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How did
Irenaeus view the Old Testament?
By Leon Sim
Irenaeus
was born in Smyrna in 130 AD, where from a young age, he studied under
Polycarp, and then went on to become the Bishop of Lyons from 177 AD till
his death in around 202 AD. Other than a few
fragments of Irenaeus’ writings, only two complete works of his are
available today: the five-volume The
Detection and Refutation of False Knowledge, usually known as Against Heresies; and the much
shorter and later The Demonstration
of the Apostolic Preaching. Although Irenaeus was not a prolific
writer, compared to the standards of later church fathers, it is clear
from both Against Heresies and Demonstration that his
contribution to the Church is both varied and immense. He is widely
acknowledged to be the first systematic theologian although some would
argue that Irenaeus was “a child of the Church’ who simply weaved
together and taught that which was handed down to him. According to
Brunner:
He
was a systematic theologian of the first rank, indeed the greatest in the
Early Church, if this is what it means to be a systematic theologian: to
perceive connections between truths, and to know which belongs to which.
No other thinker was able to weld ideas together which others allowed to
slip as he was able to do, not even Augustine or Athanasius.
Such
high accolade is fitting for Irenaeus. As this analysis of Irenaeus’
attitude to the Old Testament will demonstrate, he held together the Old
and New Testaments, “anchoring the message of the Gospel in the long
history of God’s self-revealing and redemptive interaction with mankind.” In doing so, Irenaeus
demonstrates that the Old and New Testaments are united in proclaiming
the same doctrine of God and unique message of salvation through faith in
Christ.
That
Irenaeus was the most important of theologians in the second century can
be measured against the fact that neither Gnosticism nor Marcionism is
the ‘orthodoxy’ of the Christian Church today. Against Heresies and Demonstration
were both motivated by a pastoral concern to detect and combat the
‘homicidal doctrine’ of such heresies, whose proponents and followers
were from within the Church. Particularly
widespread were on the one hand, Gnosticism (in particular,
Valentinianism, a strand of Gnosticism championed by Valentinus), and on
the other, Marcionism. Although quite
different in their teachings, they both stem from a misuse,
misinterpretation and misunderstanding of Scripture. Seeing this,
Irenaeus therefore sought to provide a way in which Scripture may and
should be interpreted that will detect, guard against and combat such
heresies. Against the false claims of apostolicity, Irenaeus sets forth
and describes apostolic preaching that alone is authentically and
authoritatively Christian. Behr comments that what is striking is that in
doing so, especially in the Demonstration:
The
New Testament writings are not utilized by Irenaeus as the foundation for
his presentation… [Rather] the whole content of the apostolic preaching
is derived, for Irenaeus, from the Old Testament, which, in turn, implies
a recognition of the scriptural, that is, ultimate authority of the
apostolic preaching.
In other
words, for Irenaeus, Christian and apostolic preaching is based on, is
the same as and does not depart from that which is proclaimed by the Old
Testament. This is immensely important in the context of the heresies
that Irenaeus was seeking to drive out of the Church. On the one hand,
Gnosticism claimed, among other things, a multiplicity of gods as well as
apostolic authority for their writings and interpretation of Scripture. Against this, it was
important for Irenaeus to limit that which is apostolic to that which is
consistent with the Old Testament – in other words that which is found in
the New Testament rather than the so called ‘secret’ teachings of Jesus.
On the other hand, Marcionism claimed that the Old and New Testament
proclaimed two different gods who are “separated from each other by an infinite
distance,” thus rejecting the Old
Testament and its cruel god. Again, the solution
is to prove that both the Old and New Testament proclaim one and the same
God, that is, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and no other.
To what
extent, however, does Irenaeus see and understand the Old Testament to be
Christian? Firstly, it is clear that for Irenaeus, the Christian God and
the Christian message of salvation is the object of revelation in the Old
Testament. It is worth quoting Irenaeus from three separate writings to
illustrate that this is a consistent line of thought in his mind:
The law was our pedagogue [to bring us] to
Christ… the law never hindered [anyone] from believing in the Son of God;
nay, but it even exhorted them so to do, saying that men can be saved in
no other way from the old wound of the serpent than by believing in Him
who, in the likeness of sinful flesh, is lifted up from the earth upon
the tree of martyrdom, and draws all things to Himself, and vivifies the
dead. (Against Heresies 4.2.7)
Hither the prophets were sent from God; by the
Holy Spirit they admonished the people and returned [them] to the God of
the patriarchs, the Almighty, [and] were made heralds of the revelation
of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. (Demonstration 30)
With regard to Christ, the law and the prophets
and the evangelists have proclaimed that He was born of a virgin, that He
suffered upon a beam of wood, and that He appeared from the dead; that He
also ascended to the heavens, and was glorified by the Father, and is the
Eternal King. (Fragments 53)
From the
above quotations, a second observation may be made. The Old Testament is
Christian for Irenaeus because he sees saving faith to be the same in
both the Old and New Testament; not faith in a general sense, but faith in Christ (and His
work) that was first of all offered
by Christ:
[Abraham’s]
faith and ours are one and the same: for he believed in things future, as if they
were already accomplished, because of the promise of God; and in like
manner do we also, because of the promise of God, behold through faith
that inheritance [laid up for us] in the [future] kingdom.
