The Response of Irenaeus to the Gnostic Threat

This paper will discuss the views of Irenaeus on the threat of the Gnostic teachings and his responses to them in his use of both logical argument and ridicule.

Irenaeus was very much against the teachings of the different gnostic groups, as is seen in his book Against Heresies. McGrath writes, “In his important work adversus haereses (“against heresies”), Irenaeus offers his readers both information concerning what the Gnostic opponents of Christianity taught, and responses to these teachings.”[1] He specifically speaks against the ideas of the gnostic teacher Saturninus, who “taught that there is one unknown Father, who made angels, archangels, virtues, powers; and that the world, and everything in it, was made by seven angels. Humanity was also created by these angels.”[2] Irenaeus did not like this claim, saying that while it is true that God is the one who made the angels, it is not true that seven of these angels were the ones who created the world and everything that is in the world, including humanity itself. Irenaeus believes this to contrary to the truth that God is the sole author of all of creation.

Another gnostic heresy that Irenaeus was against was the idea that Christ was not truly fully human. Irenaeus writes that Saturninus “also declared that the Savior was unborn, incorporeal and without form, asserting that he was seen as a human being in appearance only.”[3] Irenaeus claims that this teaching is also false, for Christ did not only appear as a human as Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians, but was actually fully human. Paul wrote that “he was found in appearance as a man,” but Paul also wrote that “he became obedient to death, even death on a cross,” thus showing the full extent of his humanity. Christ appeared like a man because he was a man. This is important to Irenaeus because through Christ God became flesh so that humanity might be restored and united with God. The physical incarnation of Christ is essential to the theology of Irenaeus because through the true physical incarnation of Christ we have been reunited with God, humanity in the present through the indwelling Spirit of Christ who was fully human, and in the future the restoration of the entire created order.[4]

Irenaeus continues in his response to the gnostic heresies by showing the falsity of their beliefs. Irenaeus points out how the Gnostics do not believe that the Father and the Son are the same God. They believe that the God of creation is an evil god whom Christ came to destroy. He writes of the claims of Saturninus, “The God of the Jews, he declares, was one of the angels; and because the Father wished to destroy all the rulers, Christ came to destroy the God of the Jews, and to save all who believed in him, and these are they who have a spark of life.”[5] Saturninus claimed that the Old Testament God of creation was just one of the creator angels who had made the evil physical realm and who needed to be destroyed by Christ.[6]

Another issue that Irenaeus has with the Gnostics and Saturninus in particular is that they claim that the prophecies of the Old Testament were the result of demonic influence and that Christ came to destroy these demons as well as their prophecies.[7] However, the belief that some prophecies were created by Satan and that those ones are good because Satan is to be admired for fighting against the evil God of creation.[8] Irenaeus obviously takes issue with this, seeing the Gnostic beliefs as evil and satanic in origin since they place the devil as the good guy and the God of creation as the bad guy. Irenaeus goes on to say, “But marriage and procreation, they declare, is of Satan.”[9] By this Irenaeus is saying that they believe these things to be bad. He uses satanic in its true sense here, and not in the distorted Gnostic sense.

Irenaeus also seeks to point out just how ridiculous the beliefs of the Gnostics actually are. Not only does he contradict them, but he continues in his attack by outright making fun of them. He goes so far as to say that the “secret knowledge” that the Gnostics claim to have is completely bogus because they came up with all of it off of the top of their heads. When the Gnostics would meet they would share their secret knowledge with each other and give each other different passwords. Irenaeus recognizes that these different sayings they would tell each other were absolute nonsense. He claims that he too must have the Gnostic gift of the secret knowledge for he can string together words and sounds without meaning as well. He demonstrates this by saying, “Iu, iu, and pheu, pheu! Truly we may utter these exclamations from tragedy at such bold invention of ridiculous nomenclature, and at the audacity that made up these names without blushing.”[10]

Irenaeus also makes fun of other Gnostic teachings. He makes fun of their history of the Aeons, who supposedly created each other one after another, and who went about creating seemingly at random, eventually resulting in the creation of a stupid Aeon known as the Demiurge who created matter, but did not know what he was doing. From this, the physical world was made and mankind was created, but trapped in evil physical bodies because everything physical is evil.[11] Irenaeus points out that the Gnostics made these ideas up and that they originated in their generation because the apostles say nothing of any of this. Irenaeus says that he can create a history of Aeons on the spur of the moment and assign them peculiar names just as they did. He says, “There is a royal Proarche above all thought, a power above all substance, indefinitely extended. Since this is the Power which I call the Gourd, there is with it the Power which I call Superemptiness. [They], being one, emitted, yet did not emit, the fruit, visible, edible, and delicious, which is known to language as the Cucumber.”[12]





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[1] (ed.) Alister McGrath. The Christian Theology Reader. (Blackwell Pub.: Malden, MA), 2007.
[2] Irenaeus. Quoted in McGrath.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Kim, Dai Sil. "Irenaeus of Lyons and Teilhard de Chardin: a comparative study of 'Recapitulation' and 'Omega.'" Journal of Ecumenical Studies 13, no. 1 (December 1, 1976): 69-93.
[5] Irenaeus. Quoted in McGrath.
[6] McGrath.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Irenaeus. Quoted in McGrath.
[10] Irenaeus. Quoted in Richardson, Cyril (ed.). Early Christian Fathers. Vol. 1 of The Library of Christian Classics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.

