Irenaeus a Shepherd
of the Atonement for a Post-foundational Society
Singular
modes of causality increasingly are called into question because of an
expanding understanding of the complexity and interconnectedness of reality. This,
coinciding with the apparent collapse of foundationalism, has contributed to
the complexity of postmodern-matrix thinking. Theological thought has not been
exempt from these trends. This paper proposes that Irenaeus’ use of the “Good
Shepherd” metaphor is beneficial and relevant for communicating an understanding
of the atonement to a post-foundational society, as it ties together
incarnation, persuasion, and empowerment, as a web of foundations using image and
narrative rather than abstract linear sequences of causality. Prior to articulating the benefit and
relevance of rediscovering imagery of the Good Shepherd for a post-foundational
mode of thought, an overview of Irenaeus’ understanding of the atonement and
post-foundationalism will be outlined after which these two concepts will be
drawn together.
Irenaeus’
atonement theology is largely written as a polemic against Gnosticism. It was
“the gnostic who sought to give a philosophical interpretation to Christian
‘mythology’ and so developed a highly intellectual system in which gnosis and ritual, the conceptual and
the symbolic, while sharply distinguished, were religiously correlated.”[1]
Against this division of concept and symbol, Irenaeus attempted to rearticulate
a grounded Christian belief that was not solely abstraction. While the Gnostics
denied the Incarnation of Christ and his bodily resurrection because of the
material properties involved,[2]
Irenaeus retorted, “he [Christ] too had flesh and blood, recapitulating in
himself the original work of the Father, not something different, and seeking
what was lost.”[3] In this statement,
Irenaeus not only affirms the physicality of Christ, he draws in a large
understanding of what constitutes the atonement. For Irenaeus, the atonement is
threefold: incarnation, obedience, and recapitulation.
Incarnation
is often assumed in discussions of the atonement, but for Irenaeus it figures
prominently. It is the incarnation that begins the work of atonement; it is not
simply a preconditioned requirement for Jesus’ later experience of the cross.
In the incarnation, “the Logos “assimilated himself to man and man to himself”
in his life and in his passion.”[4] This
radical joining of God and humanity in one person begins the process of
reconciliation. Incarnation acted as the beginning point where “the
disobedience of the first Adam was undone through the complete obedience of the
second Adam, so that many should be justified to attain salvation.”[5] In
this way, Irenaeus affirms the actions of the life of Jesus to be part of the
undoing of Adam’s disobedience. Further, “the incarnation makes recapitulation
possible. Through the incarnation Christ becomes humanity’s representative.”[6]
Against the Gnostics, this representative was not an abstract idea, but
tangibly present in the person of Jesus.
For Irenaeus,
obedience, actualized throughout the incarnation, also functions prominently in
the atonement. The effect of Jesus’ obedience is most clearly seen where Irenaeus
utilizes Paul’s imagery of Christ as the second Adam. Irenaeus draws the
comparison, “just as through the disobedience of one man sin came in, and
through sin death prevailed (Rom. 5:12, 19), so also through the obedience of one man, justice was brought in and
produced fruit of life for the men formerly dead.”[7] It
is in the actions of obedience that, “Christ became the example for men, as
Adam had been the example for Christ; being the Logos of God, Christ was not
only the example, but the exemplar and prototype of the image of God according
to which man had been created.”[8] Through
this exemplar understanding, combined with a deeply held belief in the
incarnation, Irenaeus conflates the physical and cosmic realms. In this
conflation “Irenaeus emphasises the true humanity and obedience of Christ in
the face of temptation, he [then] can combine cosmic struggle with the human
struggle here on earth.”[9] In
doing so, one can appreciate how temporally-located actions have implications
in the cosmic sphere, something Gnostic understandings could not conclude.
Thus, through this conflation Irenaeus is able to state, “By living as the
obedient, true human being, Jesus is able to place us once again on the road
from which we have strayed, so that we are restored in fellowship with God and
receive incorruption and immortality.”[10] This
restoration finds its fuller articulation in Ireneaus’ understanding of
recapitulation.
“Irenaeus’s
doctrine of recapitulation can be read as the most profound theological
vindication in the second and third centuries of the universal ideal of the
imitation of Christ.”[11]
In this sense, it is the culmination of the obedience of Jesus and the
participation of the believer. “By his active obedience the Last Adam
‘recapitulates’ the history of the first Adam. He takes up the human race into
himself and takes it back to the beginning of its moral history.”[12]
Thus, recapitulation is Christ returning humanity to its beginning, so that he
can lead humanity in the right way. Jesus’ action is both the example and the
enabler. With this understanding Irenaeus diametrically opposes Gnostic dualism
as Christ actually is “the reconstituted humanity, in whom we can all find our
renewed identity and so achieve reconciliation with God.”[13]
The Good
Shepherd leading a flock encapsulates Irenaeus’ threefold undstanding of the
atonment, as it is incarnate, active, and encompassing imagry. In the image of
Shepherd, “God is a loving being who creates the world and humankind, not out
of a necessity nor by mistake – as Gnostics claimed – but out of a desire to
have a creation to love and to lead, like the shepherd loves and leads the
flock. From this perspective, the entirety of history appears as the process
whereby the divine shepherd leads creation to its final goal.”[14] This image is one of
active wooing, the shepherd coming near so that humanity might follow. In this
image there is the affirming the physical, an active example, and the
encompassing of all history - and all reality these entail.
