The Marcions have landed!

This will be the last of our brief looks at articles in Carl Trueman's The Wages of Spin. If you missed our introduction to the book, click here. If you want to see our discussion of another article previously, click here.

Trueman's basic argument in the article entitled "The Marcions have landed!" is that much of the evangelical church today seems to have followed in the way of the not-so-famous (maybe infamous) figure in church history Marcion. We don't know a lot about Marcion, except that he grew up around the Black Sea, had heated communication from famous church history figure Tertullian, and was eventually excommunicated from the church in his day for heresy. According to Trueman, Marcion's "distinctive was his insistence that the Christian gospel was one of love to the extent that he came to a complete rejection of the Old Testament and only a qualified acceptance of those parts of the New Testament which he considered to be consistent with his central thesis" (pg. 165). So how has this figure who died in 160 AD, influenced the church today?

Trueman argues his influence had been on the level of the practical Christian life. First, the evangelical church today has largely emphasized God's love to the exclusion of most everything else. We see this in theological conversations... I've heard this recently, "God is not a wrathful God. He's a loving God. Surely he can't or won't punish people who don't meet His standard. That wouldn't be loving!" Have you heard something like that? Is that really the view of the Bible? Or does the fact that God is loving and angry at sin truly explain the Christian life? That's precisely the idea of Romans 3:21-26. God hates rebellion against God, and He must punish it. God is wrathful. If He wasn't wrathful, He wouldn't be good, just, or loving (to leave wrongdoing unpunished, I would argue is truly unloving). BUT God is not only wrathful, He is also supremely loving. God presented His son as a propitiatory sacrifice in the place of all those who would ever trust in Him. That is the epitome of wrath AND love! Praise God! That is the gospel! We must guard ourselves against this wrong emphasis/false doctrine of Marcion.

Secondly, Trueman argues that the evangelical church today has a tendency to (like Marcion) neglect the Old Testament in our theological reflections and our devotional lives. Trueman's first observation tethers nicely to his second. We have a wrong view of God's love, in large part because we have often avoided or maybe even in some cases thrown out the Old Testament altogether. I would argue that you really don't see the fully glory of Jesus Christ or the gospel without the Old Testament. The whole Old Testament prepares the way and points towards the culmination of God's just and loving work in the person of Jesus Christ. So what does that mean for us Christians who really don't spend much time in the Old Testament (outside of maybe the Psalms or Proverbs)? Think about your own life... how much time in the last few weeks have you spent reading the Old Testament? How many sermons have you listened to preached from the Old Testament? How many Bible studies have you done in an Old Testament book? Why is that? Is it because it's "harder?"

Let us study our Old Testament well. Let us glean all we can about the true nature of our wrathful yet exceedingly gracious God. Let us learn about ourselves and the horrific condition in which our rebellion against our creator has put us. Let us look for all of the ways that the Old Testament paves the way and points the reader towards the person and work of Jesus Christ. Let us delight ourselves in our savior who by His grace and for His glory has saved us. Let us not be Marcions!