Evangelicals, Irenaeus, and the Bible

Safety, wisdom, and counselors are a frequent grouping in Proverbs (11:14; 15:22; 20:18; 24:5-6; 27:9). It is wise to seek insight from a multitude of counselors for it increases the margin of safety as we attempt to live life skillfully in the fear of God, rather than recklessly. This sage teaching certainly applies to both individuals and groups, and, I think, to different Christian communities in different periods of history. More pointedly, contemporary Christianity can learn from early Christianity or, say, from the church in the age of reformation. It is patently risky to assume that a modern vision is without fault and cannot gain deeper biblical understanding upon which to model itself by listening to earlier Christian voices. This principle has ramifications for the contemporary free church tradition.

This side of glory, both temporal versions, the early church and the free church, though devoted to biblical reflection, evidence treasures and drawbacks. Each is an expression of Christianity, informed by both culture and the Bible, at different moments in the epoch of Christ’s bride, “the Church.” Each has elements of purity. Each has shamed the groom. Each has read portions of the Bible correctly. Each has supplanted the Bible with culture. Therefore, where appropriate, the present church should seek enrichment from the past and issue discerning warnings that guard against treacherous repetitions.

My purpose here is not to recount specifics of the assets and liabilities of each expression. Rather, I intend to focus on ways in which selected aspects of the early church’s experience may inform and enhance the contemporary, free church. Of course, the free church has riches of its own that can ameliorate other settings. Fundamentally, here is my premise: benefit can come to my tradition from outside it.

My particular interest is how ancient Christian exegesis may speak to contemporary evangelicals within the free church tradition. More specifically, I wish to provide some idea of how the study of Bible reading in the early church can be appropriated into the training of contemporary evangelical graduate students. The need for exposure to such Bible reading arises from a peculiar feature currently prominent within American evangelicalism.

The Free Church: Solipsism in Evangelicalism

Locating self-awareness of solipsism or individualism among evangelical thinkers and writers is not as difficult today as it was a quarter century ago. It is almost commonplace to critique it in lecture and literature. Whether such self-awareness has made its way into the mainstream of evangelical culture is another matter. In what follows, I briefly survey such criticism from both within and without the tradition.

David Wells, for instance, in a discussion of “self-piety” sees American individualism as a threat to theology’s very nature.¹ This individualism, stemming from the Enlightenment and endemic to modernity, dismisses theology outright as irrelevant because the individual has become self-absorbed and has located final authority in the self. The individual within this structure has dismissed all significant, authoritative connections outside of self.² For Wells, theology is replaced by individual consciousness and experience. Theology loses its authority in the light of the autonomous self.

For Michael Horton, American evangelical individualism unsurprisingly ends in loss of community.³ The emphasis on salvation as a personal, individual experience or relationship with Christ, leads to a collapse of the church as covenant community. Soteriology is no longer centered around a common faith, creed, or experience. Sanctification concerns personal rather than communal growth. Worship becomes an individual spectator event rather than an event of common participation. Regrettably, corrective often comes in the form of a fragment of the community, a small fellowship group. The purpose of the group is to provide the “fellowship” missing in corporate worship.

Stanley Grenz’s summation is quite pointed:

Piety among evangelicals has tended to be highly individualistic. “Bible reading” means private Bible reading; “prayer” means private prayer; “Salvation” means being saved as an individual; “being in Christ” means having a personal relationship with Jesus; “the empowerment of the Spirit” means being capable as an individual to act. As Daniel Stevick notes, “The Christian pilgrimage is made alone. God’s salvation is individually directed. His help is in an individual companionship. The way is the lonely route of personal sanctification, personally attained. And the goal is a mansion built for one.”⁴

Grenz notes that evangelical individualism derives in part from the Protestant notions of the priesthood of the believer and soul competency.⁵ He affirms the principles in their meaning that redemption is not determined by any other person or by the church. Evangelicalism “exchanges the priority of the church for the priority of the believer,” sees spirituality as “an individual matter,” and pitches its preaching to the “individual listener.”⁶ But for Grenz, although spirituality is predominantly an individual matter and responsibility, it is also a “corporate project.” The individual “remains dependent on the group.” The individual needs the group’s resources of instruction, admonition, and encouragement, but does not require the community as a means of grace.⁷ In his own systematic theology, Grenz faults classic individualism for its “truncated soteriology” and “inadequate ecclesiology.” The program of God has community as its direction and experience.⁸

For Simon Chan, the individualism that can accompany “Christological spirituality” can produce negative results. Infatuation with one’s personal relationship with Christ can diminish one’s other relationships. Within the free church, he notes, this leads to schism.⁹ Individualism also can lead to a preoccupation with feeling over what he calls “Fact.”¹⁰ The reality of the Triune God’s ministry within the life of the community is Fact. It exists whether an individual feels, internalizes, or accepts it. Protestantism, in its proclivity toward privatism in spirituality puts the objective, “factuality,” into the shadow of the subjective. Fact answers to private existence and concerns. Chan believes such a tendency “is one reason Protestantism did not develop a viable theology of the visible church.”¹¹

James Davison Hunter speaks also of “the subjectivism that pervades the private sphere” within evangelicalism.¹² It has a pressing effect upon the evangelical’s view of God. The emphasis is frequently upon God’s immanence. God is seen informally, familiarly, as a tolerant daddy with psychiatric talents: “The imagery of the immanence of God has translated from Divine Protector to Best Friend.”¹³ The evangelical accommodation to privatization and subjectivism has other results for Hunter. The self has become a fascinating frontier to be explored, charted, healed, admired, and pleased. Of course, this births a “psychological Christocentrism.” But, in addition, it produces an evangelical “narcissism and hedonism, the latter an extension of the former.”¹⁴ The hedonism frequently results in a duplicity between public expression and private experience. Rarely do evangelicals experience the exciting, rich, adventurous, happy, victorious life. But to admit this contradicts the message. He finds three areas from which narcissism detracts:

