How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (42 page)

With no early thinker is this more clear than with Origen of Alexandria—the greatest Christian theologian before the debates of the fourth century. Although he was an orthodox thinker in his time, he was condemned in later centuries for perpetrating heresy.

Origen, born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, was unusually precocious. Already at a young age he was appointed head of the school that educated converts, the famous catechetical school. He was brilliant, learned, and massively well read. He was also incredibly prolific. According to the church father Jerome, Origen’s biblical commentaries, treatises, homilies, and letters totaled some two thousand.
¹⁴

Origen delved into theological areas that had not yet been examined by any of his predecessors in the faith, and as a result he came up with many distinctive and highly influential ideas. Later theologians questioned his orthodoxy, and he was faulted for developing ideas that subsequently led to the major theological schism that I discuss in the next chapter, the Arian controversy. But he was working in virgin territory. He accepted the orthodox views of his day—including the Christological perspective claiming that Christ was divine and human at the same time, and yet was one person, not two. But Origen worked out that doctrine in a way that took him into theological arenas never before explored.

Among his abundant writings, none is more interesting than his book
On First Principles
, written around 229
CE
when Origen was just over forty years old. This was the first attempt we have of a
systematic theology
, that is, a methodical attempt to deal with the major theological views of the church, both to establish what “all” Christians were supposed to believe and to speculate on how to understand the considerable number of gray areas not yet worked out by the orthodox thinkers of his day.

Origen begins his book by stressing that Christ is to be understood as God’s Wisdom, which existed always with God the Father (since God always had wisdom), without beginning. Christ is also God’s Word, since he is the one who communicates to the world all that is involved with God’s Wisdom. For Origen, Christ was not only a preexistent divine being; he was always with God the Father, and since he is God’s own Wisdom and Word, he was himself God by nature, and always has been. He was the one through whom God created all things.

This, then, naturally raises the question of how it is that “this mighty power of the divine majesty” can have become a human, “to have existed within the compass of that man who appeared in Judea” (
On First Principles
2.6.2).
¹⁵
Origen himself stands in awe of the question of incarnation: “The human understanding with its narrow limits is baffled; and struck with amazement at so mighty a wonder knows not which way to turn, what to hold to, or whither to betake itself. If it thinks of God, it sees a man; if it thinks of a man, it beholds one returning from the dead with spoils after vanquishing the kingdom of death” (
On First Principles
2.6.2).

How exactly did this divine figure become human? How, in becoming human, did it not diminish its divinity? And how can the human be divine without ceasing to be human? Origen’s solution is one of the ideas that ended up making him susceptible to the charge of heresy. He came to believe in the
preexistence of souls.
In this view, not only did Christ preexist his appearance on earth as a human, so did everyone else.
¹⁶

Origen maintained that in the remote past, way back into eternity, God created an enormous number of souls. He made these souls in order to contemplate and participate with the Son of God, who was God’s Word and Wisdom. But virtually all of these souls failed to do what they were designed to do and fell away from their adoring contemplation of the Word and Wisdom of God. Some fell away further than others. Those who fell the furthest became demons. Those who fell not so far became angels. And those who fell somewhere in between the two became human beings. Becoming a demon, a human, or an angel was a kind of punishment for the soul. That is why there are ranks and divisions among these three kinds of being, with some greater than others. Among humans, that is why some people are born with birth defects or disadvantages in life. It is not because God is capricious in how he deals with people; it is because some people are being punished more severely for the greater sin they committed before coming into human existence.

There was one soul, however, out of all the multitude, that did not fall away. Understanding this soul is the key to Origen’s Christology. This one soul clung with absolute devotion to the Word and Wisdom of God in a state of constant contemplation, “in a union inseparable and indissoluble.” Its unceasing contemplation had a profound effect on this soul. The best analogy that Origen can draw is of a piece of iron placed into the blazing coals of a very hot fire. After a long while, the iron—even though it is not itself “fire”—nonetheless takes on all the characteristics of fire. Touching it would produce no different effect from touching the fire itself. That’s what happened to this soul. It “was forever placed in the Word, forever in the Wisdom, forever in God.” It, in effect, became “God in all its acts and feelings and thoughts; and therefore it cannot be called changeable or alterable, since by being ceaselessly kindled it came to possess unchangeability through its unity with the Word of God” (
On First Principles
2.6.6).

This one soul was the means by which God could establish contacts with the fallen souls who had become human as a means of punishment. For this one soul, thoroughly infused with Christ, the Word and Wisdom of God, became a human. Since it was “at one” with God (like the iron in the fire), in its incarnate state, as the man Jesus, it too could rightly be called the Son of God, the Wisdom of God, the power of God, the Christ of God; and since it was human, it could be named Jesus and be called the Son of Man.

How is it that Jesus Christ can on the one hand have a rational soul, like all other humans, and yet still be a manifestation of the Son of God on earth? It is because “this soul which belongs to Christ so chose to love righteousness as to cling to it unchangeably and inseparably in accordance with the immensity of its love; the result being that by firmness of purpose, immensity of affection and an inextinguishable warmth of love all susceptibility to change or alteration was destroyed, and what formerly depended upon the will was by influence of long custom changed into nature” (
On First Principles
2.6.5).

