-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
M J Edwards, God and Christ in Irenaeus. By Anthony Briggman, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 71, Issue 2, October 2020, Pages 889–892, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flaa045
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
This book is written, in sympathy with the admonitions of Richard Norris some 40 years ago (pp. 4–5), to redress the failure of modern scholars to canvass the metaphysical assumptions on which Irenaeus grounds his case for the unity of creation and redemption. The objection that secular disciplines are redundant when the sole canon of truth is Scripture is pre-empted by a study of the terms employed by Irenaeus to characterize the argumentative methods of his opponents. In accepting Briggman’s proof that all of these—hypothesis, oikonomia, plasma—retain the sense that they bear in pagan rhetorical theory (pp. 9–32), we should not deny that the last two at least have also a cosmological application: Plotinus and Tertullian show the same facility in the use of words which are simultaneously applicable to the fabrication of a delusive cosmos and the arbitrary fashioning of a myth.
Briggman next undertakes to show, against Robert Grant and others, that the excursus at Against Heresies 2.28.2 on our impotence to fathom the causes of natural phenomena is not an admission of nescience regarding either the existence of God or his attributes (pp. 35–51). Far from being a bar to our knowledge of God, his incomprehensibility is a valid deduction from his infinity and his simplicity, both of which are apparent to natural reason once we perceive that a transcendent cause cannot be contained by any superior entity or divisible into parts (pp. 71–98). Briggman further maintains that for Irenaeus divine transcendence entails divine immanence (pp. 87–90), for which I would prefer the term omnipresence. God would be immanent if, as the Stoics imagined, he pervaded the world as pneuma, and were acted upon by that on which he acts; since, however (as Briggman proves) Irenaeus considers incorporeality to be an attribute of divinity, I think it unlikely that he would have founded his argument for divine infinity on the Stoic concept of pneuma (pp. 99–103). I agree that the pronouncement that God is all mind, with its corollary that he sees and thinks as a whole, was inspired by Xenophanes of Colophon (pp. 76–8 and 92–5), but I am not so sure that Xenophanes should be labelled an Eleatic.
