Widdicombe—Irenaeus and the Knowledge of God as Father 149Thus, in the end those who become “perfect sons” will know the Father “as now
only the Son knows the Father.”^47 But we should not press our author too hard. The
topic of the knowledge of God as Father is not his concern in the passage. Whatever it
means for Irenaeus for those adopted as sons to stand in church as gods together with
the Father and the Son, he does not spell it out in terms of divine fatherhood. This may
reflect in part the fact that in the passages where he distinguishes the description of
God as Father from other descriptions, Irenaeus is mainly concerned with the human
being’s knowledge of God and not with the divine nature itself and the relationships
within it. He says nothing about the Father-Son relation that turns on the description
of God as Father. He does not use the description, for instance, to argue for the eternal
generation of the Son, as Origen and Athanasius were to do, nor seemingly does it lead
him to think about the Father-Son relation in affective terms as it did them.
That Origen, and then Athanasius, thought of God as Father and Son in the way
they did reflects in large part the way in which they read the Gospel of John. Irenaeus,
by contrast, tends to use verses from the Fourth Gospel such as 1:18, “No one has ever
seen God; the only Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known,”
not to address the immanent life of the Trinity, but rather to address its economic
expression. He repeatedly cites it, in much the same way as he does Matthew 11:27
(Luke 10:22), to help establish his fundamental concern to demonstrate that Christ
uniquely reveals the one God who is both creator and Father.^48
But this should not surprise us. It is with the economic activity of God that Irenaeus
is mainly concerned throughout his theology and there is, accordingly, little sense of
an intimate, immanent life of God into which the believer may be drawn. As we have
seen, in his few references to the knowledge that God is Father, Irenaeus’s focus lies on
the human perception of the divine and, to the extent that there is an affective element
to that, his focus lies on the transformation of the human experience of God. But, how-
ever infrequent his references to knowing God, and however brief and not joined-up
his comments about this knowledge, what they tell us is that there is no doubt that the
Pauline imagery of adoption and the Johannine of Christ as friend left their impress
on his understanding of salvation. For the Bishop of Lyon, whatever the nature of the
believer’s encounter with God in heaven, we can conclude that the revelation of God in
Christ effected a transformation in the believer’s knowledge of God, a transformation
which allowed one in this life at least to encounter God no longer as Lord and in fear
but as Father and in love.