The sharpest thing anyone said to Harnack is on his fourth page, and he never really answers it.
Von Soden had spent two pages agreeing with him. Then, in the fourth of his mounting objections, he names what he thinks Harnack has done. Harnack, he says, “substitutes, where M. is concerned, the Pauline-Lutheran antithesis of law and grace, faith and works, and does not take into account that with him this antithesis is emptied out and de-spiritualized, in that it is hypostatized and mythologized by him into the antithesis of the two Gods, and that in asceticism a new law is set up.” The charge has three moving parts. Harnack has imported a frame. Inside that frame Marcion’s version of the antithesis comes out thin. And Marcion has then done something crude with it: turned an ethical insight into a pair of deities. Von Soden’s verdict at the end of the paragraph is that the exclusively soteriological orientation Harnack keeps praising shows “more theological dilettantism than religious depth.”
Grejdanus, on the next page, presses the same point from a different side and more bluntly. Against Harnack’s consistent Paulinist, he holds that “in truth M. does not know grace at all; in Paul grace is something far deeper, namely love that forgives guilt; in M. man’s sin is not sin against God; therefore in M. too grace is not properly forgiveness.” And he adds, with an elbow, that Harnack’s failure to see the difference is “due to my defective Christian understanding, as I displayed it in Das Wesen des Christentums.” Grejdanus’s argument runs: no guilt, therefore no forgiveness, therefore no grace.
Harnack’s reply, on his eighth and ninth pages, is a good reply; and it concedes the frame entirely.
He answers on Grejdanus’s terms, not his own. “In Marcion everything rests upon faith, namely upon faith in the redemptive deed of the God-Christ, who with his blood on the cross ransomed the sinners and transforms them by faith into ‘good’ men.” He assembles the Adamantius citations. He argues that Marcion “in this decisive article of doctrine is a genuine disciple of Paul,” that the ransom paid to the world-creator “establishes no essential difference here in religious level,” because Marcion “expresses in the plainest way that the matter in hand is the justificatio impii.” He runs the Greek word μεταβολή back to Justin to show that Marcion’s transformation-language has a pre-Catholic pedigree, and notes that where Justin means a sacramental alteration of bodily nature, Marcion means “an inward transformation through faith”: Paul’s new creature, understood and then restated independently. And in a footnote on his twelfth page he answers von Soden’s line about guilt by pointing to the sinful woman “per paenitentiam ex fide iustificata,” to the mood he thinks pervades Marcion: “Mercy has befallen me, mercy of which I am not worthy”, and finally to Paul Gerhardt, insisting it goes “much too far” to say Marcion could sing only the first half of “thou shalt be free from the misery of this earth and from the labour of sin.”
That is worth pausing on, because the hymn is doing precise work. The line is from Gerhardt’s evening hymn Nun ruhen alle Wälder, and its fifth stanza has exactly two halves: vom Elend dieser Erden and von der Sünden Arbeit frei. Freedom from earthly misery, and freedom from the labour of sin. Von Soden’s charge is that Marcion had the first without the second. Harnack’s answer is that he had both. A German Lutheran hymn is being used as a measuring instrument for a second-century heretic, and the measurement is a fair one on its own terms.
Then, on his eighteenth page, the summary: Marcion “gained his concept of faith, the separatio legis et evangelii, the fateful nature of the νόμος, the significance of the death on the cross and the nova creatura in Christ from the apostle’s letters.”
Not Merely a Lutheran Projection
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy and cheap to treat all this as a Lutheran historian failing to see past his own tradition. The frame is what let him see what his critics could not.
Bauer looked at Marcion and found a man driven by hatred of the Old Testament and disgust at matter. Grejdanus looked and found a man with no doctrine of grace at all. Neither of them noticed that faith stands at the centre of the surviving Marcionite material. Neither noticed that the transformation of a person is what redemption is for, or that the death of Christ is the content of that faith rather than an appendix to a cosmology. And the whole complex comes out of Paul’s letters, not out of the air. Harnack noticed all four, and he noticed them because he had spent his life reading a tradition in which faith, grace and the justification of the ungodly were the questions that mattered. The spectacles brought the soteriology into focus. That is not a small service, and nothing in what follows is meant to take it back.
But the same spectacles put the two Powers out of focus, because they made them look like the wrong kind of thing.
Here is the sequence Harnack’s argument implies, and von Soden’s objection assumes. First, Paul discovers grace against law. Second, Marcion intensifies that ethical and religious antithesis. Third, the antithesis gets projected outward into two divine figures. Von Soden calls that hypostatizing and mythologizing. Harnack comes close to conceding it in a startling footnote on his twenty-fifth page, where he calls the personification of the world-creator one of Marcion’s “scaffoldings” which can be dismantled without difficulty.
The Order Reversed
Both men have the order backwards, and I want to state the alternative carefully, and not as a claim about what went on in one man’s head in Pontus or Rome. We do not have access to Marcion’s biography of ideas, and the witnesses who might have told us were interested in other things. What we can describe is the structural order of the surviving Marcionite confession and the texts that carry it, and that order runs the other way:
First, the Evangelion and the ten-letter Apostolikon disclose two Powers, or two jurisdictions. Second, one of them rules the present aeon by means of law, judgment, flesh, decay and death. Third, the other appears in Christ as a goodness that had not been known before, and rescues those under another Power. Fourth, faith and grace describe how that rescue is received. And therefore, fifth, the contrast between law and grace is a consequence of the distinction between the Powers, not its origin.
