Christ accomplishes the ‘communion of God and man’ by, to use again Irenaeus’ own words, ‘vanquishing in Adam that which had struck us in Adam’. That which had struck is defi ned as the violent strength of sin, instigated through the devil’s provocation but expanded into humanity’s own will and action through the accus- tomization of time. Christ vanquishes this not from without, but by coming into the realm of human existence and experience, becoming ‘Adam’ as a full member of the one race of which he is himself the ultimate antitype. It is precisely because Irenaeus has centred his anthropological discussion so deeply on the real- ity of image, on the unity across the race that the divine image implies, that his soteriology can be defi ned so summarily as recapitulative. Christ enters into the race of humanity as human, as himself the personal reality of the whole race, since this reality has from its formation been defi ned as created in his image. What he accomplishes as human becomes universally recapitulative inasmuch as he accomplishes it in the person of the whole human family. When he becomes a child and exists as a child, he exists as the personal reality of all that human childhood is, since childhood is fundamentally his image in a particular age of economic expression. He sanctifi es ‘young-manhood’, as Irenaeus calls it, not merely because he is ‘a young man’, but because he lives that age of life as the visible reality of all that constitutes human young-manhood. The living image of
that which it means to be a youth, himself exists in the economy as youth itself, restoring through that living the fundamental reality of human experience in this age. What the incarnate Christ is, he is for all humankind, as all humankind. So Irenaeus:
For the Lord came to seek back the lost sheep, and it was man who was lost; and, therefore, he did not become any other formation, but being born from her who was of the race of Adam, he maintained the likeness of the formation.78
Irenaeus’ discussion at Ref. 5.17 sets this conception squarely in the framework of the cross, the tool by which the incarnational recapitulation offered by Christ is fully accomplished. In the act of Christ’s offering on the cross is epitomized, and indeed actualized, the full measure of the human story summed up in the incarnate Son. The unity of God and man inherent in the formation of the human creature, described by Irenaeus here and elsewhere as ‘friendship’, is broken on account of transgression; and since such union was the gift of God at creation, its loss can be considered and termed a ‘debt’:
For this reason he has taught us to say in prayer, ‘Forgive us our debts’, since indeed he is our Father, whose debtors we were, having transgressed his commandments.79
It is through this framework of debt, not as proprietary claim requiring ransom or restitution, but as transgression fracturing union, that Irenaeus is able to see in the cross the manner in which recapitulation both demands and involves propitia- tion – a term he uses directly at Ref. 5.17.1. Such propitiation is understood as joined to the unifying act of healing and restoration: in offering himself in obedi- ence, the incarnate Son ‘cancels (consolatus) our disobedience with his obedi- ence’. It is in this remitting of sins, of vanquishing what had struck humanity in Adam, that the full measure of his recapitulative healing is effected. The source of human disunion – the disobedience that since Adam has held the world captive – is reclaimed by Christ, re-fashioned into an obedience that, through the cross and resurrection, conquers death which is the ultimate force and power of sin. So in Irenaeus’ chief passage on the sacrifi ce of the cross:
Therefore David said beforehand, ‘Blessed are they whose iniquities are for- given, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man to whom the Lord has not imputed sin’ (Psalm 32.1, 2; cf. Romans 4.7, 8), pointing out thus that
78 Epid. 33. 79 Ref. 5.17.1.
remission of sins which would follow upon his advent, by which ‘he destroyed the handwriting’ of our debt, and ‘fastened it to the cross’ (Colossians 2.14); so that as by means of a tree we were made debtors to God, so also be means of a tree we may obtain the remission of our debt.80
It is in Christ seen on the cross that Irenaeus fi nds the full revelation of his incar- nate being. The cross, and the obedience that leads to his offering and sacrifi ce thereon, shows the true, wholly incarnate reality of the Son-made-fl esh. It is ‘as man that he suffered for us’ (5.17.3); but as this suffering is the divine offering of God for the remission of sin, the man making the offering must be acknowledged also as God, ‘for if no one can forgive sins but God alone, then when the Lord remitted them and healed men, it became clear that he was himself the Word of God made the Son of man, receiving from the Father the power of remission of sins, since he was man and since he was God’. It is the act of remission, of healing the human person, that reveals completely who Christ is – ‘by remitting sins he did heal man, while he also manifested who he himself was’. In knowing the Son humanly, the power of the offering of the cross is understood for the measure of obedience it requires; but conversely, it is in the offering on the cross that the meaning of Christ’s humanity is disclosed as the sacrifi ce of love offered by the Father, through the Son, for the redemption of his creation. The cross, then, becomes the means of disclosing the hidden realities of the divine economy summed up in the human Son. In the latter portion of Ref. 5.17 Irenaeus takes up Elisha’s prophecy of the axe with its iron head (representing the ‘sure word of God’) separated and lost in the water, found when the wooden handle (typifying the cross) is cast into the same, and the iron head fl oats to the surface (see 4 King- doms 6.5–7). To Irenaeus, this shows that it is the cross which discloses the deepest meaning of the will of God revealed throughout the whole of history, and provides the means to re-discover and re-obtain that which previously had been lost:
This sure word, then, which had been hid from us, did the dispensation of the tree make manifest, as I have already remarked. For as we lost it by means of a tree, by means of a tree was it again made manifest to all, showing the height, the length, the breadth and the depth in itself. And, as a certain man among our predecessors has observed, this came about ‘through the extension of the hands of a divine person, gathering the two peoples to one God’. For these were two hands, because there were two peoples scattered to the ends of the earth, but there was one head in the middle, as there is but one God, who is above all, and through all, and in us all.81
80 Ref. 5.17.2.
What had been hid from the ‘two peoples’ scattered on the earth (this seems a veiled reference to the progeny of Japheth and Cham, whom Irenaeus reads as the progenitors of the various types of man82) was the reality that in the human Son,
perfecting his Father’s will through the Spirit, the union with the Father, imaged in humanity through iconic participation in the Son, is restored and perfected. Protological history and eschatological expectation are fully united in the moment of the Son’s offering. The one who himself is the establishment of the race, becomes one of the race and the fulfi lment of the race. His acts are redemptive inasmuch as he lives out, as man and as a man, the perfect relationship of Son to Father, sanctifi ed by the Spirit, obedient unto death – a relationship that is the substance of the divine life of which all human existence is the created image, joining what is created to him who created it, perfecting humanity by the obedient offering of Christ’s perfect divinity.