The narcissistic quality of this perception of the individual is in sharp contrast to the relative inattention of Evangelicalism to the common welfare of disadvantaged social groups and politically oppressed societies or even to the spiritual well-being of the church as a whole.¹⁵

Important elements of soteriology and Trinitarianism are endangered by individualism according to Peter Toon.¹⁶ The notion and language of “a personal relationship with Jesus” reveals the influence of Western culture upon evangelicalism. Toon doesn’t deny that faith and the blessings of salvation are personal and matters of experience. But salvation is not individualistic. The Holy Spirit unites the believer to the Father through Christ within the context of the body of Christ. “Therefore,” Toon writes, “there is never an individualistic union of a believer with God. The fellowship, union, and communion are truly personal and very real (as the saints testify), but are always also together with all others who are in Christ Jesus by faith and love with the Holy Spirit.”¹⁷ Any salvific relation to the Trinitarian God is both personal and corporate through Jesus Christ.

Some of those writing on behalf of the free church construct paradigms for ecclesiology. Miroslav Volf argues for the “ecclesiality of salvation” and clarifies the question of an individualism of faith. “One cannot, however,” he writes, “have a self-enclosed communion with the triune God—a ‘foursome,’ as it were—for the Christian God is not a private deity.”¹⁸ Volf aims his project at countering Protestant individualism. He offers a model of the church as image of the triune God where both “person and community are given their proper due.”¹⁹

Others critique the free church’s individualism by clarifying Protestant principles gone awry. Paul Galbreath and Timothy George, for example, bemoan the priority of community that has been supplanted by misunderstanding of the priesthood of believers. Galbreath argues that for Luther there was a new right for the Christian, but this “occurred within the context of community.”²⁰ Likewise, in Calvin, the individual’s authority is subordinate to the labor of Christ within his Body. George similarly writes that the isolated Christian is never in view for the Reformers. The idea was always of “a band of faithful believers united in common confession as a local, visible congregatio sanctorum.”²¹ He announces that individualism is suspect within Christianity and is related to a departure from both Bible
and tradition.²²

Within discussions of individualism in evangelicalism, it is common to see the vice being related to the Enlightenment and modernism. A classic treatment of this connection is found in Karl Barth’s Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century. The eighteenth-century person is the one “who no longer has an emperor.”²³ And this century begins Christian individualization, an attempt “to make Christianity a more individual, more inward matter.”²⁴ Such individualization means many things: (1) the enthronement of the individual over every other authority; (2) the transformation of the external, objective into the internal, subjective; (3) the domination of the object; and (4) the original pietist who “knows no object which is not in the first place really within him.”²⁵

This last one, for Barth, raises five challenges.²⁶ It jeopardizes the centrality of the temporal distance of the Incarnation by emphasizing the “real birth in our hearts,” “his real death … accomplished in ourselves,” “his real resurrection” of triumph in us. It also threatens the centrality of community, “the man in the church who is related to his fellow man.” Third, it substitutes authority from church, dogma, and Bible with “the inner personal authority of the man.” Fourth, it jeopardizes the command by stressing its internalization, interpretation, or application rather than simply obedience. It also minimizes mystery and sacrament by finding mystery and invisible grace within the inner sanctum of self.

The type of individualism I have been discussing thus far is what I wish to call “individualistic solipsism.” This type fixates upon the self as the fundamental reality in the spiritual journey and emphasizes the private and the personal. Inaccurate visions of Christian egalitarianism, expressed through inappropriate understandings of the priesthood of all believers or sola scriptura, characterize it. The self opposes community.

But individualistic solipsism is characterized not only by a relation to the private. It is also marked by a fixation upon the present. It is not only the private experience which is sought after but the private experience informed by the contemporary moment. Such privatism cuts the believer off from all communities. He or she is separated from the body of Christ in the contemporary age as well as that of the past. It is me, now. This essential connection between the individual and the present and the consequent disregard for the past is annunciated by the British historian, G. R. Elton. He compares self-centeredness to adolescence and growing up to a communal–historical awareness.²⁷ Adults function in company and have come to learn that prejudices which once seemed like eternal truths have powerful correctives in the complexities of history. World history is a study of the human community. Likewise, church history and Christian tradition reflect the community of the bride of Christ.

Such modern fixation upon the present, a twin of individualism, has been characteristic of modern optimism since the natural science of the seventeenth century. Those engaged in that enterprise believed they were seeing things as they are for the first time with accurate understanding. God’s natural order was finally, only now, being interpreted properly. Recall here Kepler’s understanding of his own findings and calculations in Harmonies of the World (1619):

The die is cast and I am writing the book—whether to be read by my contemporaries or by my posterity it matters not. Let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God Himself has been ready for His contemplator for six thousand years.²⁸

But an overwhelming optimism in present insight is not peculiar to the seventeenth century. The twentieth century’s fascination with technologies which would solve society’s woes also figures here. History lost its place among the pragmatic disciplines like physical sciences. History couldn’t cure cancer, alter human behavior, or build a faster computer. The physical sciences seemed daily to be dismissing past interpretations. Historians, however, found it difficult to share such timeless optimism. They knew the complexity of human existence and its essential relation to time:

Historians could not join in celebrating the triumph of technique over fundamental interpretations because their study of the past made them not only recognize how much more complex human life was than social science models assumed but above all how illusory was the denial of fundamental change [within contemporary models viewed as final or ultimate].²⁹

