Neo-Marcionism

About this sermon

Marcion of Sinope (d. 160) started a heresy early in the Church by teaching that the God of the Old Testament was different from the God of the New Testament. The Marcionists believed that the wrathful Hebrew God must be separate than the all-forgiving, all merciful God of the New Testament. Thus, for Marcion there was a sort of before and after in God, a certain opposition of the God of past times with the God of the present times. (In this Marcion acted as a precursor to the communist approach to history as being a dialectical struggle between a thesis and its antithesis. Surely, it is not accidental that Marcion named his major work, “Antithesis”.) Marcionism seems to have resurfaced in many ways in our times as various efforts have been made explain away the “harsh” and disciplinarian ways of the Church of old with new more lenient and accepting ways of the Church in our modern times. God the Holy Ghost, the soul of the Church Herself, gives the lie to this thinking...and its effort, showing that we cannot validly oppose one time of the Church to another time like our own. We cannot safely say that this or that doctrine need no longer be believed or practiced… that this or that previously approved and long tested discipline was wrong. In 2007 Pope Benedict XVI indicated something of this in his letter accompanying Summorum Pontificum, saying: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful” (Letter July 7, 2007). For more please visit http://www.reginaprophetarum.org & remember to say 3 Hail Marys for the priest