Author Archives: Jon Garvey

After writing about the abuse of Irenaeus’s thought, and the resulting re-packaging of the doctrine of sin, I thought it would be good to check up on the history of that doctrine, and pulled out Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology. It’s written from a Reformed position but always covers other views pretty thoroughly. To my surprise, I found immediate support for my reading of Irenaeus, even though I was aware Berkhof wrote before “the Irenaean theodicy” had been invented by John Hick:

Once again on BioLogos, Irenaeus has been enlisted as a recruit for an evolutionary view of sin, providing a debunking of Augustine’s view of both  sin and the fall. As I and others pointed out there, this “Irenaean theodicy” is actually filtered through the view of the very much more modern, and probably less evangelical, John Hick. The basic premise, though, is that rather than sin being the radical historic fall of an actual first man into a state alien to his God-given nature, “sin” (now largely repackaged as “selfishness”) is an inevitable part of our evolutionary heritage, and so is to be seen (this is where Irenaeus comes in) … Continue reading →