Written by James Murphy, Ph.D. |
Wednesday, August 10, 2022
The Bible is a treasury of humanity’s highest ideals and yet the Bible is brutally realistic about human evil. The clash between those ideals and human reality gives the Bible great dramatic power.

The Bible is blamed for virtually every evil under the sun. Here is a summary of the rap sheet: Slavery and racism began with Noah’s curse on his son Ham. The Crusades, Western imperialism, Islamic jihad, and even Nazi genocide were all inspired by biblical holy war. The degradation of nature, cruelty to animals, and overpopulation are all endorsed by God when he commands Adam to subdue the Earth. God’s election of Israel as his chosen people led to three thousand years of conflict in the Middle East. When God tells Eve “your husband shall rule over you” we see the origin of all the horrors of patriarchy, from polygamy to wife-beating. As for child abuse, think of Abraham’s appalling plan to make a burnt offering of his son, Isaac. Biblical condemnations of sodomy gave us centuries of cruel persecution of homosexuals. It would appear that the Bible has a lot to answer for.
At the same time, many champions of human equality, the emancipation of slaves, the liberation of women, vegetarianism, pacifism, respect for nature, the rights of children, and the abolition of the death penalty also claim to be inspired by the Bible. After all, the Bible does insist that God created every human being in his own image, male and female alike, and that in Paradise we shall see war no more, nor killing of any kind. What could be a more ringing endorsement of human equality than the biblical assertion: “there is no longer slave or free, Jew or Greek; there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one”? As the most revered and reviled book in history, the Bible is routinely blamed for our evils and credited for our ideals.
In one dramatic biblical scene, Jesus debates Satan and both support their arguments by quoting verbatim from the Bible. Notoriously, the Bible can be quoted to defend contradictory positions about virtually all moral controversies. Whatever your opinion about slavery, gay marriage, divorce, capital punishment, polygamy, patriarchy, corporal punishment, race, sacrifice, war, or socialism, you’ll find support in the Bible. How could there be a coherent biblical ethics when the Bible is deployed as a weapon by all sides on every issue—when even the devil quotes Scripture?
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It has been said that there are three requirements for a fulfilling life. Are you listening?  High school graduates?  College students? Those starting life? Those in mid-life? Those in golden years? 1. A clear sense of personal identity: Who am I? 2. A strong sense of personal mission: Why am I here? 3. A deep sense of life’s meaning: What is the purpose of it all? If we settle for superficial answers, we’ll be disappointed and face the threat of a cynical or delusional life. It is of great importance that we look for answers in the right place—and recall the great prayer of Augustine: “Dear Lord, You have made us for Yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” Here is the answer we need. 

