The heresies of Gnosticism and Marcionism have had a lasting impact on Christianity. Pervasive, resilient, and syncretic, Gnosticism has encouraged the Church to write creeds and define doctrine while occasionally seeping into Christian belief. Marcionism also influenced the writing of creeds and other important documents, many of which are still important today. One of the earliest and most important documents is Exposure and Refutation of Knowledge Falsely So-Called (commonly known as Against Heresies), written by St. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130 – c. 202 ce). Against Heresies continues to influence Christian doctrine today. Using Scripture, Christian tradition, reason, and experience, Irenaus builds a defense against Marcionism and Gnosticism that is firmly founded on his Christology. Irenaeus’ Christology makes three important claims: that Christ came as the Second Adam to sum up (“recapitulate”) all things and thus redeem humanity, that Christ was truly human, and that Christ was truly divine.
As early as the second century, the Church found itself facing a problem: How could Jesus, who bled and died a shameful, painful death, be divine? How could Jesus, who worked miracles, arose from death, and ascended into heaven, be human? In other words, was Jesus only divine, only human, or some kind of mixture of both? This is the question of incarnation, or “the process by which God is understood to have become human flesh (i.e., taken on a human life) in Jesus of Nazareth.”1 The New Testament itself seems to be clear on the subject. The Gospels present Jesus as being both divine and human, and this claim is echoed in the epistles. Yet questions remained. How could God become human? How could God die?
Gnosticism was one attempt at a solution to the question. Gnosticism arose in the late first or early second century as a loose and hard to define group of beliefs and doctrines accumulated from various sources.2 Second century sects held that “the visible world [is] alien to the supreme God and as incompatible with truth as darkness with light.”3 They also asserted that “elect souls are divine sparks temporarily imprisoned in matter as a result of a precosmic catastrophe,” but that these sparks or souls are redeemed by a savior sent from the transcendent God.4 The savior’s teachings “awake the sleepwalking soul to a consciousness of its origins and destiny, and also include instructions how to pass the blind planetary powers which bar the soul's ascent to its celestial home.”5 This teaching or secret knowledge is called gnosis, from which the heresy draws its name.6 The two main problems that Gnosticism presents to Christianity are that it splits God into two, one evil and one good, and then re-frames God’s work in the world as a redemption from creation rather than a redemption of creation.7 For many years, one of our best sources of Gnostic thought was Against Heresies, along with other works from the same time period. In arguing against Gnosticism, Irenaeus gives us a Christology built on the theory of recapitulation and the idea that Christ was truly human and truly divine.
Irenaeus spends less time explicitly building his idea of recapitulation than he spends on the next two (namely, that Christ was both human and divine). Yet it is the basis for his Christology and appears throughout his work. Irenaeus argues that Christ was the Second Adam who successfully took on the same flesh, same temptations, etc. and thereby healed humanity’s sinful nature. In one poignant metaphor, Irenaeus compares Eve and Adam taking the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil with Jesus refusing to turn stones into bread in the wilderness: “For as at the beginning it was by means of food that [the enemy] persuaded man, although not suffering hunger, to transgress God’s commandments, so in the end he did not succeed in persuading him that was hungered to take that food which proceeded from God.”8 Throughout his writing, Irenaeus shows that where Adam failed, Christ succeeded. “He has therefore, in his work of recapitulation, summed up all things, both waging war against our enemy, and crushing him who had at the beginning led us away captives in Adam, and trampled upon his head . . . .”9 Irenaeus makes a comparison between the way sin entered the world through Eve and the way Christ was born of a human woman, “in order that, as our species went down to death through a vanquished man, so we may ascend to life again through a victorious one; and as through a man death received the palm [of victory] against us, so again by a man we may receive the palm against death.”10 For Irenaeus, recapitulation is important because it is the way that Christ redeems the sins of humanity. Key to Christ’s recapitulation of Adam is the fact that Christ had to be fully human and fully divine.
