Theopedia

Origen

Overview

Origen (ca. 185 - ca. 254) taught first at Alexandria, Egypt, and later at Caesarea, Palestine, in the first half of the third century.1 Johannes Quasten calls him “the outstanding teacher and scholar of the early Church, a man of spotless character, encyclopedic learning, and one of the most original thinkers the world has ever seen,” and Herman Bavinck names him “the most influential theologian of the early centuries.”23 He succeeded his own teacher, Clement of Alexandria, as head of Alexandria’s catechetical school, produced what is usually considered the first systematic study of Christian theology, and compiled the Hexapla, a massive comparison of the Hebrew Old Testament against its Greek translations.14 His system also carried doctrines the wider church later condemned, among them the preexistence of souls and the eventual salvation of all things.56

Life and Ministry

Origen belonged to the Alexandrian catechetical school, established by about AD 190 to state Christian belief as a discipline able to answer philosophically trained readers, raising pistis (faith) toward gnosis (knowledge) without giving up the church’s own creed or Scripture as the sole source of revealed truth, the same project Philo had earlier undertaken for Judaism.3 Clement of Alexandria was the school’s first teacher known from surviving writings, and Origen, his pupil, succeeded him as its head.32 Charles Hodge likewise names “Pantaenus, Clemens, and Origen successively at the head of the catechetical school of Alexandria.”7 Origen went on to teach at Caesarea, Palestine, for the rest of the period the library’s sources trace.1

Origen wrote commentaries on most books of the Bible, preached homilies on most of the Old Testament and some of the New, and wrote a defense of Christianity against the philosopher Celsus.1 His On First Principles is, along with Lactantius’s Divine Institutions, one of only two works from this early period that can be considered a genuine dogmatic system.3 His other great labor was textual. Over twenty-eight years of travel and collecting, he produced first a four-column Tetrapla and then the six-column Hexapla, setting the Hebrew text, the Hebrew transliterated into Greek letters, and four Greek versions (Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint, and Theodotion) side by side, occasionally expanding to eight or nine columns in some books.4 The finished work ran to roughly fifty volumes and was never fully copied, because of its size and expense; it lay unused for about fifty years until Eusebius and Pamphilus placed it in the library at Caesarea, where it is thought to have perished when the city was sacked in AD 653.4 The ancients called Origen “Adamantinus,” the adamantine one, for the labor the work cost him.4

Theological Contribution

Origen’s grounding in Greek philosophy, from Socrates through Plato and the Stoa, produced, in Bavinck’s assessment, “a system that risked collapsing theology into philosophy.”3 It included the subordination of the Son, the eternity of creation, the preexistence of souls, a dualism of spirit and matter, earthly purification, and the restoration of all things, harmonized with Scripture through what Bavinck calls “a pneumatic, allegorical exegesis.”3 Bavinck judges it “the most impressive and richest specimen of the mediating theology that surfaces in the church again and again.”3

On the Son’s relationship to the Father, Origen argued that the Son had existed with the Father from all eternity. He drew on Scripture, reading Proverbs 8:22-25’s picture of Wisdom begotten before the world’s foundations as a description of the Son, and asking, “How can anyone think or believe that there was ever a time, even the shortest moment, when God the Father existed without the begetting of this Wisdom?”8 He also drew on an observation current in the Platonic schools of his day: correlative terms like “father” and “son” name each other simultaneously and cannot exist apart, so that eliminating the son eliminates the father with him.8 Reading John 1:1 and 1:14 together, Origen took the Gospel’s shift from “was” to “became” as marking the difference between the Logos’s eternal being and the incarnation, which happened at a particular time.8 The same allegorical method carried him to other conclusions the church did not follow, including a non-literal reading of Revelation 20 that ruled out a future, literal reign of Christ on earth.9

