Harrie Lyons: Irenaeus’ ontology of the Trinity: re-thinking contemporary trinitarian relational models through an Irenaean focus on unity.

Irenaeus’ Trinitarian position was unique among the pre-Nicean Fathers of the second century in its explicit orientation against non-orthodoxies that arose within the internal dialectic of Christianity itself, as shown by Lashier in a recent monograph. In this paper we argue that Irenaeus’ formulation can be utilized as a corrective to contemporary relational- perichoretic theologies.We will show that Irenaeus’ focus on unity through his essentialism (necessary to obviate the gnostic genealogy of God’s stagewise becoming), extends a challenge to a contemporary narrative of inter-personal relational perichoreticism, where, as in the work of John Zizioulas, the essence of God is declared as a communicated predication having no condition except in the relations generated between each hypostatis; here the focus of an Irenaean unity adjusts the notion of communion as a koinotēs tēs physeōs. The analysis of Irenaeus’ trinitarianism is therefore important not only for a full view of the patristic history of doctrine, but also for discursive trinitarian dogmatics in the 21st century.