Origen first cites certain Old Testament prophesies that the Jews of his time and the first centuries read *literally* and so reject(ed) Jesus as the Messiah *because* Jesus did not do any of the particular things cited, nor did any of these particular things happen when Jesus came in the flesh.
(Please remember that Origen is not anti-Semitic. He’s arguing about the way we read the Scriptures within what he considers his family, his extended tribe.)
What Origen does next struck me like lightning. He cites additional passages from the Old Testament that he says “the heretics” use to reject the Creator.
What blew my mind?
These passages the heretics (in this case, the Marcionites) cite to reject the Creator are the very ones most often cited by contemporary neo-Calvinist teachers and their epigones to *prove* their version of God, passages Origen says both they and Marcionites should not read *literally* and thus “suppose such things about him [the Creator] that would not be supposed of the most savage and unjust human being.”
“After having spoken, as in summary, about the inspiration of the divine Scriptures, it is necessary to proceed to the manner of reading and understanding them, since many errors have occurred from the fact that the way by which the holy readings ought to be examined has not been discovered by the multitude.
“For the hard-hearted and ignorant of the people of the circumcision have not believed in our Saviour, thinking they follow the language of the prophecies regarding him, and not seeing him visibly proclaiming ‘release to the captives,’ nor building up what they consider to be truly ‘a city of God,’ nor ‘cutting off the chariots from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem,’ nor ‘eating butter and honey, and before knowing or preferring evil, choosing the good’; and thinking it was prophesied that the ‘wolf,’ the four-footed animal, was ‘to feed with the lamb and the leopard to lie down with the kid, the calf and the bull and the lion to feed together, being led by a little child, and the ox and the bear to pasture together, their young ones growing up together, and the lion to eat straw like the ox’—seeing none of these things visibly happening in the sojourn of him believed by us to be Christ, they did not accept our Lord Jesus, but they crucified him as having improperly called himself Christ.
“While those from the heretical sects reading this, ‘’A fire has been kindled from my anger,’ and, ‘I am a jealous God, repaying the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third or fourth generation,’ and ‘I regret that I anointed Sault to be king,’ and, ‘I am God, who makes peace and creates evil,’ and, amongst others, ‘There is no evil in the city which the Lord has not done,’ and again, ‘Evils came down from the Lord upon the gates of Jerusalem,’ and, ‘An evil spirit from God throttled Saul,’ and numberless other passages like these, have not dared to disbelieve that these are Scriptures of God, but believing them to be of the creator, whom the Jews worship, they thought that, as the creator was imperfect and not good, the Saviour had sojourned announcing a more perfect God, whom they say is not the creator, motivated in various ways regarding this; and once fallen away from the Creator who is the only uncreated God, they have given themselves up to fictions, mythologizing for themselves hypotheses according to which they suppose that there are some things that are seen and certain others which are not seen, which their own souls have idolized.”
“However, even the more simple of those who claim to be of the Church have supposed that there is none greater than the Creator, doing so soundly; but they suppose such things about him that would not be supposed of the most savage and unjust human being.”
—Origen, On First Principles, 4.2.1, trans. John Behr, 2019
I find it ironic that Origen sees—in the third century—that reading these passages in this way, reading them literally, leads either to a rejection of the Creator or a marring of the image of the Creator.
In Origin and Gregory of Nyssa and Athanasius—and they get this from Paul and John—the image of the unseen God is Jesus Christ.
They read the Scriptures in light of his person, in light of the unveiling of God that occurs in the flesh of Jesus Christ nailed to the cross. This One is the One who lifts the veil and opens the book. He comes not to take life but to give it.
Reading the Scriptures as certain Jews and Marcionites did—by the letters that appear on the surface and only at that level—leads to grave misunderstandings, leads to not seeing and not embracing Jesus Christ as the image of the Father.
When we read the Scriptures by the great lantern of Jesus Christ, as an allegory of his love made known on the cross, when we *search the Scriptures* in this way, we find Life. We see that God loves the world in this way: he gave his only begotten Son that not one human might perish.
In reading the Scriptures the church starts with God as revealed on the cross and works backward.
Contemporary literalists tar and feather Christological readers of the Scriptures as Marcionites. If I am reading Origen right (and John Behr tells me that I am), they are the ones reading the Scriptures with Marcion.
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