164 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy
be found in the tradition, to insist on the true humanity of women and their centrality
to salvation history, and to defend a space in the tradition for women prophets in the
strongest language he has, Irenaeus’s appeal to women is, ultimately, to treat them sim-
ply as full human beings, with all the theological richness that that implies for him. His
message to them stands or falls on its own terms. Humanity is one, God is one, Christ
is one, the church is one, salvation is one. God is not two, or three, or thirty, or 365.
There is no aristocratic divine elite, a dinner party for thirty, refusing to get its hands
dirty by interacting with creation, waiting for spirits to return to their true home or not
as it may turn out. There is no Teflon-coated Christ who escapes all real suffering, or
visits it on someone else. The Spirit is not a spirit in the hands of a few, reserved for the
lucky ones who were born with the cosmological equivalent of a silver spoon in their
mouths. There is the God of love, the Christ who suffered and died to save humankind,
the Spirit poured out on all flesh, young and old, women and men, slave and free.
There is not a world where no one takes responsibility, where those born into privilege
save themselves and everyone else perishes. There is a God who created the world in
love, who takes responsibility for what has been created, even when it goes wrong,
and takes drastic action to restore it. There is a call to Christians to engage in return,
take responsibility and live as created beings in the world, and face whatever suffering
comes in the knowledge that Christ has suffered first and that the Holy Spirit is their
advocate. That is what Irenaeus has to offer, and does offer, the intelligent women who
are the target audience for the Gnostics. He can do little with the divine feminine, he
cannot rewrite the story of Eve, though he can proclaim its reversal, and he is cautious
in arguing for leading roles for women in a church which had inherited Paul’s apparent
prohibition on women speaking in public (for all Irenaeus is able to see that the roles
held by women Paul knows and commends are important and various). But he does
argue hard to protect a space for women prophets within the tradition, and to defend
women’s humanity. If theologians had followed him even to that extent for the last
eighteen hundred years, the feminists of the 1970s and 1980s would not have had quite
so much work to do.