It is important to highlight that contrary to
popular belief, Irenaeus does not hold that the Christian message is only
latent in the Old Testament – that until the advent of the incarnate
Christ, the Christian message of the Old Testament was not yet made known
and was previously obscure. Still less would
Irenaeus agree with the statement that “the Old Testament is
pre-Christian and never mentions any of the distinctives of the Christian
faith… [and that] the people of Israel are not Christians and cannot be
said to live ‘Christian’ lives.”
Rather, for Irenaeus there is no
difference between people in the Old and New Testament in terms of the
knowledge of God and the message of salvation through Christ and His
work, and he even cites them as model Christians, the firstfruits of
others to follow.
The only difference is in fulfillment:
For nothing else [but
baptism] was wanting to him who had been already instructed by the
prophets: he was not ignorant of God the Father, nor of the rules as to
the [proper] manner of life, but was merely ignorant of the advent of the
Son of God.
But how did people come to know the Son of God
before the incarnation? This leads to a third observation. Irenaeus
treats the Old Testament as inherently and explicitly Christian because
he sees how the pre-incarnate Christ was known then. He understands all
theophanies to be christophanies, that all appearances of God are the
pre-incarnate appearances of the Son of God, and thus characters in the
Old Testament knew the Son of God before His incarnation. Irenaeus says that
it is specifically the Word of God who “was always walking in [the Garden
of Eden],”
who “used to converse with
the ante-Mosaic patriarchs,” and who “spoke with
Moses.”
In Demonstration 44-45, he
equates the Son of God with the Word of God, and even emphasises that it
is the Son, and not the Father, who talked with Abraham. Elsewhere, he
also equates the Angel of the LORD with the same divine Word. Yet it is not only
those who met the pre-incarnate Word who knew and trusted in Him. As
mentioned above, Irenaeus taught that those who read Moses and the
prophets also heard Christ’s words, were introduced to Christ and were
exhorted to trust in Him.
Thus far, it has been observed that Irenaeus
treats the Old Testament as Christian for Christological reasons. A
fourth observation, however, would be that he treats the Hebrew
Scriptures as Christian because he sees them as Trinitarian in content
and nature. With Gnosticism and Marcionism in mind, Book 3 of Against Heresies sets out to
establish two scriptural principles. Firstly, that the Father (the
Creator) and the Son (the Saviour) are not two different gods but one;
and secondly, that God is one in the sense that the God of the Old
Testament is the God of the New Testament. To make these two
points, Irenaeus uses Genesis 19:24, Psalm 45 and Psalm 110, and shows
how the Father, Son and Holy Spirit work together and how there is a
clear distinction between “Him who is anointed as Son, and Him who does
anoint, that is, the Father,” and Him with whom the Father anoints the
Son, the Holy Spirit.
On the Trinitarian nature of Scripture, Irenaeus
says:
The Spirit demonstrates the Word, and, because
of this, the prophets announced the Son of God, while the Word
articulates the Spirit, and therefore it is He Himself who interprets the
prophets and brings man to the Father.
This leads naturally to a fifth observation. Not
only does Irenaeus see Christ and the Trinitarian God to be the object of
revelation, but he also sees Christ to be the subject or agent of God’s
revelation. For Irenaeus, it is not merely incidental, but crucial, that
it is the Word who spoke to the patriarchs and prophets, and “preach[ed]
both Himself and the Father alike,” as He does to those
in the New Testament. It is worth quoting Irenaeus’ explanation of
Matthew 11:27 at length to capture his own emphasis:
The Son, administering
all things for the Father, works from beginning even to the end, and
without Him no man can attain the knowledge of God… For “shall reveal”
was said not with reference to the future alone, as if then [only] the
Word had begun to manifest the Father when He was born of Mary, but it
applies indifferently throughout all time. For the Son, being present
with His own handiwork from the beginning, reveals the Father to all; to
whom He wills, and when He wills, and as the Father wills. Wherefore,
then, in all things, and through all things, there is one God, the
Father, and one Word, and one Son, and one Spirit, and one salvation to
all who believe in Him.