Legion are the causes of unhistorical attitudes in contemporary society. One can look at such convenient summaries as that of Stephen Vaughn and still, by one’s own admission, lack comprehensiveness. Whether the particular American pride in its freedom from the Old World, the emphasis in modernity upon nature and personal experience, the artificiality of urban rather than rural life, the rapidity and persistence of change in a technological society, the speedy growth of scientific data, an evolutionary, chance-oriented bias, or Einstein’s theory of relativity, the conclusion is the same: The present is the most important part of history.³⁰

But for evangelicals one element emerges as primary. Mark Noll points to it in his treatment of the role of populist revivalism in the relation between evangelicals, the life or virtue of the mind, and tradition—the union of individualism and immediatism. The revivals of the Second Great Awakening called upon individuals to immediately exercise faith themselves, to make a choice themselves without recourse to knowledge mediated by others from the past. “Revivals,” says Noll, “called people to Christ as a way of escaping tradition, including traditional learning … Everything of value in the Christian life had to come from the individual’s own choice—not just personal faith but every scrap of wisdom, understanding, and conviction about the faith.”³¹

What matters, according to the revivalists, is that the individual make a choice immediately, now, based upon the immediate. Barth had already, remember, shown us this immediatism in eighteenth-century pietism. That perspective minimized the first-century event of the Incarnation in favor of the individual’s subjective experience of Christ’s birth in his or her heart. The event, the past, the voice of others from the Church, is supplanted by the immediate. Ambivalence toward the community in evangelicalism’s individualistic solipsism is a product of both the private and the present.

Solipsism in Bible Reading

Having presented the commonplace recognition of the problem of individualism within modernity and particularly within the evangelicalism of the free church, I wish to move now to one specific facet of that problem—individualistic solipsism in Bible reading. We begin with Karl Barth. He worried that the biblicism produced by individualism involves a demand for the Bible to produce a set of expected answers, solutions, powers, and benefits. Such biblicism, interested more in gaining solutions and having curiosities satisfied than submitting to the text, imposes one’s sovereignty upon the Bible. Such approaches to Bible reading still persist in the free church. So, Chan, mourning the loss of the communal activity of reading, says: “Reading the Scripture has become a private, information-gathering exercise assisted by key charts, study Bibles and guide books.”³²

But my particular interest differs. Because of the unity between the private and the present, I wish to discuss the devaluation of tradition in evangelical Bible reading.

In the free church not only is there the emphasis upon private Bible study, as Grenz and others have shown, but also emphasis upon study without consideration for how the Church has read the text before now. There is, then, another type of solipsism, perhaps more common than the individualistic type, and just as troubling.³³ Many evangelicals read the Bible in groups, in community. They do so, for instance, in Sunday Schools and mid-week Bible Study groups. Even a book with the individualistic title, The Bible: What’s in It for Me?, has a section entitled, “Why You Shouldn’t Fly Solo.”³⁴

Such communal Bible study, nevertheless, is still consumed with present insights and usually ignores tradition. We will label it “communitarian solipsism.” Communitarian solipsism attempts Bible reading with attention only to the present community and usually with great optimism about current methods of study, which are naively viewed as “scientific.” This type of solipsism, separate from the Christian communities of the past, shows itself in both the evangelical congregation and scholarly community. It is an us and now solipsism, one founded entirely in our community. The average believer is taught modern Bible study methods which promise objective certainty under the guarantee that the method is inductive.³⁵ Scholars frequently share the conviction.

Historians of evangelicalism have usually connected this optimism in both congregation and study to the tradition’s debt to Baconianism and Scottish Common Sense Realism. The believer approaches the Bible systematically, without bias, and with an inductive method that will yield precise, correct meaning, because Bible reading is an issue of “scientific” method and common sense. The student apprehends the facts of Scripture directly and needs only to organize them. As Martin Marty summarizes the view, “The biblical scholar was something like the botanist, geologist, or museum keeper.”³⁶ And, of course, the view presupposes the pure objectivity of such scientific disciplines. Such claims reveal a lack of sensitivity to historical and hermeneutical factors in the art of biblical interpretation and nurture an unguarded optimism in one’s own contemporary reading.

In recent years, however, in addition to making remarkable advances in learning and applying the historical critical method, evangelicals also have become more hermeneutically reflective. For example, Kevin Vanhoozer interacts with the complexities of modern hermeneutical theory to provide helpful perspective for evangelicals. Rather than advocating the naive hermeneutical realism of Bacon which gives “pride of place to induction,” reads texts with an “optimistic faith in the powers of observations,” and is “oblivious to the problems of interpretation,” Vanhoozer prefers the approach of critical realism.³⁷

Yet, D. G. Hart sees evangelical biblical scholars emphasizing the objectivity of their work in a larger culture which recognizes the role of prejudice. Hart may overstate his case, but he recognizes the “old scientific optimism” still at work within some practitioners of the historical grammatical method.³⁸ There remain remnants of the attitude of the nineteenth century reported by George Marsden: Bible study “was essentially a scientific question—a job for the philologist who studied closely the history of language. Once the original meaning was determined, it seemed to follow on Common Sense principles that the meaning of a Scriptures should be settled once and for all.”³⁹

Hart also notes the danger which that optimism poses to the importance of reading Scripture with the consciousness that it always takes place within a tradition. Such optimism often nurtures an ambivalence toward tradition. Why consult the past if the current method is superior and free from troublesome encumbrances of older biases? Nevertheless, Gerald Bray, in recognizing the persistent diversity in interpretations that result from the method, identifies an evangelical “unwillingness to take church tradition seriously” as a probable culprit.⁴⁰ The historical grammatical method provides criteria for discovering meaning. But the criteria are not completely determinative.