Origen also gave close attention to the New Testament’s own boundaries. His homilies on Joshua list its books and appear to include all twenty-seven of them, over a century before Athanasius’s 367 Festal Letter named the same list.10 The list survives only through Rufinus’s Latin translation, and its reliability against Origen’s own Greek has been challenged; Michael Kruger judges the case for its authenticity the stronger one, citing the list’s placement of Acts, its lack of embellishment, and independent manuscript evidence.10 Origen elsewhere pictures Scripture as a net:

Before our Savior Jesus Christ this net was not wholly filled; for the net of the law and prophets had to be completed… . And the texture of the net has been completed in the Gospels, and in the words of Christ through the Apostles.10

Reading Genesis 26 allegorically, he names Isaac’s well-digging servants as the New Testament’s own authors: “Matthew, Mark, Luke, John; his servants are Peter, James, Jude; the apostle Paul is his servant. These all dig the wells of the New Testament.”10

Historical Significance

The eighteenth-century Particular Baptist theologian John Gill claimed Origen’s support for the eternal generation of the Son while naming his errors just as plainly: the doctrine of universal salvation, the preexistence of human souls, and the belief that the resurrected body will be new and celestial.2 Gill judged the Latin translations of Origen’s works badly corrupted, quoting the complaint that “one knows not when he reads Origen, and is at a loss to find Origen in Origen,” and faulted Origen and the Alexandrian school generally for “corrupt[ing] the simplicity of the gospel.”11 That judgment did not stop him citing Origen’s own writing at least fourteen times across his own body of work, on points ranging from the apostolic antiquity of infant baptism to the fivefold division of the Psalms to the canonicity of James.12

Two of the doctrines Gill flagged were later formally condemned. Louis Berkhof’s account of “Pre-existentianism” names Origen as its leading advocate: “Origen looks upon man’s present material existence, with all its inequalities and irregularities, physical and moral, as a punishment for sins committed in a previous existence.”13 Berkhof raises four objections to it: the theory has no scriptural or philosophical ground and rests on a matter-spirit dualism borrowed from pagan thought; it makes the body something merely accidental to the soul; it destroys the unity of the human race, since souls would not have originated together; and it finds no support in human consciousness, since no one is aware of a previous existence or dreads union with the body as a prison.13 A. H. Strong locates the mechanism more precisely: “Origen accounted for disparity of conditions at birth by the differences in the conduct of these same souls in a previous state. God’s justice at the first made all souls equal; condition here corresponds to the degree of previous guilt.”5 Strong records that “Origen’s view was condemned at the Synod of Constantinople, 538.”5 Bavinck separately names Origen, alongside Pelagius and Arminius, among those against whom “the mainstream of the Christian church has been true to the particularist teaching of Augustine that not all are saved,”6 and notes elsewhere that Origen’s related teaching that God has always been creating, so that countless worlds preceded this one, “was condemned by the Council of Nicaea,” in Bavinck’s own account, “but has made numerous comebacks.”14

Related Doctrines

Origen’s teacher and predecessor at Alexandria’s catechetical school was Clement of Alexandria. His argument for the Son’s eternal existence bears on eternal generation of the Son, and the subordinationist strand in his theology anticipates the later dispute over subordinationism and Arianism. His teaching that all things will ultimately be restored is an early form of universalism. His work on the Hexapla and his own canon list bear on inspiration of the Bible.

References

  1. Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 57. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Steven Tshombe Godet, “John Gill: Patristic Scholar,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 142, quoting Johannes Quasten, Patrology, 2:37. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  4. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 16. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  5. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 489. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Bavinck, chap. 16, “The Exalted Lord Christ.” ↩ ↩2

  7. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1873), chap. 20, “The Means of Grace.” ↩

  8. Heine, chap. 6, “Today I Have Begotten You,” 57-61. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  9. Heine, chap. 16, “Millennium.” ↩

  10. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 8, “Problem Books and Canonical Boundaries.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  11. Godet, “John Gill: Patristic Scholar,” 143. ↩

  12. Godet, “John Gill: Patristic Scholar,” 143-44. ↩

  13. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 181-82. ↩ ↩2

  14. Bavinck, chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