It is also worth noting that while Irenaeus does
not use the formulaic language of the later creeds, he nevertheless seems
to have a mature and profound grasp of the relationships and roles within
the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as well as of how they relate to
Creation.
This Trinitarian understanding of God of course affects how Irenaeus
interprets the Old Testament. This will be examined next, but to summarise
the observations made above, it is clear that for Irenaeus, the Old
Testament is “the revelation, not of another being than the Father
revealed in Christ through the Spirit,” that is, the same
God revealed in the New Testament; and “the
faithful of the Old Testament could have had such complete knowledge of
the apostolic gospel… because of Irenaeus’ belief that the one Father
always reveals himself through his one Word.”
Moving on to evaluate Irenaeus’ attitude towards
the Old Testament, it is plain to see that his interpretation is
fundamentally influenced by his understanding of the being and economy of
the Triune God. In other words, there is a theological framework, a “rule
of faith”,
– the Trinitarian pattern of God in creation, salvation and revelation –
which “inform[s] the whole of Irenaeus’ interpretation of Scripture.” In one sense,
Irenaeus reads the Old Testament Christologically and Trinitarianly
because He sees that the Father does everything through the Son by the
Holy Spirit. In another sense, he also does so because he holds creation,
salvation and revelation together, that is, it is the Father’s purpose in
creation to save and bring men to Himself through the revelation of His
Word by the Spirit. Hence if there is to be salvation for humanity in the
Old Testament, it must be through the revelation of the Spirit-anointed
Son.
As such, Irenaeus does not only follow such a
framework but provides and encourages his readers to use such a
Trinitarian framework in their own interpretation of Scripture, to read
the Scriptures by faith in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. His purpose
in writing Demonstration is to
provide “a summary memorandum [of apostolic preaching], so that you may
find much in a little, and by means of this small [work] understand all
the members of the body of truth, and through a summary receive the
exposition of the things of God.” His overview of
Jesus Christ (from the virgin birth to the promised salvation of the
Gentiles) from various passages of the Old Testament is to provide clear
examples and a framework with which his readers may also understand the
rest (and perhaps less obviously Christian passages) of the Old
Testament.
In line with the purpose of this essay, we will
now move on to examine the source and validity of such a framework for
Irenaeus.
It is common for scholars to see Irenaeus as
somewhat of a pioneer in biblical interpretation, implying that such a
way of interpreting the Old Testament was previously unknown. Irenaeus, however,
does not make any claims of innovation with respect to Old Testament
interpretation. On the contrary, he “relies
on an already well established tradition of interpreting Scripture.”A quick survey
through the history of Old Testament interpretation would reveal that
this is an accurate observation.
Many scholars would agree that Justin Martyr was
“Irenaeus’ most
important precursor, and one who influenced him significantly.” Not surprising then
that as with Irenaeus, “when we read Justin’s own account of the
doctrine of God found in the Hebrew Scriptures we find a very robust
account of the Trinitarian God.” Here are two among
many examples in which we see the
similarity between Irenaeus and Justin. One is that both see the divine
Word (Logos) as the Mediator of revelation who appeared to and spoke to
Abraham and Moses among others. Secondly, both see
Isaiah 65:2 to be a prophecy or “sign of the Cross.”
Yet even in this explanation of Isaiah 65:2,
both Irenaeus and
Justin are following an earlier Church Father, Barnabas. Irenaeus also
follows Barnabas in interpreting “Let us
make man” in Genesis 1:26 as the words of the Father directed to the Son. More than that, in The Epistle of Barnabas, it is can
be seen that Barnabas also roots the authority of apostolic preaching in
the Old Testament, often employing typological methods in interpreting
the Old Testament. Behr, in the
introduction to his translation of Demonstration,
explains how Ignatius and members of the Christian community at the time
also saw “the archives,” that is, the Old
Testament to be inherently and explicitly Christian. Hence it is clear
that Irenaeus is neither a pioneer of Christological nor of typological
interpretations of the Old Testament, but is simply following the example
of other earlier and contemporary Fathers.