Noll links evangelical distance from tradition in Bible study to non-academics as well. Here, too, principles, systems, expectations, and guidelines become authoritative traditions among people who formally disown traditions. Evangelicalism continues to share many features with fundamentalism on this score. If not a method, it is frequently a leader, a study Bible, or a handbook. Ironically, in the history of fundamentalism and evangelicalism, the very teachers who tout the objectivity of the inductive method have often been the ones to emphasize the necessity of intricate schemas—theirs, of course—for understanding the Bible.

Timothy Weber has pointed out the incongruity between the hailing of the method and the need of the student to refer to notes in a study Bible.⁴¹ Vanhoozer minces no words: “Fundamentalism thus preaches the authority of the text but practices the authority of the interpretive community.”⁴² Some evangelicals remain under that umbrella. The realism of Bacon ends up producing traditions it was embraced in order to avoid.

So, even when evangelicals read the Bible within their contemporary communities, academic or ecclesiological, the concept of community is limited by the optimism surrounding the possibilities of the present. Though individualistic solipsism may be more readily acknowledged, communitarian solipsism is also problematic. And even within a scholarly community that confesses a critical, rational realism, an optimism in contemporary assessments of meaning persists.

Neither of these solipsisms, individualistic and communitarian, necessarily destroys the aptitude for accurate interpretations. They each contribute hypotheses for testing. But in order to avoid an uncritical naivete about the superiority of any one community, an evangelical approach must include a communal concept of interpretation which eclipses either solipsism. If not, we are numbered with Kepler: Hasn’t God waited 2000 years for someone to gaze upon his revelation with understanding? As Horton says, “A return to community must, therefore, entail a return to Christian tradition.”⁴³ Alister McGrath has helpfully sounded this note. Acknowledging the criticism of tradition within the Reformation, McGrath goes on to encourage evangelical sensitivity to tradition by highlighting its communal essence.

Yet the idea of “tradition” is of importance to modern evangelicalism. Evangelicals have always been prone to read Scripture as if they were the first to do so. We need to be reminded that others have been there before us, and have read it before us … “Tradition” is thus rightly understood (for example, by the Reformers such as Luther) as a history of discipleship—of reading, interpreting and wrestling with Scripture. Tradition is a willingness to read Scripture, taking into account the ways in which it has been read in the past. It is an awareness of the communal dimension of Christian faith, over an extended period of time, which calls the shallow individualism of many evangelicals into question. There is more to the interpretation of Scripture than any one individual can discern [emphasis added].⁴⁴

Attentiveness to tradition in Bible reading, then, is submission to the essentially communal nature of Christianity. It is a refusal to be infatuated with oneself as a Bible reader. But it is also another thing. It is the refusal to be infatuated with one’s own time and methods.

The Early Church: Irenaeus, The Church, and The Spirit

In the late part of the second century, we find a thoughtful model for Bible reading which may speak helpfully to contemporary concerns within the free church. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, in his confrontation with the Gnostics and Marcionites set forth an emphasis upon the gifts of the Spirit manifested in persons within the church as the environment within which true understanding takes place. A thoroughly biblical model, we find him developing it from 1 Corinthians 12:28 and Ephesians 4:15–16.

The first text comes in Adversus Haereses 4.26.5, but he builds toward it strategically in the previous four paragraphs. In 4.26.1 (SC 100.2: 712.1–716.42) he argues on the basis of Matthew 13:38, 44, 52; Daniel 12:3–4, 7; Jeremiah 23:20; and Luke 24:26, 46–47 that the Old Testament Scriptures, read appropriately in light of the Incarnation, show forth Christ and the blessings he brings. Although the heretics and the Jews miss the treasure of Christ Incarnate in the Scriptures, it is due to their lack of the proper Christological prejudice, not the failure of the prophetic typology. Irenaeus introduces the prerequisite for proper reading of Scripture—the occurrence of the passion and glory of the incarnate Christ. This is the interpretive paradigm the disciples of Jesus received from the Master in Luke 24:26–27, 47.

The second paragraph, 4.26.2 (SC 100.2: 718.43–720.62), builds from the first. The disciples of Jesus, the Apostles, were succeeded by their disciples, the presbyters. These presbyters or elders (presbuteroi) have a teaching and interpretive authority which provides the church with proper understanding of things theological.⁴⁵ These presbyters, for Irenaeus, are to be obeyed on the ground that they with their succession in the line of bishops have “received the certain gift of the truth according to the good pleasure of the Father.”⁴⁶

Discussion of the meaning of “the certain gift of the truth” (charisma veritatis certum) has revolved around two questions.⁴⁷ Is the charisma veritatis a spiritual, supernatural gift received in ordination which placed one within the prophetic order of those who truthfully transmit and teach divine revelation? Or is the charisma veritatis a term which signifies the true doctrine, the deposit of faith, received according to tradition, which is maintained and passed on through purity of life and faithfulness of teaching? Put another way, is the gift a special charisma which imparts to the presbyter infallibility in teaching or is it the doctrine of the apostles which God has given to the church through the succession of bishops?

