Abstract

Introduction . 'The Glory of God is a living person...a church community fully alive.' A modern paraphrase of Irenaeus' famous dictum or a rediscovery of a profound insight? Can we build a continuity with the relevance of modern day paradigms from how Irenaeus saw his world and how we see our world, especially as it relates to being human and experiencing church? Specifically, in Part I , we will focus on aspects of the historical, dialectical and, doctrinal ways of communicating how Irenaeus viewed personal salvation and the church as related to community and faith-lifestyle notions (what has been called the 'tradition' of the church and the 'rule of faith'). We will seek to incorporate recent insights in the sociology of knowledge that have helped reorientate our perspective on a communal ethic in the early period of Christian ecclesiology. In rediscovering his major theological paradigms of Life, Incarnation, and Deification through a 'church faith and community' prism, Part II will seek to draw out four modern aspects of this historical dialectic of Irenaeus' theology that are central to church as 'community' and integrally related to 'faith as lifestyle.' Namely, what could be called his sub-paradigmal themes of: 'Creation and cosmos', 'growth education in divinity', the 'Body of Christ and the flesh of selfhood', and finally, the 'ecumenical freedom of unity as church ecclesia'. We will see how all of this is incorporated in a definition of what I call, the hermeneutical praxis, or orthopraxis theology of Irenaeus and his use of the 'rule of faith (truth)' as generating a communal ecclesiology.