Catechesis Then and Now

Read as a model for catechesis, St. Irenaeus’s Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching teaches the faith narrative-first — as the single saving economy of God told as a story — rather than as a system of propositions. Its Trinitarian spine (the three articles of Dem. 6–7) and its baptismal framing anticipate the later catechetical tradition of Cyril of Jerusalem and John Chrysostom, and they have made the work a touchstone for the twentieth- and twenty-first-century recovery of “narrative” catechesis.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Narrative-First Theology: the Economy as Story

The most striking feature of the Demonstration, considered as a catechism, is that it does not begin with definitions. It begins with a story and never really leaves it. Irenaeus narrates the faith as the one oikonomia — the saving economy of God — unfolding from the creation of the world through the fall, the patriarchs, the Law and the prophets, to the incarnation, cross, resurrection, and the sending of the Spirit (Dem. 8–42; trans. Behr, PPS 17). Doctrine is carried inside the narrative rather than abstracted from it: the believer learns who God is by learning what God has done.

This is a deliberate pedagogy, not an accident of an unsystematic age. For Irenaeus the rule of faith is this narrative summary — “the order of the rule of our faith” (Dem. 6) — and heresy is precisely the dismembering of the one story into fragments rearranged to a different plot, the Gnostic error of severing the Creator from the Redeemer and the Old Testament from the New (Dem. 99–100; cf. Osborn, Irenaeus of Lyons, ch. 1). To catechize, then, is to hand on the whole story whole. Behr observes that Irenaeus’s theology is “narratival” through and through: the truth of the faith is the coherence of the single economy, and to know it is to be able to tell it rightly from beginning to end (Behr, PPS 17, Introduction).

The Trinitarian Shape: the Three Articles (Dem. 6–7)

The story is held together by a Trinitarian frame stated explicitly near the start. Irenaeus sets out “the three articles of our seal” (Dem. 7), the threefold pattern of the rule of faith:

“And this is the order of the rule of our faith… God, the Father, not made, not material, invisible; one God, the creator of all things: this is the first point of our faith. The second point is: the Word of God, Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord, who was manifested to the prophets… and who, in the fullness of time… became man among men, visible and tangible, in order to abolish death and bring to light life… The third point is: the Holy Spirit, through whom the prophets prophesied, and the fathers learned the things of God, and the righteous were led into the way of righteousness; and who in the fullness of time was poured out in a new way on mankind over all the earth, renewing man to God.” (Dem. 6, trans. Behr, PPS 17)

The next chapter binds this confession to baptism: “this is the order of the rule of our faith, and the foundation of the building, and the stability of our conduct… For this reason the baptism of our regeneration proceeds through these three points: God the Father bestowing on us regeneration through His Son by the Holy Spirit” (Dem. 7, trans. Behr, PPS 17). The catechetical lesson and the baptismal rite are thus one thing seen twice: the three points of instruction are the three names into which the catechumen is baptized.

Baptismal Framing

The whole Demonstration is governed by baptism. Irenaeus opens by recalling that “we have received baptism for remission of sins in the name of God the Father, and in the name of Jesus Christ… and in the Holy Spirit” (Dem. 3), and he returns at Dem. 7 to make baptism the structural hinge of the rule of faith. The faith narrated in the body of the work is the faith into which one is baptized; the prophetic proofs of the second half confirm the confession the candidate makes at the font. This is catechesis in its original sense — instruction ordered toward and culminating in Christian initiation, not religious information offered in the abstract.

Comparisons with the Later Catechetical Tradition

Irenaeus stands at the head of a line. By the fourth century the pattern he models — a Trinitarian, baptismally framed handing-on of the faith — had matured into the great catechetical cycles delivered to candidates preparing for Pascha.

St. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 350) delivered his Catechetical Lectures and Mystagogical Catecheses to the candidates of Jerusalem, expounding the articles of the creed in sequence and then, after baptism, unveiling the meaning of the rites themselves. The structure is recognizably Irenaean — the rule of faith narrated and then the sacramental seal explained — now expanded into a full Lenten course (Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures; trans. NPNF II/7).

St. John Chrysostom, as a presbyter at Antioch, prepared each year’s candidates with his Baptismal Instructions, narrating the rites of initiation — the renunciation of Satan, the anointing, the threefold immersion, the white garment — and joining sacramental theology to a demanding ethic of the post-baptismal life. Much of this corpus was itself lost and only recovered in the twentieth century, in a parallel to the Demonstration’s own rediscovery (see Catechetical Homilies). What Irenaeus does in compressed compass — bind the three articles to the baptism of regeneration — Chrysostom does at length and with the rites described in documentary detail.

Set beside these, the Demonstration’s distinctive contribution is its economy of scale and its narrative integrity: it gives the whole faith as one continuous story in a hundred short chapters, where the later catecheses expound it lecture by lecture. It is the seed of which Cyril and Chrysostom are the flowering.

Modern Catechetical Revival

The twentieth-century ressourcement — the return to the Fathers as living sources — gave the Demonstration a second life. Its recovery of “narrative” or “kerygmatic” catechesis (teaching the faith as the proclamation of God’s saving acts rather than as a list of doctrines to be memorized) resonated strongly with modern catechetical renewal, and the book has been widely attributed an influence on it (Behr, PPS 17, Introduction; Osborn, Irenaeus of Lyons, ch. 1). The publication of the work in accessible translation — especially Behr’s PPS 17 — placed it on seminary and adult-catechumenate reading lists, where it is commonly held up as the patristic charter for teaching the faith as a single economy from creation to Christ. Such claims of direct influence on particular modern programs are best stated cautiously, as attributions rather than documented dependence; what is not in doubt is that the Demonstration models, sixteen centuries early, precisely the narrative-first, baptismally ordered catechesis that the modern Church has sought to recover.

See Also

• The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching — the work itself, its rediscovery and plan
• Catechetical Homilies of St. John Chrysostom — the later Antiochene baptismal catecheses
• Orthodoxy: Eschatology — the baptismally-grounded hope the catechumen confesses

References

• Irenaeus of Lyons. On the Apostolic Preaching. Translated and introduced by John Behr. Popular Patristics Series 17. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997. (Cited by chapter “Dem.”)
• Cyril of Jerusalem. Catechetical Lectures and Mystagogical Catecheses. Trans. NPNF II/7.
• John Chrysostom. Baptismal Instructions. Translated by Paul W. Harkins. Ancient Christian Writers 31. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1963.
• Osborn, Eric. Irenaeus of Lyons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Behr, John. The Way to Nicaea. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.