Irenaeus

141

Chapter twelve

Irenaeus and the Knowledge of God as Father

Text and Context

Peter widdicombe

I

n both Adversus haereses and The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, Irenaeus

uses the word Father to refer to God with great frequency.^1 It is a commonplace of

his theological vocabulary, and it is fundamental to his theology that it be understood

that the creator God of the Old Testament and the Father of Christ of the New Tes-

tament were one and the same. But did he have a conception of the fatherhood of

God? Indeed, did the word have any particular theological significance for him? The

question is not patient of a certain answer. He nowhere engages in a discussion of

the meaning of the word or why he thinks it appropriate to use it of God, and the

bulk of the evidence suggests that he used it unselfconsciously as a synonym for such

divine titles as “God,” “creator,” and “Lord.” There are, however, glimpses in Irenaeus’s

writings of what would become hallmarks of third- and fourth-century reflection on

the idea of divine fatherhood, a reflection that, beginning with Origen and reaching

doctrinal shape with Athanasius, would eventuate in the idea of divine fatherhood

being seen as fundamental to the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of salvation.

These glimpses mainly have to do with the knowledge that God is Father and with

how human beings come to that knowledge. They occur in a few passages scattered

throughout both Haer. and Dem. They suggest that something more is going on in Ire-

naeus’s use of fatherhood language than is to be found in the writings of his Christian

predecessors, something more that shows the potential in the second century for what

was to come in the later Christian tradition.

Irenaeus lived in a world in which for Greek, Jew, and Christian alike it was taken

for granted that God was to be referred to as Father, and this was no less true of those

against whom he directed Hae r. He was heir to what earlier studies on the fatherhood

of God in Western thought tended to regard as two distinct traditions of referring to

God as Father. Schrenk and Quell, in their well-known entries on πατήρ and related

words in the TWNT,^2 and Jeremias, in various studies,^3 identified two families of tradi-

tions of referring to God as Father—the Greek and the Judeo-Christian—which they

sharply contrasted with each other. The Greek conception they characterized as cosmic

and genealogical, and the biblical as historical and elective. The presence of the for-