Essay On Irenaeus

Irenaeus was born in second century Smyrna and was a student of Polycarp who in turn was a student of St. John the Evangelist. Eventually made bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul, Irenaeus is considered by some to be the Church's first systematic theologian. He primary opponents were the Gnostics who claimed a greater spiritual knowledge and believed the material world to be evil. As such, they asserted that Christ could not have been fully man. Rather, he either only appeared to be or else controlled the normal human man Jesus of Nazareth, leaving him at the crucifixion.

Irenaeus asserts that the beliefs of the Gnostics have no warrant in the teachings of Christ, the apostles, or the prophets. Rather, they use the writings of these in an unjustifiable …show more content…
Furthermore, God is both the creator of the universe and the father of Jesus Christ (31). Granting this, then, the heretics are shown to be false for what God created cannot be evil (32). Furthermore, had the apostles actually had any secret doctrines as the Gnostics believed they certainly would have handed them down to their successors the bishops (34). What the apostles did do was to commit the fullness of Christian truth to the church which anyone can now draw from at will. As such even in the absence of the scriptures the true doctrine can be know by reference to sacred tradition (35). Irenaeus next moves on to explain the doctrine of the Gnostics in regards to the incarnation. The Gnostics denied the true humanity of Christ, instead saying that he merely appeared human, that he merely passed through Mary as water through a tube, or that he descended on the man Jesus at his baptism (36). However, Irenaeus argues, this cannot be the case because Christ must recapitulate human experience for us and become the new Adam. Christ must be human to suffer and conquer sin as well as to unite humanity with God through God's association with it (37).What seems apparent from the situation Irenaeus