Scott,
that might be an interesting account from the perspective of a medieval philosopher. But, as far as I can tell, it’s just not on the radar for the 2nd century theologian/pastor like Irenaeus, but if you can find something there, please do share.

As for as my own interests go in modern theology, while you might be able to logically demonstrate the above view of yours, I don’t really see how you could then demonstrate what this “type” necessarily entails apart from a concrete account of what the practice “looked like” as practiced in actual communities: how does said practice fit into the life and beliefs of the community. After all, baptism means so much different things to Christians across the globe and throughout the centuries. Moreover, it has been practiced in radically different ways. What Irenaeus wants to assert however is that baptism and the vow made in baptism and in the community of the baptized REALLY does fit into the narrative of salvation history. The gnostics blow it here b/c they can’t even affirm that Jesus is the very same lord of both Salvation History and Creation. They can’t do this for any number of reasons, all of which originate in their fundamental inability to account for Christian practice the way that apostles and the churches across the globe do. So, yes, you can built a phenomenology of the “type” of baptism. But the following question is twofold: first, will the description be faithful to the church’s practice if you reduce practice in favor of a more “ideal” type, and second by emphasizing type over practice, do you risk limiting the practice in way that fathers like Irenaeus are hedging against precisely by avoiding such an idealized definition?

Thanks for that; would you say that baptism could ever _not_ be part of the regula fidei, in this life, for Irenaeus?

I get the performative nature of this — you can even see this in the way that some medievals construed logic, e.g., Abelard, Anselm. You often find that when they analyze a ‘proposition’ that they are analyzing an ‘oratio’– that is, some performed statement. This view of performed sentences was somewhat in competition with another view — where words have naturally fixed meanings. Eventually the ‘naturally fixed meanings’ acct. dropped out, and the focus was on ‘orationes’.

So yeah- I do get the significance of the claim that ‘content’ is never not performed by someone, e.g., by the Christian community. Nevertheless, there has got to be something to the idea that even if there isn’t a baptism being performed right now somewhere in the world, that it remains –in this life– a ‘type’ of action to be done. In which case, we could consider baptism as a type of action in addition to being ‘tokened’ at various moments in time.

What do you think?

Knowing anything is an on-going journey of distinguishing the essentials of that kind of thing from the less essential…with openness to future insight and correction from the past, too. Persons are the doers of this kind of knowing. And this kind of knowing shapes the persons who engage in it. Aristotle said that a way of knowing is “a qualification of the human person WITH RESPECT TO THAT PERSON’S BEING (ousia).

Isn’t that a splendid and stupendous thing to have seen? All this empersoned growth is the crucial aspect of knowing that was dropped from the theoretical picture in modern “epistemology,” which has little to do with the episteme or communal discipline as previously understood in the liberal arts tradition of the West? This is why the questions of knowing became questions of “knowledge.”

I was asking about the particular contents of the ‘regula fidei’; not the convention of having a rule by which to accept or reject some claims. I was just interested to learn what the particular contents of Irenaeus’s rule of faith was, and see how similar it is to, e.g., Augustine’s. If we notice differences of content, then we might ask, what is the basis for this difference? It could be all sorts of things, rhetorical, philosophical, theological, moral, etc. I suppose if I were to identify what this ‘comparison’ amounts to, it would be one of ‘overstanding’ consequent to ‘understanding’. But, given that I’ve not studied this in Irenaeus I asked the question about what I. takes the ‘regula fidei’ to be (namely, its content)?

But perhaps you may not accept such a procedure — perhaps one might hesitate b/c ‘content’ would be a technical term and not based in the historical documents. In which case, we are in the land of perspectivism and we can’t ask such comparative questions and expect any non-perspectival responses. Is that how you see it? If so, perhaps the phrase ‘regula fidei’ is a technical concept of medieval or modern origins; and given our technical concept we explain it as an item of rhetoric for some reason yet to be explained.

The Regula is what *makes* our theologizing important. For instance, debates on the Trinity had importance for Nyssa b/c these concerned the Name into which one was baptized. Getting the theology wrong meant being baptized into a false name, when “there only one Name under heaven whereby we might be saved” (he discusses this in his “Catechetical Oration”). But baptism is not theology, it is a mystery, an ontological event, a sacrament. Same with the Eucharist, which “makes” the Church (in that, by partaking of Christ’s Body and Blood, we become that Body).

It served as a way of pointing towards realities which we might otherwise miss, primarily in being wholly fixed on our discourse about God apart from moving the whole life toward God (cf. Nazianzen’s repeated insistence upon purification of life as integral to “doing theology”). It means to bear in mind that by faith we are saved, which is an act of the total creature; anything less is had by the demons anyway (who are expert in discursive knowledge of God).

Not sure if I’m adding any light for the heat . . .

I don’t think that Josh is saying that we ought to mark a hard and fast distinction between rhetorical, philosophical and theological. After all, the divisions between the Gnostics and Irenaeus were all of the above. And Irenaeus is not in the business of clearly demarcating the disciplinary lines. In fact, he seems to think that theology (or theological meaning) encompasses all of the above.

As you say above, some interpretations don’t work and are rejected in council. But we see this before there’s any councils at all. After all, that’s what Irenaeus is doing; arguing that the Gnostic Interpretation is not Christian, that it doesn’t work. But to do so, he develops a rule that is largely based in Christian practice, not in philosophy.

Sounds good to me. My response was coming from a concern that the phrase ‘regula fidei’ be taken in a way that obscures divergences among theological accounts or hides what the context(s) of such a thing is.

I also agree that we need to isolate theological reasons from rhetorical reasons, or philosophical reasons. Sometimes a difference of the (proposed) truth of a philosophical claim underlies a theological difference. For example, in certain Trinitarian theologian’s philosophical psychology explains why they have different theological accounts. I won’t bore you with details, suffice to say certain scholastic theologians all want to agree with church authorities, especially ecumenical counsels, and if possible Augustine. So, they generally aim for the same conclusion, but how they get there is very different. Sometimes how they get there even slightly changes the conclusion. And– what determines this difference are philosophical differences and not theological differences. Of course, there are many other ways things could go — there might be theological reasons that explain why there are philosophical differences between people. It is left to patient students to figure out what is going on in a given situation.