Stand Up

There were many competing forms of religion circulating in the second and third centuries that were in direct competition with the development of early Christianity. In this fresh work by American Donna Singles, St. Irenaeus comes to life as the first theologian of the early Church. Where the Gnostics were preaching that the body and the physical realm were evil, Irenaeus came forward with powerful arguments that insisted that the body was part of God’s creative plan. To claim that the body was bad would be to say that either God made a mistake, or that He was responding to sin – which would imply that something else was as much or more powerful as God. Irenaeus rejected this and wrote beautifully that the body was not finished yet and needed to be further developed by us until it became fully alive in the Christ. We were in a process of creation that we needed to see and understand. This approach to life was lost when St. Augustine came along and wrote that the body was sinful and needed to be saved, but Singles has excavated the lost teachings of St. Irenaeus and gives us a renewed and fresh approach to the work of becoming what we have been designed to be – a human fully alive and an image or expression of God!