Irenaeus

P. Parvis—Packaging Irenaeus: Adversus haereses and Its Editors 191

you, Most Serene Frederick, in accordance with the augury of your name, attempt to

join together the Christians in your lands, divided by controversy so gravely from each

other, and to reconcile them in peace” (Dedicatio, 2–3).

Where one or the other is wrong, Lutherans should be prepared to learn from Cal-

vinists and Calvinists from Lutherans.

But where both have turned aside from ancient paths, following their own prede-

cessors, but where those predecessors were wrongly carried away by a commend-

able zeal directed against the new traditions and huge abuses of the latter-day

Roman Church and went on to scorn as well the old traditions of the Catholic

Church and to reject the right use of certain sacred practices, slipping, as often

happens, from one extreme to the other—there (in those circumstances) let both

sides step back and return to the royal road—that is, the middle way and primi-

tive form. And thus, truly Reformed, let them grow together into perfect union

with the Christians of primitive times and mutual union among themselves.

“The writings of the most ancient Fathers” can teach us the doctrine and the ways
of primitive Christianity, but “even Irenaeus by himself... speaks in his books so
clearly that if these and certain other dissident parties should wish to accept him as an
arbiter of peace and to hear him, every controversy would have an end and the whole
Church would have peace” (Dedicatio, 4–5). And he concludes his dedication with an
invocation of the wish of Erasmus, expressed “in the Dedication of the first edition of
Irenaeus nearly two hundred years ago ‘that some Irenaeuses might arise, who, in the
spirit of the Gospel, would restore the world to concord.’”^23
It was a heart-felt plea. Grabe’s theological formation had been in the world of
Lutheran “syncretism,” with which his father, a Professor in Königsberg, was intimately
involved. The “syncretists” were the heirs of Georg Calixtus, who saw the faith of the
first five centuries and the supposed ubiquity and uniformity of ancient doctrine as the
basis for the reconcilation and reunion of Lutherans, Calvinists, and Roman Catholics,
and they were bitterly opposed by the pastors of Königsberg.
Grabe began to have doubts about the whole Lutheran system and to incline more
and more toward Catholicism. In 1694 he was ordered to submit a written statement
of his “Dubia” to the Consistory of Samland. This led to his arrest and a short impris-
onment. He eventually fled to Breslau, with the intention of becoming a Catholic, but
became persuaded that the only reasonable exegesis of the Apocalypse was that the
whore of Babylon was indeed the church of Rome, which rather dissuaded him.
In the spring of 1697, he was received into the Anglican Church in Hamburg. From
there he made his way to England and found shelter in the academic and ecclesiasti-
cal life of Oxford. There a great burst of creative energy saw his most brilliant patristic
work done. The two volumes of his annotated anthology of second-century texts, the
Spicilegium, appeared in 1698 –1699; a distinguished edition of Justin’s First Apology in
1700; and his Irenaeus in 1702.^24 The Anglican Church as a via media, resting securely
on the foundation of the early Fathers—not the last time a High Churchman would
work his way to that sort of position in Oxford.