The Calvinist International
In today’s post, Melanchthon cites one more patristic source (Origen) as an example of how the church’s authority is rightly deployed. He then proceeds to sketch his understanding of the relation of the church to the Word and to give his definitions of what the church (1) is not, and (2) is. The church at […]
A few months ago David Bentley Hart kicked up quite the online controversy over in the comments of this blog. The original topic was universalism, but then it turned into a discussion of the status of Origen of Alexandria within Eastern Orthodoxy, and that in turn became a discussion about the authority of church tradition […]
It may be news to many of you that Origen, the church father, and Plotinus, the great Neoplatonist philosopher, at one time or another, both sat under the teaching of Ammonius Saccas, who was perhaps the founding teacher of Neoplatonism. Joseph Trigg, in his book on Origen, briefly explains the similarities and differences between Origen […]
Origen, in his Commentary on Romans, poses an interesting solution to the question of what keeps the free will from falling away once it has been restored to God by grace: Now precisely what it is that would restrain the freedom of will in the future ages to keep it from falling again into sin, […]
Origen was not a universalist, at least not in the popular sense of a “universalist” as one who believes that all religious paths lead to the same summit, nor in the specific doctrinal position that the goodness of God demands the ultimate restoration of all things and the salvation of all creatures without exception. On the […]
Despite his penchant for allegory and Platonic speculation Origen quite often produces insightful conclusions based on the literal meaning of the text in his biblical commentaries. Historians argue that it was partly his reading of Origen’s Commentary on Romans that inspired Erasmus’s Bible-centered philosophia Christi. It was perhaps Origen’s conclusion that the “priests” of the New […]