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[Adam ‘is the type of the one to come’] because the Word, the
Fashioner of all things, pre?gured in him the future economy re-
lating to the Son of God on behalf of the human race, God having
predetermined the ?rst, the animated human that is, so that he
should be saved by the spiritual [one]; for, since the Saviour pre-
exists, it was necessary that the one to be saved should also exist,
so that the Saviour should not be without purpose. (Haer. 3.22.3,
referring to Rom 5:14)

Creation and Salvation, for Irenaeus, are not Plan A and Plan B. Rather they
cohere together as the one economy of God, which culminates in the work of
Christ on the cross, and which is only understood and told from this starting
point.10 And this starting point is simultaneously the completion of the crea-
tive act begun in Genesis. The only work in the opening chapter of Genesis
said to be God’s own express purpose, his own project, is “Let us make the hu-
man being in our image” (Gen 1:26-7). Yet this is also the only work for which
God does not say “Let there be.” After having spoken everything else into be-
ing, he announces his own project with a subjunctive rather than an imperative.
And it is in the Gospel of John, which clearly sets itself in parallel with Gene-
sis, that Christ says from the Cross: “it is ?nished” (John 19:30)! Now is the
divine purpose complete, by Christ’s own voluntary passion, so that he is the
image of God (Col 1:15), and, as Pilate says, just before the cruci?xion, and only
in the Gospel of John: “behold the human being” (John 19:5). Christ shows us
the truth of God and also the truth of the human being (or the true human
being) simultaneously: he shows us what it is to be God in the way he dies as a
human being.

It is only in the light of the risen Christ that we can say that death came
into the world through Adam’s sin. But this also means that, while it is only in
the light of the Risen Christ that we can see that death is the last enemy, this
last enemy isn’t simply dismissed, rendered naught, or obliterated, but is,
rather, turned inside out: it is now also known to be the means by which the
last enemy is destroyed—it is by his death that Christ conquers death—so that
what was once the end, now in fact becomes the beginning. Its power over
human beings, the fear that it introduces, leading us to sin, has been voided, so
that we might voluntarily die to ourselves in baptism and a life of taking up the
cross, in following Christ.

10 cf. J. Behr, Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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