Irenaeus
himself leaves his readers without doubt that he simply seeks to “present
and defend” the tradition that “originates
from the apostles, [and] which is preserved by means of the succession of
presbyters in the Churches.” In some sense,
Irenaeus claims authority for what he is teaching from his relationship
with Polycarp, who was himself said to be a disciple of the Apostle John. More importantly though, over
and against the Gnostic claims of authority from the secret teachings of
Jesus and the apostles, and the Marcionite rejection of the Old Testament
and much of the New, Irenaeus claims authority by reverting “to the Scriptural proof furnished by
those apostles who did also write the Gospel.” Put another way, for Irenaeus,
the heretical Gnostics and Marcionites “warp Scripture because they read
it through non-scriptural principles, forcing Scripture to fit into an
alien mould” as they “depart
from the primitive succession.” According to
Irenaeus, Scripture alone mediates the true meaning of Scripture, or in
Irenaeus’ own words, “proofs [of the things
which are] contained in the Scriptures cannot be shown except from the
Scriptures themselves.” Thus, for Irenaeus, apostolic succession and tradition are
not authoritative in themselves. Rather, they are authoritative because,
and only because, they conform to Scripture. Thus while it is true that
Irenaeus reads and interprets the Old Testament with and through a
theological framework, it is because this framework and interpretative
method is provided by the Scriptures, and ultimately by Jesus Himself.
This can be seen in various ways.
First of
all, Irenaeus is seeking to interpret and understand the Old Testament in
the way Jesus Himself interpreted and understood the Old Testament. He
quotes from John 5:36-46 to show how Scripture, and Moses in particular,
wrote about Jesus, even claiming that “it would be endless to recount [the occasions] upon
which the Son of God is shown forth by Moses.” Luke 24:25 and
24:44-47 are also cited to show that all of the Old Testament is
explicitly about Jesus. Greidanus argues
that Luke 24:25-26 shows how “the Old Testament witness to Jesus was
difficult to detect,” as if the early
disciples struggled to see how “passages that did not have
messianic significance in Judaism now did in Christianity.” However, such struggles,
difficulties, failure or refusal to understand the Old Testament
Christologically are not due to obscurity of the texts, but stem from an
impious disregarding of “the order and the connection of the Scriptures.”
Secondly,
his theological assumption that the Word (pre-incarnate or incarnate) is
the only mediator and revelation of the Triune God, who thus appeared to
people in the Old Testament, is one that is also derived from Scripture,
in particular, from passages like Matthew 11:27, John 1:1 and John 1:18. Against Heresies 4.6, for example,
is an explanation from Matthew 11:27 of how Irenaeus arrives at the
conclusion that it must have been the pre-incarnate Word and no other who
is seen by those in the Old Testament and who mediates any knowledge of
God.
He even points out the erroneous idea that this is only a
post-incarnation truth. Irenaeus cites his opponents as mis-rendering the
verse, “‘No man knew the
Father, but the Son; nor the Son, but the Father, and he to whom the Son
has willed to reveal [Him];’ and they explain it as if the true God were
known to none prior to our Lord’s advent.”[59] According to
Irenaeus, therefore, anyone who follows in the non-Christological
interpretation of the Old Testament – assuming that the Father, Son and
Holy Spirit were unknown or unrecognisable through the Old Testament
itself – have followed unbelieving Jews in departing from the true God
and any knowledge of Him:
Therefore
have the Jews departed from God in not receiving His Word, but imagining
that they could know the Father [apart] by Himself, without the Word,
that is, without the Son; they being ignorant of that God who spake in
human shape to Abraham, and again to Moses.[60]
Thirdly,
even his typological interpretation of the Old Testament is a method that
is utilised by the apostles and Jesus. Some scholars, for example
Greidanus, seem to equate typological interpretation with a reading of
Christ back into the Old Testament, and thus conclude that such a
hermeneutical method “is not a good option because it forces the text to
say something it does not intend to say.” Yet, Irenaeus
believed that he was merely following in the footsteps of Paul, pointing
to Paul’s interpretation of Exodus 35:40 in 1 Corinthians 10:11 to
justify typology.[62]
Irenaeus also followed Jesus’ use of typology, for example, in seeing the
lifting of the bronze serpent by Moses to be a type of the Cross.
