Widdicombe—Irenaeus and the Knowledge of God as Father 147believer’s relationship with the Father is transformed from one of fear to one of love.
Referring to John 15:15 and Rom. 8:15, for instance, Origen says that Jesus becomes
the friend of those who initially as slaves feared him as Lord;^33 and he can sum up
his thinking about the matter by concluding simply that it is only when one loves
Jesus that God becomes one’s Father.^34 This, for Origen, culminates in the ability to
call God “Father” in prayer, the most intimate form of communication with God. It
is for this reason that Christ taught the disciples to pray using the words “our Father”
in the Lord’s Prayer,^35 words that Irenaeus neither quotes nor discusses, although he
does allude to the Lord’s Prayer.^36 Such an intense focus on the affective aspect of the
relationship between the believer and the Son, and thus the Father, we do not see in
the writings of Irenaeus, but in his conjoining of the word Father with the language
of “love,” we do see its beginnings.
Adoption as sons, according to Irenaeus, is brought about through participation
in the Word. In two passages, he makes this explicit. In Haer. III.18.7, he says that
it was incumbent on the “Mediator,” by virtue of his relationship with both God
and humankind, to bring both to “friendship and concord” (amicitia et concordia,
φιλία καὶ ὁμόνοια), for it is only through the “fellowship” (communio) that we receive
from God that we can “participate in the adoption of sons.” It is for this reason that
Christ assumed flesh and passed through every stage of life.^37 In Haer. III.19.1, we
find Irenaeus positing something of a formula of exchange between “Son” and “son-
ship through adoption.” Irenaeus explains that the purpose for which the “Word
became man” and “the Son of God became the Son of man” was that man, “having
been joined [commixtus] to the Word and receiving adoption, might become the
son of God.”^38
Irenaeus does not quite make a parallel between “Son” and “adopted sons” in the
manner later writers would do. Irenaeus does not say that it is because the Son is Son
that we may become sons—we are “joined” to the “Word,” not the “Son.”^39 Nor does
he say that it is specifically divine fatherhood that this “joining” through adoption
allows the believer to know. Nevertheless, it is clear that those who believe in Christ
do become sons and Irenaeus is prepared to include the adopted with the Father and
the Son, as those who are called gods in Psalm 81:1. Earlier, in Haer. III.6.1, he had
explained that Psalm 81:1, “God stood in the congregation of gods, he judges in the
midst of the gods,” “speaks of the Father and the Son and those who have received the
adoption, for they are the church.” Those to whom Psalm 81:6 (LXX), “I have said, you
are gods and all sons of the Most High,” is addressed are those “without doubt, who
have received the grace of adoption, by which ‘we cry, Abba, Father.’”^40
What Irenaeus thought was entailed in this standing with the Father and the Son,
however, is not patent. It has been argued that what Irenaeus understood by the word
“adoption” was “establishment as a son,”^41 and it is clear that he did not intend to sug-
gest that human beings were dehominized and made the ontological equal of the Son
(and the Father).^42 In Haer. IV.41.2-3,^43 Irenaeus, following, as he says, one of his pre-
decessors (whom he does not identify), explains that the word son has two meanings,
son “according to nature” and “son according to teaching.” According to nature, “son”
applies both to the offspring and to the work of the creator, the difference between