Between 137 and 144 CE, or thereabout, Marcion presented a new theology for the Christian communities in Rome – containing teaching that the Roman presbytery eventually could not endorse. Marcion’s influence, however, was substantial both then and subsequently. After his expulsion from the Roman Church, he became the founder of an influential parallel church structure. In the decades that followed, it even became difficult to tell the Marcionite congregations apart from those of the Majority Church. Yet, the differences in teaching were significant. In three respects Marcion deviated from standard Christian beliefs: He radically broke with the church’s Jewish past by downgrading the Creator God to a lessened divine status and dispensed with the Jewish Scriptures; he further relegated many Jewish features from his diminished New Testament (Luke + ten Pauline epistles); in addition, he eradicated the doctrine of incarnation from the Christian credo, promoting a docetic Christology. The Majority Church addressed the crisis that emerged from this split by means of renewed emphasis on the church’s Rule of Faith and its relationship with the Jewish and apostolic Scriptures. The first part of the paper discusses Marcion’s novel teaching, the ensuing ecclesial and theological crisis, and the Majority Church’s response. The second part takes its point of departure in this early hermeneutical crisis and explores the broken relationship between Scripture and theology also in modern and late-modern biblical and systematic theology. Two questions are attended to:
• How may the disciplines of biblical and systematic theology uphold a doctrine of creation in the current pedagogical climate?
• Looking forward, how can Scripture and theology, on the one hand, and Old and New Testament studies, on the other, be brought into fruitful interaction?