In my mind, to differentiate the two options is a movement in the wrong direction.⁴⁸ To emphasize a spiritual gift to the neglect of the content of faith or to stress the doctrine of the apostles without acknowledging the gift brought by the Spirit to the presbyter is to misread Irenaeus. The concept of spiritual gifts is certainly on his mind within the context (we will see it again in 4.26.5) and so is the idea of the apostles’ doctrine.⁴⁹ The charisma veritatis is to be understood as a pneumatic gift which relates the individual presbyter to the church for the service of pastoral teaching in continuity with the apostles’ doctrine.⁵⁰ The presbyter, as gifted, teaches in fidelity to that message. But he receives this gift along with his inclusion into the line of succession leading back to the apostles. And this carries with it a necessary relationship between the gift and his guarding of the apostolic tradition. In accordance with 1 Timothy 3:2 and 2 Timothy 2:2, his teaching and purity of life are a measure of his relationship to the episcopacy.⁵¹

In Adv. Haer. 3.3.1 (SC 211:30.10–12) he clearly states that bishops were appointed successors to the apostles in their teaching (magisterium) and in that ministry were to be beyond reproach.⁵² There is an inherent unity between the gift and the presbyter’s teaching of the faith. The first does not exist apart from the second. Those who teach imperfectly, departing from the rule of faith, are not true gifted successors. For Irenaeus there are those who pass on the apostles’ teaching with accuracy and humility through giftedness within the line of those who succeed the apostles. These are presbyters. Those who gather outside that succession or cause schisms are imposters who will be dealt with severely by God after the manner of Old Testament evildoers (Lev. 10:1–2; Num. 16:33; 1 Kings 14:10–16).

The third and fourth sections continue this line of thought by making explicit the differences between true and false presbyters. There are those who many believe to be presbyters but are not. These are selfish, contemptuous, prideful, and evil in secret. The Lord who judges the heart, not appearance, will bring condemnation upon them after the words of Daniel (13:56, 52–53) and his own words (Matt. 24:48–51; Luke 12:45–46). The true presbyters, however, stand apart. They “guard the succession of the apostles and with the presbyterial order⁵³ provide a sound word and unimpeachable conduct (Titus 2:8) for the example and connection of others.”⁵⁴ He goes on to compare such presbyters to Moses, Samuel, and Paul (Num. 16:15; 1 Sam. 12:2–5; 2 Cor. 7:2).

Helpful to our understanding of Irenaeus’s notion of gift is the parallelism between sound teaching and character. For Irenaeus the charisma veritatis is a grace for truth in doctrine and conduct. They form an indivisible unity.

Finally, he concludes that presbyters of the type described in Adv. Haer. 4.26.4 are the ones brought forth by the church in accordance with Scripture’s teaching (Isa. 60:17; Matt. 24:45–46; Luke 12:42–43). The emphasis for him is upon where such presbyters can be found. Of course, they are located in the church where the gifts are dispensed by the Lord, and it is from within the church, from the presbyters of truth, that one should learn what is true:

Paul, teaching the place where one finds them, says, “God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers [1 Cor. 12:28].” Consequently, where the gifts of the Lord have been placed [1 Cor. 12:4], in that place it is necessary to learn the truth, that is, from those who have the succession of the church from the apostles and among whom abides sound and irreproachable conduct and purity and incorruption in word (Titus 2:8).⁵⁵

Such gifted presbyters preserve the church’s faith in the One God, increase its love for the Son of God, and honor the Spirit who inspired the patriarchs and prophets, by safely explaining the Scriptures.⁵⁶ For Irenaeus the gifted presbyters fulfill the mandate of apostles, prophets, and teachers in the sense that they: (1) hold and preserve the apostles’ doctrine, the church’s faith; (2) proclaim that doctrine founded upon the prophets; and (3) explain the Scriptures.⁵⁷ The charisma veritatis, this grace of the Spirit upon presbyters within the church, enables them to proclaim and explain from the Scriptures that which is apostolic. In this way they are within the line of continuity with the prophets and apostles, but they are teachers. Or, as we see in our next passage, disciples.

In Adv. Haer. 3.24.1 (SC 211:470.1–474.35) Irenaeus contrasts, again, the heretics and the church in their different teachings on God, Christ, and redemptive history. The church’s faith, in his view, has received harmonious testimony from the “prophets, apostles, and all the disciples,” those who have preserved the faith “through the beginning, the middle, and the end.” The three divisions refer in his mind to the three divisions of the progressive impartation of truth to the church. The prophets of the beginning indicate the Old Testament. The apostles of the middle period indicate those of the New Testament. The disciples of the end are the presbyters and those who follow the apostles’ teaching by following the presbyters.⁵⁸

The true faith does not stall with the apostles. It continues to prosper through the apostles’ disciples. Irenaeus cites 1 Corinthians 12:28 in order to support this thesis. In the church, by the vivifying, gifting presence of the Spirit, itself a gift from God (John 4:10), the faith of the prophets, apostles and disciples is preserved and renewed.⁵⁹ The reason is that there are those within the church, presbyters and others, who have been gifted in all appropriate ways:

For “in the church,” it is said, “God has appointed apostles, prophets, teachers (1 Cor. 12:28)” and all the other working of the Spirit (1 Cor. 12:11), of which all those who do not unite with the church, but deprive themselves of life by their evil doctrines and their depraved conduct, are not partakers. For where the church is, there is the Spirit of God, and where the Spirit of God is, there is the church and all grace; and the Spirit is truth (1 John 5:6).⁶⁰

What is of paramount importance for our purposes here, is to recognize that ultimately for Irenaeus the certainty of truth in the church is a matter of succession, “yet his strongest conviction, however difficult it may be to describe, was that it was a succession in the Divine Spirit.”⁶¹ M. A. Donovan concurs. For her, in Irenaeus “the role of the Spirit must never be underestimated. In the Irenaean perspective the bishops succeed to the apostles through the gift of the Spirit.”⁶² Yes, the church has its authoritative teaching presbyters, but this order does not supplant the Spirit in Irenaeus. This order is the Holy Spirit implementing his own government:

The governance of the Holy Spirit, given by the risen Christ to His church, is implemented through the working that the Spirit of God demonstrates in those whom God has placed in the church, first apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly teachers.⁶³

Ultimately, then, in the matters of governmental authority and truth one must think pneumatologically. After providing a survey of the Irenaean images of the Spirit in the church in his discussion of Adv. Haer. 3.24.1, Bentivegna gives a pointed conclusion: “For all these reasons the Holy Spirit, that the Lord conferred upon the church, must be considered as the real governor of the church.”⁶⁴

Yet one cannot think pneumatologically, for Irenaeus, without thinking ecclesiologically. His reading of Ephesians 4:15–16 makes this clear in complement to his reading of 1 Corinthians 12:28. His quotation of the Pauline word occurs in Adv. Haer. 4.32.1 in definition of the “spiritual disciple,” the accurate Bible reader. In contrast to the heretics, the spiritual Bible reader reads with a prejudice of faith: There is one God who created all things through the agency of his Word as is announced by Moses, John’s Gospel, and Paul (Gen. 1:3; John 1:3; Eph. 4:5–6). The reader with this faith confesses one head of the church, Christ, and the ultimate unity of the diverse testimonies to him. Such a disciple

holds to the head [of the body] from whom the whole body, joined and entwined by every joint with which it is furnished, according to the measure of each part, makes bodily growth for the edification of itself in love.⁶⁵

For Irenaeus “each part” refers to the Old Testament prophets. “Each one” (unusquisque) of them gave partial testimony to the One and only Christ in a unique manner. Each testimony when taken together with the others forms a whole which proclaims Christ in type and anticipation.⁶⁶ But there is another referent for “each part”: Irenaeus intends the various members of the church whose gifted testimonies of unity are equally necessary to the unity and maturity of the church, namely the apostles, presbyters, and spiritual disciples (cf. Eph. 4:11–12).

The heretics divide the prophetic words and split and pervert the One God and the One Word. But the spiritual reader clings to the prejudice of unity, a prejudice delivered by the apostles to the presbyters. When such a person reads Scripture, all its parts will be understood as consistent with each other. Behind this confidence stands the framework of prophet, apostle, and ecclesiological presbyter, a framework of theological and Christological unity. The true disciple reads the Bible with an eye to the words of the presbyters because they have the doctrine of the apostles, which is in accord with the prophetic announcement.

But what is it that provides confidence in each of these parts which the head uses to nurture his body? Once again, we are back to the Spirit. The Spirit has been superintending the prophet, the apostle, and the presbyter; the prophecies of the future, the explanations of the present, and the interpretations of the past:

Such a disciple who is truly spiritual, because he has received the Spirit of God who was with humanity from the beginning in all the economies of God, predicted the future, declared the present and fully explained the past, “Judges all and himself is judged by no one [1 Cor. 2:15].”⁶⁷

The disciple who reads the Bible in accordance with the church’s reading, that of the presbyters, reads it in a manner continuous with the apostles (and prophets). Both have been given to the church as parts, which, within their measure, contribute to bodily growth. The spiritual disciple also makes contribution and is preserved from judgment, for his interpretation is true.

In this way, the spiritual disciple “holds to the head” by viewing things as the Lord himself did. The Lord, the Word, “united the beginning to the end, being the Lord of both.”⁶⁸ The continuity of revelatory history is a sine qua non of Christianity for the Bishop of Lyons. The church must imitate Christ, “the body following the head.”⁶⁹

Irenaeus is reading Ephesians 4:15–16 within the context of the chapter, particularly 4:5–6, 4:11, and 4:14 and in light of 1 Corinthians 2:15. The theological and Christological bias of unity is informed by Ephesians 4:5, 6 which he cites. When he thinks of the prophets, apostles, and disciples as the parts which contribute to the body’s growth, he is casting his eye upon Ephesians 4:11: “And his gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers.” And we are to understand that his attraction to the passage in a context where he is opposing the false doctrine of the heretics is influenced by Ephesians 4:14. This verse speaks of the protection the church receives from deceitful doctrine by virtue of the maturity gained through the gifted members referred to in Ephesians 4:11.

In unity with many patristic interpretations, Irenaeus takes the prophets of Ephesians 4:11 as Old Testament prophets. This view is largely rejected today. But Irenaeus’s main point is the importance of listening to the voice of the “gifted ones” within the church in one’s own Bible reading. Those attentive to the Spirit within the gifted community become spiritual themselves.

The Free Church and the Early Church

It is in the Irenaean vision of the Spirit’s gift within the community led by the presbyters that I find a helpful, yes biblical, corrective to both individualistic and communitarian solipsism. Evangelicals in their Bible reading need the influence of the community past and present because there the Spirit resides. Christ has gifted the community with teachers who by the Spirit’s enablement see and proclaim the meaning of Scripture in continuity with the prophets and apostles.

Members of the free church may not wish to identify with Irenaeus’s episcopal or presbyterial confidence. But they must join him in his pneumatological–ecclesiological confidence. The evangelical’s optimism must never be in a method ancient or modern. The evangelical is not to be overcome with an anthropological confidence or confidence in a milieu. Any suspicion directed toward the results of ancient exegesis must also be directed toward contemporary method. I would hope evangelicals would return to the history of interpretation because to do so is essentially Christian.⁷⁰

To be truly evangelical, to be truly free, is to be pneumatologically oriented. This means to be absorbed with what the Spirit is bringing forth in his gifted ones now and in what he has set forth through his gifted ones in the past. The focus on the Spirit within his gifted ones defeats any notion of solipsism, for it is an interest outside of either “me, now” or “us, now.” Evangelicals within the free church must go to tradition in order to look for the gift within others. They must journey to the exegesis of the past in search of the Spirit’s fruit. And where is the gift of the Spirit? In the church. In the community, both of today and yesterday.

