; but “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1:17).
Moses’ new prophet arrives at last, and with him Moses’ promised New Covenant, offering his promised clean heart. “In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ; and you were buried with him in baptism [Ezekiel’s ‘sprinkling with clean water’] in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God [not your own action] who raised him from the dead” (Col. 2:11–12). For Justin this was the true and final “end of the law”: “We, who have approached God through Him, have received not carnal, but spiritual circumcision, which Enoch and those like him observed. And we have received it through baptism, since we were sinners, by God’s mercy; and all men may equally obtain it” (43).
Our later Fathers, then, are simply collating and chronologizing a whole series of “heart surgery” metaphors begun by Moses and the prophets, and interpreted for the New Covenant era by the Apostles and the early apologists. John Chrysostom continues the “case history,” up through the loss of the temple and the Holy City:
After they kept the festival in honor of the evil demons [likely a reference to the Golden Calf], God yielded and permitted sacrifices. What he all but said was this: “You are all eager and avid for sacrifices. If sacrifice you must, then sacrifice to me.” But even if he permitted animal sacrifices, this permission was not to last forever; in the wisdom of his ways, he took the sacrifices away from them again. Let me use the example of a physician again. . . . After he has given in to the patient’s craving he gets the drinking cup from his home and gives instructions for the sick man to satisfy his thirst from this cup and no other. When he has gotten the patient to agree, he leaves secret orders with the servants to smash the cup to bits; in this he proposes, without arousing the patient’s suspicion, to lead him secretly away from the craving on which he has set his heart. This is what God did, too. He let the Jews offer sacrifice but permitted this to be done in Jerusalem and nowhere else in the world. After they had offered sacrifices for a short time, God destroyed the city. Why? The physician saw to it that the cup was broken. By seeing to it that their city was destroyed, God led the Jews away from the practice of sacrifice, though it was against their will.161
Notice that the “rock pile” imagery used against the Judaizers now begins to give way. In the earlier, penal conception of Deuteronomy, the Second Legislation had been harsh because it was being used to break a hardened criminal. Now, the Second Legislation is harsh because the disease being treated with it is stubborn . . . and deadly. And while both sets of images are valid and true, there’s no question that comparing Yahweh to a doctor lifts the conversation to a higher level, and not only because it brings tenderness for the patient more fully to the fore. A doctor also has to be wiser than a jailer, shrewder in his forethought, and more self-sacrificing, like a battlefield surgeon. Medieval bishop Anselm of Havelberg (not to be confused with St. Anselm, the philosopher) brings out this subtlety in a passage from one of his commentaries: “Nor was it easy to alter things which had come into veneration through long custom and over an immense stretch of time; hence, the salubrious remedies of the gospel were received, bit by bit, as if by sick people, and mixed as medicine by the divine art for getting people better.”162 Mere divine accommodation — God grading on the curve, so to speak — begins to be superseded by something similar but much more profound: divine condescension — a very great God stooping, as it were, to conquer.
Marcion probably saw this imagery as an advance — or some of his disciples may have, at any rate, and been inspired to turn their hopes back toward orthodox Christianity. For one thing, it offers the strongest explanation yet for the supposed discontinuity between the Old and New Testaments. “If the trouble is,” writes Augustine,
that the moral precepts under the old law are lower and in the Gospel higher, and that therefore both cannot come from the same God, whoever thinks in this way may find difficulty in explaining how a single physician prescribes one medicine to weaker patients through his assistants, and another by himself to stronger patients, all to restore health.163
St. Ephraim the Syrian expresses the same ideas in more poetic language:
The whole world like a body had fallen into heavy sickness; for in the fever of heathenism, it burned and pined and fell. The right hand of tender mercy touched it, and dealt with its soul in pity; and cut off speedily its heathenism, for that was the cause of its sickness, and it was purged and sweated and restored.164
Beautiful as this imagery is, most of the Marcionites remained unpersuaded. The concept of God as “family doctor” or even “personal trainer” to Israel is certainly better, yes. But Marcion, likely, would have seen it as disproportionate — too much of a good thing. We can, for instance, envision Marcion looking at the enormous pot of scrolls that made up the Hebrew Scripture in those days — the Scriptures he hated — and balking at the whole broad picture. Was it really tenable that this huge, ancient, widely respected corpus of material was deliberately intended, as the medical metaphor suggests, to be trifling and futile? It was nice to have the Church agree with him on this overall impression, to be sure, but hadn’t they proved a great deal too much by it? After all, if God intended to destroy this Law after such a short while (cosmically speaking), why had He bothered to finish it all? Even the Church Fathers we’ve been following seem to have felt the sting of Marcion’s point at this stage, for their attempts to answer it ultimately opened, as we will see in the next chapter, a new and even deeper well into the center of God’s covenant love.
149 CCC 42, quoting Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Anaphora.
150 We might also note that the actual Hebrew phrase translated in verse 23 as “I swore . . . I would scatter them” is the same term used at several key points in Deuteronomy, whereas the similar phrase employed earlier in the Pentateuch corresponds to an entirely different word.
151 Didascalia Apostolorum 6, 18, 6.
152 Ezek. 5:1; 14:15; 20:37; 37:2; 46:21; 47:3–4; 48:14.
153 Scott Hahn and John Bergsma, “What Laws Were ‘Not Good’: A Canonical Approach to the Theological Problem of Ezekiel 20:25–26,” Journal of Biblical Literature 123, no. 2 (2004): 127.
154 Augustine, De Vera Religione 17, LCC 241, quoted in Benin, Footprints of God, 98.
155 Augustine, On Penance, Sermon 35 1, 1, 1.
156 Grosseteste, On the Cessation of the Laws, 229.
157 Ibid., 243.
158 Ambrose, Glossa ordinaria at Rom. 4:15.
159 Augustine, De Vera Religione 17, 33.
160 Benin, Footprints of God, 39.
161 John Chrysostom, Discourses against the Judaizing Christians, trans. Paul W. Harkins, vol. 68 of The Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 90.
162 Anselm of Haverberg, Dialogues 1, 6, quoted in Benin, Footprints of God, 255n148.
163 Augustine, De Vera Religione 17, 34, quoted in Benin, Footprints of God, 98.
164 Ephraim of Syria, Hymn 21, 18, quoted in Benin, Footprints of God, 81.