Fourthly,
Irenaeus seems to follow the New Testament in assuming that the Old
Testament writings had a clear Christian message in their original
historical context. Some scholars, while agreeing that there is a
Christian message in the Old Testament, would hold that the Old Testament
writers did not know the Christian meaning, that they wrote more than
they knew, and that Jesus and the New Testament provide a new Christian
meaning to what was originally Jewish. Yet Irenaeus cites
Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 to illustrate how David could not have been
writing about his own resurrection (Psalm 16) or exaltation to the right
hand of the Father (Psalm 110), but rather was writing about Jesus
Christ, seeing that David died and remained buried. Again, using such
historical context provided by the Old Testament itself, in explaining
Psalm 132:10-12, Irenaeus shows how those verses could refer to no other
than the eternal king who will be born of David, Christ, seeing that
“none of the sons of David reigned ‘for ever.’”
Fifthly,
Irenaeus derives his Christological, Trinitarian and Christian
understanding of the Old Testament from a careful reading of the Hebrew
Scriptures themselves. Or as Blackham puts it, Irenaeus is “careful in delineating the divine Persons in the Godhead in his
exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures.” Thus, in Genesis 19:24,
Irenaeus sees a distinction between the LORD who rained fire and
brimstone upon Sodom and Gomorrah and the LORD who is in the heavens,
saying “it points out that the Son, who had been talking with Abraham,
had received power to judge the Sodomites for their wickedness” from the Father in heaven. Such identification
of different Persons of the Trinity from careful exegesis is of course
not alien to those before Irenaeus, as can be seen from the long list of
such exegesis in Hebrews 1.
Thus in terms of source and validity, it does
seem that Irenaeus’ framework for interpreting the Old Testament is, as
he claims, derived from and validated by Scripture itself. Irenaeus’ ‘sola scriptura’ principle in
interpretation was crucial and successful in defending the Church against
Gnostic and Marcionite heresies, demonstrating that the Old Testament is
as inherently and explicitly Christian as the New Testament. He held up the
unity of Church’s ancient faith, “a unity that flows from the fact that
one Father by His one Word, in one Spirit, gives one truth to one Church
for all,”
and maintained that it is the same Triune God who creates, reveals and
redeems in the Old Testament as in the New.
One important question arises from Irenaeus’
(and Scripture’s) insistence that the Old Testament believers did not
worship a different God, but had the same faith as Christians, and that
it is through the Word that they knew the Father. If there is no
fundamental difference between the Old and New Testaments, then what was
the point of the incarnation? After setting out
the unity of the Testaments in Against
Heresies 3 and 4, Irenaeus begins Book 5 by summing up his
understanding of the incarnation: “the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did,
through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us
to be even what He is Himself.” As such, the
incarnation of the Word was not primarily revelatory, since it is not the
first appearance of the Word. What is ‘new’ with the incarnation is that
“the same Word known by the patriarchs had now come in the flesh.” This is not a mere
theophany, as in the Old Testament. Rather, the
incarnation fulfilled that which was promised in, by and through the Old
Testament, that is, “the salvation of the flesh that the Old Testament
believers looked forward to.” Believers during
and after the incarnation and work of Jesus Christ thus possess, not
necessarily a greater degree of knowledge, but “a higher degree of
exultation, rejoicing because of the King’s arrival” and a stronger
faith, knowing that what was preached in the Old Testament is undeniably
true.
In conclusion, Irenaeus’ attitude towards the
Old Testament, his use and interpretation of it, as presented in his
writings, are very clearly stimulated by the heresies he faced. Yet it is
not the heresies, but Scripture itself that determines Irenaeus’
Trinitarian “rule of faith” in interpretation.
Of course, as Blackham points out, theological “assumptions about the
Living God have profound exegetical implications” that may hide or
reveal the Trinitarian God of the Hebrew Scripture (as with the New
Testament). Some do “exclude such [Trinitarian] possibilities in advance” when approaching
the Old Testament. As Torrance observes, this “may not accord very well
with the hermeneutical standards of some modern scholars.” However, this essay
has argued that Irenaeus stands on scriptural foundations by interpreting the Old
Testament through his Trinitarian “rule of faith.” In doing so, Irenaeus
bequeathed to the Church two inter-related ideas. On the
one hand, his writings gave the Church confidence that apostolic
preaching was in accordance with what is written in the ancient Old
Testament. On the other hand, he gave many examples and a framework with
which to read and discover the treasure in the Old Testament (as well as
in the New), that is, Jesus Christ. This was not merely an intellectual
issue for Irenaeus but a matter of life and death. For Irenaeus, it is
through Jesus alone that one is drawn by the Spirit to the Father
Himself, thus sharing and participating in the life of God, and
rediscovering one’s humanity. Writing pastorally, Irenaeus thus warned
that to depart from this scriptural “rule of faith” is to “wallow in all
error,”
blasphemous, non-Christian and worst of all, “homicidal”.
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