For where the church is, there is the Spirit of God, and where the Spirit of God is, there is the church and all grace; and the Spirit is truth (1 John 5:6).

1. David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 137. ↩︎
2. Wells, No Place for Truth, 141–43. ↩︎
3. Michael Scott Horton, Made in America: The Shaping of Modern American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 166–71. ↩︎
4. Stanley J. Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology: A Fresh Agenda for the 21st Century (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1993), 50. ↩︎
5. Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 50. ↩︎
6. Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 50–53. ↩︎
7. Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 53–54. ↩︎
8. Stanley J. Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 1994), 626–27. ↩︎
9. Simon Chan, Spiritual Theology: A Systematic Study of the Christian Life (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1998), 47. ↩︎
10. Chan, Spiritual Theology, 108–109. ↩︎
11. Chan, Spiritual Theology, 109. ↩︎
12. James Davison Hunter, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 1983), 125. ↩︎
13. Hunter, American Evangelicalism, 124. ↩︎
14. Hunter, American Evangelicalism, 97. ↩︎
15. Hunter, American Evangelicalism, 98. ↩︎
16. Peter Toon, “Is a Personal Relationship with Jesus What I Really Want?” Touchstone (September–October 1998): 13–14. ↩︎
17. Toon, “Is a Personal Relationship with Jesus What I Really Want?” 14. ↩︎
18. Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity, Sacra Doctrina (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 173. ↩︎
19. Volf, After Our Likeness, 2. ↩︎
20. Paul Galbreath, “Protestant Principles in Need of Reformation,” Perspectives 7–8 (October 1992): 15. ↩︎
21. Timothy George, “The Priesthood of All Believers and the Quest for Theological Integrity,” Criswell Theological Review 3 (1989): 291. Cf. idem, “An Evangelical Reflection on Scripture and Tradition,” Pro Ecclesia 9 (2000): 184–207. ↩︎
22. George, “The Priesthood of All Believers,” 292. ↩︎
23. Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History (1946; Valley Forge: Judson, 1973), 41. ↩︎
24. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 113. ↩︎
25. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 113–14. ↩︎
26. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 114–23. ↩︎
27. G. R. Elton, “Putting the Past Before Us,” in The Vital Past: Writings on the Uses of History, ed. Stephen Vaughn (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 1985), 41–42. ↩︎
28. Johannes Kepler, Harmonies of the World 5. “Proem,” trans. Charles Glenn Wallis, in Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World, Great Mind Series (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), 170. ↩︎
29. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, 2nd ed. (Chicago/London: University of Chicago, 1994), 406. ↩︎
30. Stephen Vaughn, “History is it Relevant?” in The Vital Past, 1–14. ↩︎
31. Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 63. Cf. Martin E. Marty, The Pro and Con Book of Religious America: A Bicentennial Argument (Waco: Word, 1975), 43–44. ↩︎
32. Chan, Spiritual Theology, 116. ↩︎
33. Cf. John Goldingay, Models for Interpretation of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 242: “Interpretation is an inherently catholic enterprise… The limitations of individual study are paralleled by the limitations of study of scripture within homogenous groups.” ↩︎
34. J. Stephen Lang, The Bible: What’s in It for Me? (Colorado Springs: Chariot Victor, 1997), 144–45. ↩︎
35. By its nature, of course, induction does not guarantee certainty. But this seems lost on many evangelicals. ↩︎
36. Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, vol. 1, The Irony of It All, 1893–1919 (Chicago/London: University of Chicago, 1986), 233. ↩︎
37. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 48, 300–02. ↩︎
38. D. G. Hart, “Evangelicals, Biblical Scholarship, and the Politics of the Modern American Academy,” in Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective, ed. David N. Livingston, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll (New York/Oxford: Oxford University, 1999), 318. ↩︎
39. George M. Marsden, “Everyone One’s Own Interpreter?: The Bible, Science, and Authority in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American,” in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (New York/Oxford: Oxford University, 1982), 92. ↩︎
40. Gerald Bray, Biblical Interpretation: Past and Present (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1996), 562. ↩︎
41. Timothy P. Weber, “The Two-Edged Sword: The Fundamentalist Use of the Bible,” in The Bible in America, 114. ↩︎
42. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text?, 425. ↩︎
43. Horton, Made in America, 177. ↩︎
44. Alister McGrath, A Passion for Truth: The Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1996), 95–96. ↩︎
45. The critical editions referenced are: Irénées de Lyon: Contre les hérésies, Livres 3, 4, 5, ed., trans., and annot., A. Rousseau, L. Deutreleau, B. Hammerdinger, and C. Mercier, 6 vols., Sources chrétiennes (SC), nos. 210, 211, 100.1, 100.2, 152, 153. (Paris: Cerf, 1974, 1965, 1969). Cf. Adv. Haer. 5.5.1 (SC 153:64.22–66.29); 5.36.2 (SC 153: 458.37–44); Rousseau, SC 100.1: 263. ↩︎
