Here is a great quote from Oscar Cullmann that shows the centrality and importance that redemptive history had for Irenaeus and should have for us.  He rightly understood that Christian preaching divorced from the fullness of redemptive history, had no vitality.  May our preaching be filled with biblical theology and its Christ-centered, gospel witness.  Here is the quote found in Aloys Grillmeier’s Christ in Christian Tradition:

Down to the theologians of the ‘redemptive history’ school in the nineteenth century…there has scarcely been another theologian who had recognized so clearly as did Irenaeus that the Christian proclamation stands or falls with the redemptive history, that this historical work of Jesus Christ as Redeemer forms the mid-point of a line which leads from the Old Testament to the return of Christ (Cullmann, Christ and Time, London 1962, 56-7).

May we exhaust ourselves defending and declaring, exegeting and extolling the glories of Christ unveiled in the history of redemption.  The power and the purity of the gospel depends on it.

Sola Deo Gloria, dss