Jeffrey Bingham: Irenaeus and Time

Irenaeus concedes that his Valentinian opponents conceive of the Primordial Father’s immensity as including the property of eternality. In relation to time he is free and infinite. However, the bishop of Lyons describes their conception of the Creator’s immensity in terms of existence and intelligence, as properties that begin and end, merely existing over multiple periods of time. His challenge, then, as he composes his account of God is to provide a narrative where the one God is both Creator and Father, eternal and immutable, yet active purposefully within all the times of history from “the beginning” through “the intermediate period” to the “end of time.” One is unable to speculate on God’s activity before creation, so his attention is focused upon God’s dealings with humanity since creation. Irenaeus’s discussion of the term “time” yields, already in the second century, a robust, carefully parsed Christian theology of God and humanity in relation to time and history, of God’s transcendence and imminence, his eternality and temporality. The Father, though transcendent, creates, introduces and perfectly manages time and “the things of time,” manifesting himself within time, for humanity’s sake. He does so, however, through the agency and means of the Son and Spirit. The Son, “eternal king,” coexists always with the Father, “from the beginning” “in the bosom of the Father.” Yet, he is the agent of creation, who converses with humans throughout history from “time to time” at “one time” and “another time.” His incarnation occurs after the “old times” of prophecy in the “times of Tiberius Caesar,” the “last times,” the “proper time,” the “foreknown” and “appointed” time in which promise reaches fulfillment and Christ joins “the end to the beginning.” In him the blessings of the eternal, incomprehensible and invisible come to humanity by means of the temporal, the comprehensible and the visible. In the “last times” the Spirit of God and prophecy also comes upon Jesus Christ and is poured out upon humanity in a new fashion. These times culminate in the “times of the Kingdom” when the Spirit causes humanity to flourish, for it is within time and by the things of time, as temporal creature, that humanity matures and is always enriched by God while God, as creator, always remains the same with no beginning or end.