210 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, LegacyAn Ecclesiastical Legacy
This strange observation brings me to my final heading: the question of an ecclesiasti-
cal dimension to the Irenaean legacy. Apart from the doctrinal, dogmatic, heresio-
logical, and other theological contexts of the patristic age, is there any sense in which
Irenaeus contributes to the ecclesiastical heritage of Christianity? Here I would suggest
that the answer is a strong “yes” precisely because the answer to the question of a direct
theological influence in the patristic era is a “no.” Irenaeus’s legacy is borne out in the
ecclesiastical context of which he was such an ardent defender, precisely because Ire-
naeus was successful in doing just what he set out to do: articulate the apostolic faith in
a manner that preserves its authenticity and makes it newly immediate to each genera-
tion, without introducing the kind of “creative” innovations he so laments in others.
When we examine the textual evidence of Irenaeus’s influence on immediate and
future patristic writers, as we have done above, the lopsidedness of their testimony
becomes overwhelmingly clear. What is relayed and re-presented in their testimony
is Irenaeus the polemicist, Irenaeus the diplomat, Irenaeus the “philosopher.” Not Ire-
naeus the theologian. And the most sensible interpretation of the almost complete lack
of any theological reflection on Irenaeus by future generations is that he was perceived
as articulating and advancing a theological vision that was not unique, not unexpected,
not “nameable” as stemming particularly from him. Irenaeus’s theology was simply
the church’s theology; and though in the second century we are speaking of an era
before there existed any universally agreed-upon mode of articulating, of expressing,
that theological vision (and so Irenaeus may speak in language, in images, that are not
known to or embraced by others), the lack of theological attention paid to Irenaeus’s
works demonstrates that what readers experienced, when they read his works, was
a theology they already knew. This is reinforced by the rather different testimony of
Augustine, who does make theological use of Irenaeus, but does so precisely to support
a doctrinal position that challenged traditional expressions—that represented some-
thing new, something different.
It is possible, of course, to interpret the contemporary and later treatment of Ire-
naeus in another way: as evidence that his theological views were perceived as unhelp-
ful, incomplete, problematic. Irenaean scholarship of the last century was certainly
not without those who attempted just this. But here the evidence is too strong against.
Recent studies of Irenaeus—including the ongoing work evidenced in the scholars and
studies represented in this volume—have simply given us too much evidence of Ire-
naeus’s theological acumen to allow such a reading, and have similarly shown that
much of the criticism levelled against Irenaeus in this regard stems from anachronistic
readings of later Nicene developments back into the early generations of the church, in
the light of which many (if not most) pre-Nicene figures are found wanting.
Perhaps the greatest testimony to the Irenaean legacy comes in the fact that the
theological vision by which we characterize him today does carry on in the church,
even if the vicissitudes of history are such that other forms of expression became so
dominant, at least in certain areas, that what struck his contemporaries simply as
“Christian theology” strike us today as “Irenaean theology.” The church has never been
without those who expressed a vision of incarnational soteriology that is wholly in