Here then is a highly sophisticated, if greatly speculative, understanding of the incarnation and nature of Christ, arguably the most advanced early attempt to understand how Christ could be both human and divine. But it too would be surpassed in the years to come, as theologians worked to refine their views and to rule out of court any views that they considered either heretical or bordering on heretical.
¹⁷

W
HEN THE HERESIOLOGISTS OF
the second, third, and fourth centuries discussed the “heretics” whom they considered to be a threatening presence in their midst, they described them as demon-inspired, evil propagators of falsehood. The reality, though, is that virtually no heretic then or since has considered himself or herself to be a “heretic,” in the sense that the ancient heresiologists used the term, as referring to someone who propagated error. No one thinks they are propagating error, just as no one thinks that their views are “wrong.” Anyone who thinks their views are wrong changes those views so that they become right. Almost by definition, everyone thinks that their views are “orthodox”—at least in the theological sense of “right teachings.”

This is one of the reasons why historians do not use the terms
heresy
,
heterodoxy
, and
orthodoxy
in the value-laden theological sense to describe which views are right and which are wrong. People always think they are right. So historians use the terms in a neutral sense, to describe the views that ended up being declared true by the majority of believers—or at least the majority of church leaders—and those that ended up being declared false.

But since everyone who propounded one view or another in the early church believed that their views were right, there is very little reason to suppose that anyone meant to cause harm by advancing the views they did. Virtually everyone in the early church whom we know of believed they were doing the right things and intended to understand the secrets of the Christian religion correctly. But history is not always kind to good intentions.

Christians wanted to affirm certain beliefs. But in some instances, if those affirmations were pressed to an extreme, they did not allow Christians to affirm other beliefs that they or other Christians also wanted to affirm. We have seen, for example, that some Christians wanted to affirm that Christ was human, but they did so to such an extent that they refused to acknowledge he was divine. Others wanted to affirm that he was divine and did so to such an extent that they refused to acknowledge he was human. Others tried to get around the problem by claiming that he was two different things: part of him was human and part of him was divine; but this solution brought division and disunity instead of harmony and oneness. Others wanted to affirm that since there can be only one God, Jesus could be divine only if he himself was that one God come to earth. But that solution ended up causing Christians to say that Jesus begot himself as the father to his own son, along with other equally confusing formulations. Some superscholars of the day such as Origen tried to resolve the problems in more sophisticated ways, but these views also led to ideas that were later deemed objectionable, such as the view that all of us have souls that preexisted and were brought into the world as a form of punishment.

I should stress that these issues were not merely intellectual games that a group of cerebral Christian theologians were playing. They evidently mattered to ordinary Christians as well, and not just because they wanted to get their beliefs “right”; it was also because they wanted to know how to worship properly.
¹⁸
Should Jesus be worshiped? If so, should he be worshiped as God, or as a subsidiary divinity? Or is God the Father alone to be worshiped? And is the God who is to be worshiped the same God who created the world, or some other deity? If Jesus is to be worshiped and God the Father is to be worshiped, how does one avoid the conclusion that the Christians worship two Gods?

Throughout all these debates, we see Christian thinkers trying to figure it all out, wanting to make certain affirmations that they took to be gospel truth. What resulted was not so much confusion, as considerable nuance and sophistication. Eventually a Christology emerged that affirmed at one and the same time aspects of what opposing heresies affirmed, while refusing to deny what they denied. This led to a significantly refined but highly paradoxical understanding of how it is that Jesus could be God.

A
FTER
I
STOPPED BEING
an evangelical Christian, I worshiped for years in liberal Christian churches. Most people in these congregations were not literalists: they did not think either that the Bible was literally true or that it was some kind of infallible revelation of the word of God. And even though they said the traditional Christian creeds as part of their worship services, many of these people did not believe what they said—as I learned from talking with them. Moreover, many people never gave a passing thought even to what the words meant or why they were in the creed in the first place. For example, the famous Nicene Creed begins with the words:

           
We believe in one God,

           
the Father, the Almighty,

           
maker of heaven and earth,

           
of all that is, seen and unseen.

In my experience, many Christians who say these words have no idea why they are there. Why, for example, would the creed stress that there is “one God”? People today either believe in God or they don’t. But who believes in two Gods? Why say there is only one? The reason has to do with the history behind the creed. It was originally formulated precisely against Christians who claimed there were two Gods, like the heretic Marcion; or twelve or thirty-six gods, like some of the Gnostics. And why say that God had made heaven and earth? Because lots of heretics claimed this world was not created by the true God at all, and the creed was designed to weed such people out of the church.

The creed especially has a lot to say about Christ.

           
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ.

Again, why say there is one of him? How many could there be? Here, too, it is because Gnostic Christians were saying that Christ was several beings, or at least two: a divine being and a human being who were only temporarily united. The creed continues with a long string of affirmations about Christ:

           
the only Son of God,

           
eternally begotten of the Father,

           
God from God, Light from Light,

           
true God from true God,

           
begotten, not made,

           
of one Being with the Father.

           
Through him all things were made.

           
For us and for our salvation

           
he came down from heaven:

           
by the power of the Holy Spirit

           
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,