Irenaeus argues that in order to be truly human Jesus Christ had to take on human flesh by being born of a woman. To say otherwise would be to deny the relationship between Jesus and Adam. Further, it would mean that Jesus “appeared putatively as man when he was not man, and that he was made man while taking nothing from man.”11 Being made human without taking anything from humanity is problematic because it means that Christ is not truly human: “For if he did not receive the substance of flesh from a human being, he neither was made man nor the Son of man; and if he was not made what we were, he did no great thing in what he suffered and endured.”12 Besides, Irenaeus continues, why even bother to be born of Mary if he wasn’t going to take anything from her?13 Similarly, it was important that Jesus be born of Mary and not formed from dust again, “that there might not be another formation called into being, nor any other which should [require to] be saved, but that the very same formation should be summed up [in Christ as had existed in Adam], the analogy having been preserved.”14
Irenaeus seems to consider that Christ’s divinity is not under question, yet he does give us some useful guidance. He argues that the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, were active in creation with the Father—a connection with our previous discussion about the Trinitarian nature of God.15 Irenaeus writes that “there are some who say that Jesus was merely a receptacle of Christ, upon whom the Christ, as a dove, descended from above . . . .”16 He appeals to the author of the Fourth Gospel, writing “that John knew the one and the same Word of God, and that He was the only begotten, and that He became incarnate for our salvation, Jesus Christ our Lord, I have sufficiently proved from the word of John himself.”17 He goes on to quote Matthew 1:20: “. . . an angel of the Lord appeared to [Joseph] in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.’” He concludes, “we should not imagine that Jesus was one, and Christ another, but should know them to be one and the same.”18 He argues that a completely human parentage—being the earthly son of Joseph—would cause Jesus to be less than God. His reasoning is that Adam was formed “from untilled and as yet virgin soil . . . by the hand of God, that is, by the Word of God. . . .”19 Had Adam had human parentage and was thus born of human seed, then saying that Jesus was born of human seed would be reasonable. “But if the former was taken from the dust, and God was his Maker, it was incumbent that the latter also, making a recapitulation in himself, should be formed as man by God, to have an analogy with the former as respects his origin.”20
Irenaeus takes another tack with the idea that Jesus forgave sins—something that a human prophet cannot fully do, but which the Son of God has full authority to do. “[I]n what way can sins be truly remitted, unless that He against whom we have sinned has Himself granted remission "through the bowels of mercy of our God . . . ?”21 By remitting sins, Christ healed humanity and revealed himself as the Son of God.22 Only God can forgive sins, and Christ’s action thus proved that Jesus is God.23
Irenaeus’ Christology is that Jesus Christ came into the world as the Second Adam, taking on human nature to bring salvation and forgiveness to humanity. Yet Christ could not offer salvation and forgiveness without being divine. While he does not attempt to define the hypostatic union that later theologians would come to understand, he does see both natures as being equally important, equally visible, and equally manifest in the person of Jesus Christ. In arguing Christ’s divinity and humanity, Irenaeus not only answers the heretical leanings of Gnosticism and Marcionism, he also offers us a beautiful and vitally important Christology for believers today.
1“Incarnation” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. Ian A. McFarland, et.al., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 235.
2“Gnosticism” in Dictionary of Christian Theology, 199-200.
3John Myles Dillon, “Gnosticism,” The Oxford Classical Dictionary, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
4Dillon, “Gnosticism” in Oxford Dictionary.
5Dillon, “Gnosticism” in Oxford Dictionary.
6There appears to be a great deal of controversy recently over the beliefs of Gnosticism, and even over whether it can rightly be named and defined at all.
7James Lee, “Gnosticism, 2nd Century,” class handout for Christian Heritage I, September 13, 2021.
8Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Cox, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1885), revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103420.htm, V.21.2. Christ’s hunger is also an important part of his proof that Christ was fully human, as we shall see.
9Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” V.21.1.
10Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” V.21.1.
11Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” III.22.1.
12Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” III.22.1. This idea was also expressed by Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 329–390), Archbishop of Constantinople in the fourth century: “For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.” Gregory of Nazianzus, “Epistle 101:To Cledonius the Priest Against Apollinarius” in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Cox, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1885), revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3103a.htm
13Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” III.22.2. “Still further, if He had taken nothing of Mary, He would never have availed Himself of those kinds of food which are derived from the earth, by which that body which has been taken from the earth is nourished; nor would He have hungered, fasting those forty days, like Moses and Elias, unless His body was craving after its own proper nourishment . . . .” Irenaeus’ emphasis on Jesus eating real food, being weary, and bleeding is interesting because it calls on both experience and reason to show that only a human could suffer from these things.
14Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” III.22.10.
15Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” IV.20.
16Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” III.16.1.
17Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” III.16.2.
18Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” III.16.2.
19Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” III.22.10.
20Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” III.22.10.
21Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” V.17.1.
22Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” V.17.3.
23Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” V.17.3.
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