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Explain How Irenaeus Presents The Distinctively Christian Understanding Of God

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The goal of this paper is to discuss the teaching of the Holy Trinity, and how it presents the distinctively Christian understanding of God. In order to address such a vast topic, I will take a particular angle on it, and focus on the exposition of the Holy Trinity as found in Irenaeus from Lyon's On the Apostolic Preaching. As we shall see in detail it is Irenaeus view that the incarnation of the Son and belief in Jesus as God Saviour implicates necessarily a Trinitarian understanding of God. Accordingly, Irenaeus supports the Trinitarian teaching as a way to explain and support a Christian understanding of God’s economy – that is, as climaxing with the life of Jesus.
The choice of this particular author is far from being casual. As Irenaeus is one of the so-called "early fathers", it means that is work is positioned at the very beginning of Christian theology – and therefore, of the reflection concerning Christianity’s essential teachings. Hence, to show how Irenaeus presents a Trinitarian understanding of God as distinctively Christian, it is to show how this opinion pervaded Christian self-awareness from the origins. In this respect, it is also crucial to remark that, while he lived before …show more content…

As argued by Everett Ferguson, On the Apostolic Preaching is to be considered primarily as a catechetic text, where by catechesis it is meant an '[…] elementary but comprehensive Christian teaching connected with baptism' – as a matter of fact, this is the earliest catechetic text which we know of. Thus, as Irenaeus wrote this text with the aim of instructing the converts about the fundamentals of their new-found faith, the relevance that the Holy Trinity finds in this text indicates how this father of orthodoxy deemed the Trinity to be a teaching essential for those who were to begin their life with

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