The Influence of Eschatology on Western Culture

In considering how eschatology has helped shape Western culture in history, one must consider also the roots of Western culture. The traditional West has derived much of its philosophical tradition from the Greeks. Greece heavily influenced the culture of the Roman Empire, which in turn influenced the whole of Europe. Later, Europe had much cultural influence over the rest of the world, especially so in North and South America and Australia. These locations, along with Europe, are what is considered to be the Western World of today. The West has its true birth in Greece, however, with the influence of the Greek philosophers, such as Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. Their understanding of the universe helped to shape the understanding of subsequent generations and cultures. This is why so much of what we, as Christians, claim as our eschatology tends to lean towards rather Platonic ideas.

In our eschatology we tend to have a platonic world view, meaning that we embrace Plato’s idea of some sort of afterlife. However, we go beyond just that and tend to think of an afterlife as being better than the life that we live now. We tend to believe that this world in which we now live is only a shadow or a copy of what is to come. There are deeper layers to creation that have not yet been explored, however, they look a lot like what we have now, only much better. This concept is seen in the writings of such western authors as C.S. Lewis among many others. In Lewis’s book The Last Battle, he portrays both our world as well as his fictional world of Narnia as only being shadows or copies, a small glimpse of what is to come, of the real world of the afterlife. He compares this idea to an onion – one may remove layer upon layer, always going deeper inside towards the true reality. Because of this type of idea, we in the West tend to think that this physical world we live in does not really matter all that much, because it is only a bad and spoiled copy of a better world that we may experience when we die. I believe this is especially true among Christians, who often in the West tend to believe that God is going to destroy this bad copy that is his creation and take us all into the real world of “heaven” where everything will be the way it is supposed to be.

This type of thinking lent itself to the Gnostics of the early Church who were also heavily influenced by Greek philosophy. They believed that the actions done in the body were of little significance, because these body was only something bad that would one day be destroyed, and we would live on as spirits in the afterlife, because only our spirits were truly pure and good. This Gnostic idea seems to have invaded much of Western, especially evangelical, Christian thought. People, for the most part, believe that when they die their bodies will rot away and their spirits will live on. They will go up to heaven and live with God as a spirit of some kind. This vague idea of some sort of spiritual afterlife often contradicts beliefs that Christians will receive a new body in heaven. It would seem that while our culture is highly eschatological in its thought it does not really have any idea what it truly does believe about these things. Our culture seems very ignorant, and worse, ignorant of its ignorance.

What we do seem to believe is that the physical world is not too important, so we tend to do whatever we please with it – polluting both our bodies and our environment, with the underlying thought of this appearing to be that it does not matter because the world is all going to hell in the end anyway – which brings up another idea that seems very much present in the minds of the West, the ideas of heaven and hell. It seems that more people know of these two places and think of them as places where one may go after death than they know of Jesus himself. I am not sure why these particular doctrines have been raised above almost every other belief of the Church, so that even those in secular culture know about these things and yet do not understand or even know of the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ, or of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Even within many Christian circles, more emphasis is placed on heaven and hell and on how one needs to pray the sinner’s prayer so that Jesus can save them from hell and they can go to heaven when they die than anything else.

The end times seem to be a fascination of Western, especially evangelical, culture as well. Everyone seems to be fascinated by the idea that God may someday, any day now, come down and destroy this place. There have been numerous attempts made to predict the date of Christ’s return. All of which so far have been wrong. There is also a certain fascination of particular concepts of an AntiChrist figure that will supposedly rule the world just before Jesus comes back and trashes the place. Various leaders have been accused of being the AntiChrist, or the Man of Sin spoken of by the Apostle Paul. These people include such people as Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II, and Barak Obama. These types of things are really not surprising, however. Western culture has been shaped by the biblical texts as well and not just Greek philosophy. It should not be surprising that people speculate on the identity of these mysterious future figures presented in the biblical texts. It is not wrong to wonder who or what exactly Paul and John and even Jesus himself were talking about. People tend to think whoever is in leadership at the present time must be the AntiChrist. It may seem silly now to say that Gorbachev was possessed by Satan himself since he worked heavily with Ronald Reagan to help prevent Armageddon from happening. It seems foolish now, but a lot of people were convinced back then, just like it made since to believe that Hitler was the AntiChrist during WWII and that Nero was the AntiChrist in the early days of the church. This phenomenon is nothing new and not at all times without logic. It is hard to think of a better candidate for the position of AntiChrist than such evil people as Hitler and Nero. While it is okay to wonder, I believe the problem arises when we become obsessed with things like this and forget the central hope of the Gospel. I believe the apostles would agree with C.S. Lewis when he writes at the beginning of his Screwtape Letters that there are people who ignore devils and people who are obsessed with devils; and neither of these is what Lewis or the Apostles wanted for us as Christians living in Western culture, or anywhere else.