Prisoner 174517 was one of only 3 survivors out of a group of 650 Italian Jews transported to Poland in 1944. One day in the Auschwitz death camp, prisoner 174517 was thirsty. 
“Seeing a fat icicle hanging just outside his hut in the Auschwitz extermination camp, he reached out of the window and broke it off to quench his thirst. But before he could get the icicle to his mouth, a guard snatched it out of his hands and dashed it to pieces on the filthy ground.”
‘Why?’ the prisoner burst out instinctively—’Why?’ the guard answered with brutal finality, ‘Here there is no why.’”
To Prisoner 174517, the “Italian Jewish scientist and writer, the guard’s answer was the essence of the death camps—places that defied all explanation for their absolute evil. In the face of their horror, explanations born of psychology, sociology, and economics were pathetic in their inadequacy” (Long Journey Home: A Guide to Your Search For the Meaning of Life,” Os Guinness).
The ‘Why?’ Question
Some things defy explanation. They seem inexplicable or gratuituos. But we still ask “Why?” 
It is a question we ask our whole lives. It looks for a reason, a purpose, a motive– an explanation for the way things are.
“Why?” was a question God began asking in the earliest days of human history. To Cain—“Why are you angry?” To Abraham—“Why did Sarah laugh?”
Moses asked, “Why is the bush not burned up?” Nathan asked David, “Why have you despised the word of the Lord?” Job asked, “Why did I not die at birth?”
Jesus repeatedly asked “why” questions – “Why are you anxious?” “Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye?” “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’ and do not do what I say?” “Why do you not believe me?” Most dramatic of all: “Why have you forsaken me?”
Here There Is No Why
“Why?” cuts through the superficial and requires explanations, a reason, a motive, a cause, a purpose. Without experiencing anything close to the horrors of the Auschwitz, people all over the world—out of the frustrating emptiness of life, agree with the brutal finality of the guard’s answer, “Here there is no why.” 
What a sad conclusion.
Evidently, Job felt this despair when under the unspeakable weight and misery of his suffering, he cried out, “Why did I not die at birth?”  Sometimes life hurts so much, and seems so unexplainable that we cannot see clearly enough to answer the ‘why?’ question. But we go on asking because we feel compelled to find answers.
We Seek a Final Explanation
“Unique among living species, human life is aware of itself, yet we find ourselves in a world that doesn’t explain itself. So we’re impelled to ask why things are as they are and how we fit in. What gives life to life? Why is there something rather than nothing?”
“Deep inside us we know the facts of the matter are not the end of the matter. So we seek a final explanation, a source of meaning that goes as far back as one can go, an ultimate answer before which all questions cease.”
“This will to find meaning is fundamental. It is ‘the primary motivational force in man,’ according to psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. ‘Meaning is not a luxury for us,’ says philosopher Dallas Willard. ‘It is a kind of spiritual oxygen, we might say, that enables our souls to live.’”
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Irenaeus is thus a key architect of Christian thought. As such it is unsurprising that his influence spread so rapidly and so far (a fragment of Against Heresies, dating from when Irenaeus was still alive, has been found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, at the other side of the known world from where he wrote the work). We actually have no idea when or how Irenaeus died, though later tradition has it that he was martyred on June 28, 202.

Irenaeus of Lyons
Irenaeus once wrote,
Thou wilt not expect from me, who am resident among the Keltae, and am accustomed for the most part to use a barbarous dialect, any display of rhetoric, which I have never learned, or any excellence of composition, which I have never practiced, or any beauty and persuasiveness of style, to which I make no pretensions.1
As a result, Irenaeus has become a somewhat forgotten theologian, quickly dismissed as blundering and confused. Certainly, he is difficult to access, and hard-going theologians tend to incite the wrath of the critics. However, Emil Brunner’s reassessment of Irenaeus has become increasingly standard:
In spite of the fact that in the formal sense Irenaeus was not a systematic theologian, yet—like Luther—he was a systematic theologian of the first rank, indeed, the greatest systematic theologian: to perceive connections between truths, and to know which belongs to which. No other thinker was able to weld ideas together which others allowed to slip as he was able to do, not even Augustine or Athanasius.2
Who, then, was Irenaeus?

Irenaeus was born somewhere around AD 130 and grew up in Smyrna in Asia Minor, where the then bishop, Polycarp, became his mentor and passed on his memories of the apostle John and others who had seen the Lord. It was to be extremely important to Irenaeus that he had such a direct link back to the apostles. It is possible that he went with Polycarp to Rome—at any rate, both visited Rome. There Irenaeus seems to have learned from men such as Justin (he clearly borrowed much from him), as well as seeing how endemic the problem of heresy was there. He then traveled to Gaul and settled where a church had been founded quite recently in the capital city of Lugdunum (Lyons).

Then in 177 he was sent back as the church’s delegate to Eleutherus, then bishop of Rome, perhaps to discuss the problem of false teaching in Gaul. At any rate, while he was away, a ferociously violent wave of persecution swept through Lyons; many of Irenaeus’s friends and fellow-believers were horrifically tortured and killed, including the old bishop, Pothinus.
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