46. Adv. Haer. 4.26.2 (SC 100.2: 718.46–47). ↩︎
47. See, e.g., K. Müller, “Das Charisma Veritatis und der Episkopat bei Irenaeus,” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren kirche 23 (1924): 216–22; D. van den Eynde, Les normes de l’enseignment chrétien dans la littérature patristique des trois premiers siècles (Paris: Gabalda & Fils, 1933), 186–87; E. Molland, “Irenaeus of Lugdunum and the Apostolic Succession,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 1 (1950): 12–28; A. Ehrhardt, The Apostolic Succession in the First Two Centuries of the Church (London: Lutterworth, 1953), 107–31; J. D. Quinn “Charisma Veritatis Certum: Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 4.26.2,” Theological Studies 39 (1978): 520–25; L. Ligier, “La charisma veritatis certum des évêques,” in L’homme devant Dieu: Melanges Offerts au Pére Henri de Lubac (Paris: Aubien, 1963), 247–68; N. Brox, “Charisma veritatis certum (Zu Irenäus Adv. Haer. IV, 26.2),” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 75 (1964): 327–31. Cf. for brief bibliographical analyses: Y. de Andia, Homo Vivens (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1986), 229, n. 24; P. Bacq, De l’ancienne à la nouvelle alliance selon Irénée: Unité du Livre IV de l’Adversus Haereses (Paris: Lethielleux, 1978), 202, n.2. ↩︎
48. Cf. Ligier, “La charisma veritatis certum des évêques,” and Brox, “Charisma veritatis certum.” ↩︎
49. Cf. Brox, “Charisma veritatis certum.” ↩︎
50. Cf. Ligier, “La charisma veritatis certum des évêques,” 267. ↩︎
51. Cf. Jacques Fantino, La théologie d’Irénée (Paris: Cerf, 1994), 36. ↩︎
52. The translation of A. Roberts and W. H. Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers 1:415, failed to capture this meaning with “government.” But see Rousseau, SC 210:222–23. ↩︎
53. Ordo presbyterii is interchangeable with episcopatus successio (Douglas Powell, “Ordo Presbyterii,” Journal of Theological Studies n.s., 26 (1974): 290–328). Contra J. G. Sobosan, “The Role of the Presbyter: An Investigation into the Adversus Haereses of Saint Irenaeus,” Scottish Journal of Theology 27 (1974): 129–46, who sees it as a college of presbyters. ↩︎
54. Adv. Haer. 4.26.4 (SC 100.2: 722.82–86). The Armenian has successiionem for doctrinam. This is Rousseau’s preference and is followed here (Cf. SC 100.1: 262–63). ↩︎
55. Adv. Haer. 4.26.5 (SC 100.2: 278.115–22). Cf. Thomas F. Torrance, “Early Patristic
    Interpretation of the Holy Scriptures,” in Divine Meaning: Studies in Patristic Hermeneutics
    (Edinburgh: T & T Clarke, 1995), 129. ↩︎
56. For the trinitarian structure, cf. Van den Eynde, Les normes de l’enseignment chrétien, 185–86. ↩︎
57. J. Bentivegna, “The Charismatic Dossier of Saint Irenaeus,” Studia Patristica 18.3 (1989): 46–47. ↩︎
58. “Disciples” of the apostles, for Irenaeus, has four references: (1) Luke and Mark who wrote Gospels as followers of Paul and Peter, but were not apostles (Adv. Haer. 3.3.1; 3.9.1; 3.10.1; 3.10.6; 3.11.1; 3.12.1); (2) Others (presbyters) who had seen and heard the apostles but were not evangelists (Cf. Adv. Haer. 4.32.1; 5.5.1; 5.33.1; 5.36.2; W. C. van Unnik, “The Authority of the Presbyters in Irenaeus’ Works,” in God’s Christ and His People: Studies in Honor of Nils Alstrup Dahl, ed. J. Jervell and W. A. Meeks (Oslo/Bergen/Tromsö: Universitetsforlaget, 1977), 248–60); (3) followers of the apostles, also named presbyters, who learned from those who had seen and heard the apostles (Cf. 4.27.1); (4) the spiritual disciples, those who read Scripture along with the presbyters, but are not presbyters (Cf. 4.32.1–33.1). In 3.24.1 Irenaeus has 2, 3, 4 in mind, contra Rousseau, SC 210:388, who sees them as 1. Irenaeus goes on to cite 1 Cor. 12:28 in support of post-apostolic, i.e., post-New Testament, continuity within the church. ↩︎
59. Cf. Rousseau, SC 210:390–93. This corrects E. Molland’s interpretation that Dei munus in 3.24.1 (SC 211: 472.17) is to be read as the church’s preaching” or “our faith.” This interpretation contributed to his understanding of the charisma veritatis as the “deposit of faith” (26). He was following K. Müller, 218. Bentivegna concurs, “The Charismatic Dossier of Saint Irenaeus,” 43. ↩︎
60. Adv. Haer. 3.24.1 (SC 211:472.22–474.29). ↩︎
61. Ehrhardt, The Apostolic Succession, 124. ↩︎
62. Mary Ann Donovan, One Right Reading? A Guide to Irenaeus (Collegeville: Liturgical, 1997), 65. ↩︎
63. Bentivegna, “The Charismatic Dossier of Saint Irenaeus,” 46. ↩︎
64. Bentivegna, “The Charismatic Dossier of Saint Irenaeus,” 44. ↩︎
65. Adv. Haer. 4.32.1 (SC 100.2: 798.24–27). ↩︎
66. Adv. Haer. 4.33.9 (SC 100.2: 820.149–822.170). See esp. SC 100.2: 824.178, 186. ↩︎
67. Adv. Haer. 4.33.1 (SC 100.2:802.1–5). ↩︎
68. Adv. Haer. 4.34.4 (SC 100.2: 858.105–107). ↩︎
69. Adv. Haer. 4.34.4 (SC 100.2: 860.117). ↩︎
70. Cf. Goldingay, Models for Interpretation of Scripture, 239; Michael Cahill, “The History of Exegesis and Our Theological Future,” Theological Studies 61 (2000): 344–45. ↩︎