The Resurrection of the Body

The resurrection of the body is a very important part of the Christian belief system for several reasons. First of all, as Christians we believe that Jesus himself had a bodily resurrection. The Gospels record the resurrection of Jesus as a physical resurrection. Jesus is recorded as having a body with scars from his crucifixion. Thomas feels the wounds on Christ’s body after having doubted the resurrection and then truly believes that Jesus is alive after feeling that Jesus had a physical body. The Gospels record that the disciples were a bit startled at Jesus’ appearance to them after his resurrection. They wondered if he might be a ghost or some kind of spirit. He was not a spirit, however. He is recorded as having flesh and bones. Luke’s Gospel records: “He said to them, ‘Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.’” (Luke 24:38-9). Jesus reassured them that he was not a spirit and asked them to bring him a piece of fish, which he ate in front of them. A spirit would have no need for physical food. However, Jesus’ body, while it is physical, does appear to be different than it was before. He is able to do things in his body, such as walk through walls, that he is not recorded as having done before his resurrection.

Matthew’s Gospel has little to say about Jesus’ resurrection. However, he does record some sort of a resurrection occurring at the time of Jesus’ death. He records that when Jesus died, “At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus’ resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people” (Matthew 27:51-3). This passage is seldom reflected on and seems rather bizarre in its placement at the time of Jesus’ death. It seems to be a glimpse of both the future resurrection of Christ as well of the rest of mankind. This Gospel records that these people underwent a bodily resurrection, not a spiritual one. Honestly, I am unsure of what to make of this passage, since it would appear that the resurrection of the dead began occurring even before Jesus was in the grave – almost as though these folks jumped the gun and could not wait until the Last Day.

According to Paul, Christ is the first born from among the dead (Colossians 1:18), indicating that the rest of us will follow him in his resurrection. Paul writes in Romans, “If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection” (Romans 6:5). If we are to truly be resurrected as Jesus was then we must be resurrected in our bodies, for that is how Jesus was resurrected. He had a physical body after his resurrection and so will we. However, Jesus’ resurrected body was not exactly the same as it had been before his death, so we may assume that our resurrected bodies will not be exactly the same as they were before our deaths. One of the differences is that Christ will not die again. His body cannot die. In the same way, our physical bodies will no longer be subject to death.

Paul says that we will have spiritual bodies, indicating not an idea of a disembodied spirit, but rather an eternal flesh. Just as the spirit lives on forever, so will our bodies. Paul presents this idea in 1 Corinthians: “So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:42-4). Paul goes on to say that the physical does not inherit the kingdom of heaven, but that which is spiritual. He says, “I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable” (1 Corinthians 15:50).This would seem to indicate that we would become disembodied spirits in heaven. However, this is not what Paul is saying. He continues his discourse by saying that because the physical body will naturally perish, it must be “clothed” with the spiritual body. This is how we may go on living forever. He says, “For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’” (1 Corinthians 15:53-4). Paul is not saying that the physical creation is evil; only that it will perish unless it is united with the spiritual. We will not lose our physical bodies through death and resurrection. Rather our physical bodies will be saved by being united with the spiritual, with Christ, who is both God and man, physical and spiritual. We will always be both physical and spiritual beings. Paul says that we will be resurrected with “spiritual bodies,” not that we will be resurrected without bodies.

Paul also records that all of creation is waiting to be liberated from its bondage to decay. He writes, “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:19-21).In this is seen the idea of a sort of resurrection of all creation, all of the physical realm. Paul continues, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:22-3). This again shows that in the future we will have physical bodies that have been redeemed; just the whole of the physical creation will be redeemed. All of creation will be resurrected. This idea of resurrection points to something beyond the merely spiritual ideas we have inherited from Plato and others. This idea includes a physical resurrection of all people, as well as a resurrection of the entire physical domain.

When God created the physical world, he did not create it separate from the spiritual world. He created all and he said that all was good, including both the physical and the spiritual. He created the heavens as well as the earth. This indicates that the earth and the physical creation is not evil as the Gnostics believed. They believed that we needed to escape the physical world through death in order to enter the spiritual realm. This idea is not much different than the idea of salvation that many Christians have today. Many Christians are focused solely on getting into heaven, believing that the world is purely evil and that God will destroy it someday, so the only thing to look forward to is heaven, a place where we will be free from our evil fleshly bodies and this evil physical world. However, this concept is flawed. God will indeed create a new heavens and a new earth, but this does not mean that the physical realm will be done away with. The scriptures give us a picture of heaven being united with earth in a new creation. It is a picture of the physical and the spiritual being united as they were truly meant to be.