Irenaeus’ Christology in Against Heresies

Irenaeus’ Christology in Against Heresies


Irenaeus’ work, Against Heresies is an attempt to fight the Gnostic teachings of the second century and to defend, explain and formulate the Christological viewpoint of the Church. The Gnostics of the time were concerned with the separation or the dividing of the human Jesus from the divine Christ. Gnostics held that the divine spirit (Christ) temporarily became enfleshed and then left sometime before the human Jesus died. Irenaeus counters the Gnostics by offering a number of principles that deal with unity; the unity of God, the relationship of God and the Logos to humanity and the salvation of humanity. Irenaeus as Smulders states is concerned with, “the unity of the Creator God with the God of Salvation, the unity of soul and body, and the union of man with God in the one Jesus Christ (Smulders 21)”.
In the first paragraph of chapter eighteen in Book III Irenaeus begins explaining that the Logos existed in the beg...