On that reading the two Powers are not the mythological shell around a doctrine of justification. They are the prior fact that makes rescue necessary at all. And once the order is righted, von Soden’s central charge simply has nothing to work on. You cannot hypostatize an ethical antithesis into two Gods if the two Gods are where you began.
What the Texts Do First
The texts put the order in that sequence themselves. Galatians opens with rescue, before a single argument about law has been made: “Who gave himself for our sins so that he might deliver us from the present evil aeon according to the will of God the Father” (Galatians 1:4 TT). The letter is four verses old and we already have a jurisdiction and an exit from it. Only afterwards does the law-and-faith argument arrive: “a person is not justified by works of Law but through faith in Christ … because by works of Law no flesh will be justified” (Galatians 2:13 TT), and when it does, its function is diagnostic rather than foundational: “the Law has shut up all under sin, so that the promise by faith in Christ might be given to those who believe” (Galatians 3:12 TT). Law is what the jurisdiction does. Faith is how the exit is received.
The same order holds elsewhere. Colossians states the same transfer as an act between powers rather than a verdict (Colossians 1:13 TT). Laodiceans names the Power first, “under the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now working in the children of distrust” (Laodiceans 2:2 TT), and only then reaches grace, and when it does, the vocabulary is the vocabulary of rescue and not of acquittal: “For by grace you have been rescued through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not from works, so that no one may boast” (Laodiceans 2:8–9 TT). That is as close to a Lutheran sentence as the Apostolikon comes, and the verb is rescued. Grace is the manner of a rescue, not the settlement of an account.
And when Paul does set law-righteousness against faith-righteousness, he does it by naming two sources rather than two moral principles: “not having a righteousness of my own from Law, but that which is through him, the righteousness from God on the basis of faith” (Philippians 3:5 TT). Two origins. Which is what you would expect if the underlying distinction were between Powers. Most directly of all, 2 Corinthians opens its fourth chapter by naming the obstacle as a person rather than a condition (2 Corinthians 4:1 TT).
The most interesting evidence that Harnack half-knew this is a sentence of his own. In the footnote where he defends Marcion’s consciousness of sin, he describes what redemption delivers us from: “the good God frees from the flesh, from sin, from the law, from the world, from the world-creator.” That is not a list of moral conditions. It is a list of jurisdictions, ending with the one who holds them, and Harnack wrote it himself on his twelfth page while arguing for something else.
Two Cautions
Two cautions before this section closes, one about Harnack’s evidence and one about mine.
Harnack’s first main point rests almost entirely on five citations from the Dialogue of Adamantius on his eighth page. The critical edition (Bakhuyzen’s, in Harnack’s own series and from his own publisher) places that work between roughly 290 and 311. It depends on now-lost treatises of Methodius, and it is set during a persecution, which puts its outer limit at the Edict of Galerius. Features pointing later, including the homoousios in the orthodox speaker’s mouth, have led to the proposal that it was composed in two stages. Either way its Marcionite speakers are Marcionites of well over a century after Marcion. More awkwardly, Bakhuyzen observes that they are not historical persons at all but literary figures, citing, for one of them, Harnack’s own earlier judgment. This does not destroy Harnack’s argument. It relocates it. What he has securely demonstrated is that faith and transformation stood at the centre of Marcionite teaching long after the founder, which is worth having and is not the same thing.
The caution about my own side is that modern work on Paul cuts in two directions, and I am not entitled to the half I like. Krister Stendahl’s 1963 essay on the introspective conscience of the West, and then E. P. Sanders on covenantal nomism and James Dunn on what “works of the law” actually names, have put Harnack’s assumption under sustained pressure: the assumption that Paul’s governing problem was individual guilt set against a religion of earned merit. None of that makes Paul a Marcionite, and Dunn in particular should not be misread as denying that Paul criticized the law. But the same literature forbids me from annexing Luther’s Paul and calling him Marcion’s. If the Lutheran Paul is an anachronism when Harnack uses him, he is an anachronism when I do.
What the apocalyptic reading offers instead is not a Marcionite Paul but a Paul whose central problem is bondage to hostile Powers. Ernst Käsemann had already insisted that God’s righteousness in Paul is divine activity and lordship rather than a property or a private transaction. He is a poor recruit for anyone’s programme, though, holding as he does that it is gift and power at once. It is J. Louis Martyn who states the structural point most plainly, in his Galatians commentary: “God would not have to carry out an invasion in order merely to forgive erring human beings. The root trouble lies deeper than human guilt, and it is more sinister. The whole of humanity … is, in fact, trapped, enslaved under the power of the present evil age.” Beverly Gaventa has made the same case for Romans, reading Sin there as one of the anti-God powers whose defeat the death and resurrection of Christ guarantees. And Sanders, of all people, had already conceded the decisive grammatical point: righteousness in Judaism is a term of maintained status, whereas in Paul, he wrote, “it is a transfer term.”
That is close to what I have argued. It is not the same as proving it, and nobody should pretend Paul has been settled.
None of this yet says what the Creator is. Harnack’s own answer (righteous rather than bad, and troubled rather than malicious) is the most interesting thing in the pamphlet and it deserves its own section. What has been established here is narrower and prior. The antithesis of law and grace is a consequence in this confession and not its foundation. Both Harnack and his critics were arguing about the shell when they thought they were arguing about the kernel.