Articles from Bethel’s Grapevine Newsletter

Cloud of Witnesses: Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, by Dr. David C. Noe, October 2004

Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon

In the last installment of Cloud of Witnesses, we talked about the two languages that dominated the history of the early church and formed the basis for the first theological efforts of its thinkers and teachers. Several Patristics were recognized, both among the Greeks and the Latins, as having had a significant influence on the thought of Calvin. In Greek, there was Irenaeus of Lyon, Cyril of Jerusalem, Athanasius, Basil the Great, and John Chrysostom; in Latin, Tertullian, Cyprian, Hilary, Jerome and Augustine of Hippo.

The first individual with whom we need to become acquainted is Irenaeus. This father stands in an important position in the church's history as the culmination of the Apostle John's efforts among the Gentiles and the beginning of a unified, catholic system of doctrine. The biographical information available for Irenaeus is lamentably scare. His date of birth can be placed to sometime within the first 25 years of the second century A.D. at Smyrna, a prominent Greek city on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor. To the church that dwelt there the author of the Apocalypse had spoken words of encouragement, urging them to bear up under affliction, commending their wealth in Christ, and prophesying their imprisonment and persecution (Rev. 2:8ff).

Reliable tradition relates that John had made Ephesus his home and center of ministry. From there, evangelists fanned out across Asia to places like Sardis and to points further east. John's subsequent exile to Patmos in the 90s (unless the early 60s is the correct period) occasioned the composition of the book which closes the canon. We cannot know whether John ever returned to Ephesus, though again tradition states that he died there in old age. At his death, the disciple whom Jesus loved left behind a group of students who had been fully transformed by the spirit of the Gospel and were prepared to set their hands to the plow and not look back. Men like Polycarp, Papias, and Melito carried on the Apostolic ministry (though of course without that same authority) and continued to welcome converts and strengthen the feeble.

In Smyrna, Polycarp preached and baptized until the middle of the 2nd century, and one of the young men who listened to him was a promising student named Irenaeus. His name in Greek means "peaceful." When Christ, however, had brought peace to his soul, he did not at the same time take away a fighting passion for the truth. This was to serve Irenaeus well when he would later be engaged in a host of controversies for the heart of the doctrine. Aroung 177, when he was around forty or fifty years old, Irenaeus was sent to southern Gallia (France) to serve as a missionary and presbyter under Polycarp's student Pothinus. (From what we can tell, Asia was instrumental in bringing the Gospel to that part of Europe.) The humane emperor Marcus Aurelius was busy persecuting Christians there and Irenaeus witnessed the martyrdom of the bishop Pothinus firsthand. Irenaeus replaced him at Lugdunum (Lyon) where he was to serve for the next fifteen years. Later accounts which name him martyred in the persecutions of Septimius Severus (202) are certainly unreliable as nearer testimonies do not mention the idea. He is said to have died peacefully and to have been buried in the church of St. John beneath the altar.

Irenaeus' writings fall into several categories. The most important is his work called Refutation of Gnosticism. The Gnostic heresy had at its core the notion that salvation consisted in the acquisition of secret knowledge. No disposition of heart and objective work of God is necessary. Instead, the mere possession of quasi-magical information confers salvation in a formulaic manner. We will speak more of Gnosticism and Irenaeus' five-book attack upon it in the next installment. Other works by the bishop, none of which have survived but as fragments and excerpts in Eusebius, include: The Epistle to Florinus, On the Ogdoad (debunking one aspect of Valentinian mysticism), On Schism, Against the Greeks (or On Knowledge), On Apostolic Preaching, a Book on Various Disputes, and the Wisdom of Solomon. In addition, there is a narrative of the persecution of 177 that afflicted the churches of Gaul that was circulated among churches in the east, and four Greek fragments of very questionable authenticity.