If
recapitulation of all history occurs through Christ, the question of reality
and how one apprehends and understands it becomes important. To answer this
question humanity has classically built understandings of reality on
foundations of certitude. Thus, foundationalism functioned on the premise that
there is “the existence of indubitable, universal axioms”[15] that
can be known and built upon; or at least there is “the commitment to
foundational beliefs”[16]
on which people build a worldview that explains reality. Yet foundations have
become untenable as it has become impossible to prove one can know a foundation
with indubitable certitude.[17] As
a result, concepts of reality exist within post-foundational frameworks.
Structuralism
and post-structuralism assist in understanding the arch to post-foundationalism
and postmodernity. In this scheme, “structuralism operates a bridge between
modernism and postmodernism, undermining faith in autonomous reason and radical
individualism.”[18] As
abstract foundationalism began to collapse, structuralism arose as a final
modernist bastion. “Structuralism asserted that language shapes the way humans
think, but that the words themselves are arbitrary.”[19]
This conception is modernist in that “structuralists assumed that the human
mind, no matter the culture, has an innate, universal structure.”[20]
This structure acted as the foundation and therefore humans could examine it.
The critique soon followed, as “post-structuralism asserts that there is
nowhere to stand outside of our language in order to objectively investigate it.”[21]
In this step the human observer once again becomes enmeshed into the subject
being investigated.
Enmeshed
theories and the realization that the human is not somehow outside observing,
but partakes in the observing process, have been incredibly influential in
moving to post-foundationalism. Post-foundationalism thus reacts “against the
idea that indubitable truth can be objectively perceived by reason alone.”[22] Without
indubitable certainty in any one foundation, one is confronted by the reality
that “no theory ever stands alone. Every theorist confronts the world with a
whole web of theoretical and non-theoretical beliefs.”[23]
Some people have reacted negatively to this criticism because they see it as “a
discourse that in all its claims to uproot the so-called objectivity of science
has done so at the expense of its central subject - the human."[24]
Yet, an alternative reading of such theories is possible, one which praises the
enmeshedness of the human into the web of theories and observation, as a return
to an incarnational conception of reality.
In the same
way Irenaeus’ understanding of the atonement confronted the Gnosticism of his
era, it continues to confront the Gnosticism of modernism, foundationalism, and
structuralism. In contemporary society, the “modernists [have] nevertheless
developed their own brand of Gnosticism when they established that the mind
could reach disinterested truth totally apart from the body.”[25] This
was the Gnostic form of one type of foundationalism, whereby objective axioms
are known with certitude. Another Gnosticism occurs when one speaks of God via structuralism
as the speaker will have stated “a belief that was as much about the godlike
power of the mind as it was about the truth of Christ.”[26]
These abstractions have become isolated from reality and perverted into their
Gnostic absolutes.
Gnosticism can be further
witnessed when complex matters that ought to be articulated via
post-foundational understandings are communicated via reductionalist-foundationist
sequences of causality. This has become a contemporary problem with conceptions
of the atonement, which often are reduced to: “humanity owed God infinite
reparation because sin against God is an infinite crime. Hence, either humanity
would have to pay for their wrongs by suffering in eternal hell, or God himself
would have to pay for this wrong. This is what God did by becoming a man and
dying on the cross.”[27]
It is not that these ideas are not true, in that they have no correlation to
reality. Rather, to the extent they are conceived of as either maximally the
case, or represent an absolute minimum, one finds the Gnosticism of
foundationalism. These forms of Gnostic foundationalism are often communicated
in refrains of “it may be more, but certainly not less.” Such conceptions do
not take seriously the post-foundational web.
Freud acts as a precursor to
post-foundational thinking in his conception of overdertermination, which can
assist in comprehending Irenaeus’ understanding of the atonement. Overdetermination
conceives that there is more than sufficient cause for any event.[28]
Therefore, an event may have any number of causes, none of which needs to be
considered “the foundation.” Also no one cause must be included in an articulation of causality, if the others
articulated are of sufficient cause. Thus, for Irenaeus the incarnation itself
can be understood as sufficient cause for atonement, as God identifies with
humanity. “It is this identification that atones for humanity’s apostasy by
affecting their ontology so that through instruction and empowerment humanity
might identify with Christ.”[29] Other
“causes” for atonement are not void; yet they need not be mentioned. Nonetheless,
within the apparent singularity of Jesus’ incarnational identification with
humanity a post-foundational web emerges, as Jesus affects multiple foundations
such as human action through instruction and an ontological shift which empowers
change. Thus, although this paper has not focused specifically on the cross, it
does not cease to be one of the plethora of foundations in an atonement
post-foundational web, yet it need not act as the sole foundation either.
