Yesterday, June 28, the Episcopal Church marked the life and work of St. Irenaeus of Lyons. Although the dates of his birth and death are uncertain, we know Irenaeus lived during the second century CE. As a young adult, perhaps even as a teenager, Irenaeus took Christianity to Lyons, in southern France, where he was later ordained a presbyter (priest). He had learned his faith from Polycarp, a venerable early Church leader (and later martyr) who had himself learned from John the Evangelist. Irenaeus lived during a time of Christian persecution, before the Roman empire had adopted Christianity as a unifying religion. While away in Rome on church business, the bishop of Lyons died in prison and Irenaeus was elected to replace him.
The church business Irenaeus traveled to handle is what he is remembered for. During the first few centuries of the Church, there was great debate over doctrine (though perhaps this is part of the essential nature of being the Church, since there are plenty of continuing debates over doctrine today). There was no central Christian authority and different communities from all sides of the Mediterranean and throughout the Middle East had their own unique flavors of belief and practice. What were the tenets of this new faith of Christ followers? How was scripture to be interpreted (and what counted as scripture)? How did Jesus being human and divine work? How did creation come to be?
Irenaeus was dispatched to Rome to mediate conflict coming out of all these questions and different answers to them. In particular, he went to address the creeping influence of gnosticism (gnosis is Greek for knowing; gnostics believed that Christ came to reveal sp). Rather than a singular alternative religion, what scholars call gnosticism today was a collection of philosophies and beliefs that shared certain characteristics – all of which were close enough to Christianity to be confused for it. Irenaeus went to clear things up (he also wrote a book about it).
One central feature of gnosticism was an assertion that there were two Gods instead of one (Triune) God: the God of Hebrew scripture, and the God of (what would become) the New Testament. Gnostics believed that the God of Hebrew Scriptrue formed the world out of matter and was subordinate and inferior to the New Testament God, who was ineffable and transcendent and revealed in Christ. (A very simplified equation of another gnostic belief: material world < spiritual world; matter = bad, spirit = good. This makes things like the Creation and the Incarnation kind of tricky.) Christ, in turn, was an emissary from a higher realm who descended and took up residence in the body of Jesus (eek!) to reveal secret mysteries to spiritual men and women. (To be clear, this is not Christianity!)
Irenaeus wrote against all of this (and more) using the “rule of faith,” asserting with scriptural backing from Deuteronomy and Corinthians that “there is one God, ‘maker of heaven and earth, who formed man…called Abraham, led the people [of Israel] from the land of Egypt, spoke with Moses, gave the law, sent the prophets,’ and is also ‘the Father or our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Christian faith did not begin with Christ,” as the gnostics held, but “had its beginnings with God the creator who had given the law to the Jewish people and sent the prophets” (Wilken, 44). There was only one God, and that God was present throughout the entire story.
The rule of faith I mentioned above was an oral tradition in the early church. Just like there was no cannonical Bible, there were no doctrinal creeds in the second century (the first version of the Nicene Creed was affirmed in 325 CE). To profess their faith, Christians preparing for baptism were asked a set of three questions about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “We believe, wrote Irenaeus, in ‘one God almighty from whom are all things…and in the Son of God Jesus Christ our Lord….who became man, and in the Spirit of God’” (44). This rule, which had been handed down orally and was part of the tradition of Christian teachings, was key to scriptural interpretation for Irenaeus. It was the pattern, the rhythm of belief, that gave meaning to the whole (44-45). Not only was there one God, who created all things, but that God became flesh and was present as the Spirit of God as well.
We carry the imprint of Irenaeus in our faith today. We affirm that there is one Triune God, that our faith stretches back to the stories of Genesis, and that Creation – the physical world – are good. And, we understand our apostolic (which is to stay, beginning with the apostles of Jesus) faith to be “known through the witness of persons and the teachings and practices of a community that extend[s] back in time” (45). We are part of a rich, beautiful, troubling, inspiring, confounding lineage of faith, and Anglicanism draws deeply from the well of Christian tradition in our belief and practice. What we do and say and sing and pray is connected to these ancient conversations.
If all of this feels a little esoteric, I’ll leave you with this. I am fresh off a beach vacation, during which I watched Elliott (now 8 ½ months old!) eat a lot of sand and begin to learn to crawl. He was moving his body and experiencing new parts of Creation in new ways. It was wonderful! Reflecting on it, and on Irenaeus, I am grateful that my tradition affirms that his body is Good and that so is the sand he ate. The same is true of my body, and yours, no matter our frustrations with them or their limitations or what society tells us about them. There is nothing that Elliott or you or I have to do to access salvation, no secret knowledge out of reach – it has been given freely to us, by a God who also had the body of a baby and probably ate some dirt and sand, too. We are already loved and Good – because we are made by the God who created the whole world (including all that sand) and called it Good and at whose heart is love. And we can rest in God’s heart, with ancestors like Abraham and Sarah and Irenaeus, eternally.
~Rebecca