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Irenaeus’ Christology in Against Heresies
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Irenaeus’ Christology in Against Heresies Irenaeus’ work, Against Heresies is an attempt to fight the Gnostic teachings of the second century and to defend, explain and formulate the Christological viewpoint of the Church. The Gnostics of the time were concerned with the separation or the dividing of the human Jesus from the divine Christ. Gnostics held that the divine spirit (Christ) temporarily became enfleshed and then left sometime before the human Jesus died. Irenaeus counters the Gnostics by offering a number of principles that deal with unity; the unity of God, the relationship of God and the Logos to humanity and the salvation of humanity. Irenaeus as Smulders states is concerned with, “the unity of the Creator God with the God of Salvation, the unity of soul and body, and the union of man with God in the one Jesus Christ (Smulders 21)”. In the first paragraph of chapter eighteen in Book III Irenaeus begins explaining that the Logos existed in the beginning with God, refuting those who believed that the Christ became God’s son at a particular moment in time. The first verse of the Gospel of John is used to explain that God and Christ have unity and that they existed together since the beginning. Irenaeus in this brief explanation of preexistence of the Logos is trying to preserve the idea of one God. It seems that Irenaeus was concerned that the view of the Gnostic groups that the person of Jesus was human and Christ was the divine. This line of thinking Irenaeus may have believed would cause people to have a dualistic approach to God and shake the foundation of monotheism. God for Irenaeus is a unity of Father and the Logos. Recapitulation is another important theme in Irenaeus and is presented at the beginning of his work that we read. The theory explains how the human race is redeemed by Jesus Christ by reversing the sins of Adam “. . . when he was enfleshed and became a human being, he summed up in himself the long history of the human race and so furnished us with salvation in a short and summary way, to the end that what we had lost in Adam.
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