The metaphor of
the Good Shepherd mixes well with the post-foundational metaphor of a web. The
Good Shepherd is an image of atonement which shows how “God restores humanity’s
freedom from the tyranny of death, and instead of using coercion redeems what
is rightfully his “by means of persuasion,” as exhibited in his use of
instruction and empowerment.”[30] Thus, the coming of the shepherd
changes the paradigm, as it participates in “a grand vision of history, [where]
the divine purposes unfold through it. The focal point of that history is the
incarnation.”[31]
One might conceptualize the incarnation as the shepherd walking into the web of
a multi-foundational reality. As the shepherd leads, exhibited in the obedience
of Christ, the entire web moves; all enmeshed foundations and persons start to
move, everything is realted, thus begining the recapitulation of all history.
In many ways
this image is similar to the moral influence atonement theory, yet contains an
important difference from a reduced forms of moral infulence theory. The
location agency lies differs. In a simplistic moral influence theory, Jesus only
was the ulitmate example; yet in Irenaeus’ conception, Jesus acomplished more
than only being the example. Through the incarnation, and his subsequent
obedience, he had the agency to recapitulate all of history, and now the
Christian participates in a new reality, not only following an example while
remaining in an old paradigm.
The Good
Shepherd is a beneficial relational metaphor for communicating an understanding
of the atonement, similar to Irenaeus’ understanding, to a post-foundational society
as it draws together incarnation, persuasion to obedience, and empowerment to
participate in recapitulation. The image is a shepherd leading a flock – or
stuck to a web – drawing all towards reconciliation with God. This
understanding challenges contemporary Gnostic abstractions by affirming the
complexity of a post-foundation web, which deeply incorporates the physical human
into conceptions of reality.
[1] Douglas Kelly,
“Atonement in Irenaeus of Lyon,” Journal Of Christian Reconstruction,
no. Winter 1982 (January 1, 1982). pp. 63
[2] Ibid. pp. 58
[3] Robert M Grant, Irenaeus
of Lyons (London; New York: Routledge, 1997). pp. 169
[4] Jaroslav Pelikan, The
Christian Tradition : A history of the Development of Doctrine, vol. Volume
1 (Chicago u.a.: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1971). pp.144
[5] Ibid. p.144
[6] Hans Boersma, Violence,
Hospitality, and the Cross : Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2004). pp. 122
[7] Grant, Irenaeus
of Lyons.
pp. 139. Italics mine.
[8] Pelikan, The
Christian tradition, Volume 1:. pp.145
[9] Boersma, Violence,
hospitality, and the cross. pp. 189
[10] Ibid. pp. 123-124
[11] Pelikan, The
Christian tradition, Volume 1:. pp.144
[12] Kelly, “Atonement
in Irenaeus of Lyon.”
pp. 67
[13] Boersma, Violence,
hospitality, and the cross. pp. 200
[14] Justo L González, The
Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation.,
vol. Volume 1 (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984). pp. 68
[15] Crystal Downing, How
Postmodernism Serves (My) Faith : Questioning Truth in Language, Philosophy and
Art (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2006). pp. 100
[16] Ibid. pp. 100-101 Italics original
[17] Nicholas
Wolterstorff, Reason within the Bounds of Religion, Second ed. (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 1984). pp. 54
[18] Downing, How
postmodernism serves (my) faith. pp. 125
[19] Ibid. pp. 125 Italics original
[20] Ibid. pp.125
[21] Ibid. pp. 126 Italics original
[22] Ibid. pp. 102
[23] Wolterstorff, Reason
within the Bounds of Religion. pp. 43
[24] David Ross Freyer,
“Introduction : Symbols of the Human, Phenomenology, Post-Structuralism, and
Culture,” Listening 38, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 78–83. pp. 78
[25] Downing, How
postmodernism serves (my) faith. pp. 23
[26] Ibid. pp. 111
[27] Gregory A Boyd and
Paul R Eddy, Across the Spectrum : Understanding Issues in Evangelical
Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2009). pp. 125
[28] Edward Erwin, The
Freud Encyclopedia : Theory, Therapy, and Culture (New York: Routledge,
2002).
pp. 407
[29] Brad Jersak et
al., Stricken by God? : Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2007). pp. 452
[30] Ibid. pp. 439
[31] González, The
Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation., Volume
1:.
pp. 71
