I have been accused of "Marcionism" because I advocate reading Old Testament passages Christo-allegorically (i.e. reading all the Old Testament passages as prefigurements of Christ and His soon coming inner kingdom of love and light).
Very many heresy hunters grossly misunderstand and misapply the concept of Marcionism. It's been said that to a person whose only tool is a hammer, everything appears as a nail. The same could be said for those heresy hunters who accuse any who dare advocate a non-literal reading of the Old Testament as being Marcionites. Marcion is their hammer, and any Christological or Allegorical reading of the Old Testament resembles a nail which they feel obliged to smite into oblivion.
Marcion was an early Christian who advocated eliminating the entire Old Testament as inspired Christian Scripture because the God it describes is incompatible with the New Testament nature of God revealed by Jesus.
Here is the problem with accusing Christological/Allegorical readings as Marcionite heresy. And it's a huge one for the hammer-heavy heresy hunters.
Allegorical reading is NOT Marcionism, not now, not ever.
First, Marcion never believed the Old Testament Scriptures were to be read Christologically or Allegorically, non-literally in other words. Marcion believed that they weren't to be read at all. To Marcion, the Old Testament described a demonic demiurge, not the loving Abba of Jesus Christ. Thus, he allegedly believed that those Scriptures had no benefit. If true, then Christo-allegorical readings simply had no place in his canon.
Second, the majority of the early Church Fathers read the Old Testament Christo-allegorically. To label Augustine, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Ignatius, Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Clement, Valentinus, Heracleon, Saint Ambrose, Ephraem the Syrian of Edessa/Nisibis, Philoxenus of Mabbug, and scores of others as all being Marcionites is outrageous. There were six known Christian theological schools in the early church: Alexandria, Antioch, Caesarea, Edessa/Nisbis, Ephesus, and Rome/Carthage. The early Church's hermeneutic, except for the Antiochan school, largely held to a hermeneutic which commonly allegorized the Old Testament whenever It seemed to "literally" (by the dead letter) attribute evil or unworthy attributes to God. If this is Marcionism, then most all the church fathers would be called Marcionites, and THAT has never been so asserted by any competent scholar of any age. Much of modern Christianity is woefully ignorant of our Patristic theology, and that is a shame. Many who are called heretics today are in intimate alignment with what the church fathers wrote and taught, whereas many who claim the fundamental high ground couldn't be further away from the early church's views.
Third, to be fair to Marcion, none of his writings still exist. All we know about him today comes from those who loathed him as a heretic. What I attributed to him above may or may not be accurate. I would hate to have my enemies describe the worth and conclusions of my theology without any of my writings being available for review and confirmation. I can't tell you how often my proposals get misstated and twisted into things I have never come close to saying. Our ability to misunderstand and misstate one another's true position is humongous. Marcion may well have believed the Old Testament needed to be excised from the Bible. And if he did, then I believe he was wrong and I disagree with him. But the lawyer in me wants to give him a chance to personally respond before we hang him up by his thumbs.
We need to trade in our hard hammers for soft ears that earnestly seek after the legacy the early fathers left us.
Just from a common sense angle, IF all (or even most) the ancient accounts are true that Marcion believed that the brutal God the OT describes was an "actual"(not fictional) demiurge and NOT the God of the New Testament, then he is necessarily reading the OT "literally." That pungent conclusion can ONLY come from a strictly literal reading where the OT demiurge "delights to destroy" those who disobey them.
Marcion is NOT reading OT Scripture with the non-literal eye of Christo-allegory, anthropomorphism, or myth. That pretty much just leaves literalism. He obviously finds much of the OT literally unconscionable to NT Christian sensibilities. Thus his reaction. Really, ONLY a literal reading could warrant such a massive excision of the OT altogether. My point is his extreme action in deleting the whole OT as canonical with one fell swoop is most consistent with the reactionary zeal which normally accompanies literal-centric hermeneutics.
By most all early accounts, Marcion believed in a "literal" OT demiurge as "literally" described in the OT. Most of the early Church Fathers loved the Old Testament, as Barth also once declared, far too much to read it just literally. Non-literal readings allowed the early church to purge all the satanic elements out of the divine nature which were suggested by just a literal reading.
Of course, I always keep a caveat in place where we don't have any extant writings of the person in question. For instance, I think it's unfair to hold Origen responsible for others who called themselves Origenists hundreds of years later, after Origen died, and who may or may not have distorted or misrepresented his original teachings.
So, I would afford Marcion the same courtesy, at least in the form of a caveat. Marcionite churches of subsequent generations may or may not have been accurately representing his original teachings. Also, his teachings may or may not have been accurately described by his critics. But, assuming there is some early fair-minded church consensus on his teachings, then I think we can make some strong, but rebuttal, presumptions about him, one of which is that he was a literalist.
"The most radical position was that of Marcion, who had rejected the OT altogether and attributed it to the creator god (the demiurge), rather than to the Father of Jesus Christ. The prophetic and allegorical interpretation of OT texts already found in the NT (especially by Paul, as in Gal. 4:21-26; 1 Cor. 9:8-10; 10:1-11) rendered the position of Marcion impossible except through a radical editing and excision of NT texts, a project that Marcion himself carried out consistently." Mark Sheridan, O.S.B., Dean of the Pontifical Athenaeum of San Anselmo, in his article on the "Old Testament" in THE WESTMINSTER HANDBOOK TO ORIGEN (2004). Sources Cited: Dawson (1992); Heine (1997); Lienhard (2000); Torjesen (1986).
"Marcion stood against 'allegorism' in any form, and resisted any attempt to connect Christian thought to the fulfillment of Old Testament or traditions. Because of this he was often an object of ridicule for later Christian writers (Irenaeus, ADVERSUS HAERESES 1:27; 4.38, 34; Tertullian, PRESCRIPTION AGAINST HERETICS 30-44, Clement of Alexandria, STROMATA 3.3-4, Origen, AGAINST CELSUS 6.53)...." John Anthony McGuckin, THE WESTMINSTER HANDBOOK TO PATRISTIC THEOLOGY, MARCION ENTRY (2004).
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