As a pastor who deals (almost daily) with the devastation wrought in souls by bad readings of Scripture, I wish every contemporary Christian on the planet could read this passage. It’s the beginning of a section called “How the Divine Scripture is to be read and understood” from Origen’s ”On First Principles.”

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.”

read more…