Category: Patristics

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Early Christianity Origen Patristics Science and Religion

Origen on Adam, Part 2: Locating Origen’s Views

800px-origen-768x911This is the second post in my series about Origen and “Adam.”

Today Origen is widely recognized in both the Western and Eastern branches of the Church as one of Christianity’s great early thinkers, even if some of the details of his protology and eschatology remain suspect, or at least subject to historical dispute.[1]  However, several problems confront anyone who seeks to understand “Origen’s view” of Adam, sin, and the Fall.

First, like all of the early Church Fathers, Origen did not produce a definitive “systematic theology” treatise.[2]  Origen is, of course, recognized as one of the first “systematic” Christian thinkers because of his effort to produce a sustained, philosophically and Biblically integrated argument in his treatise On First Principles, from which these posts will draw heavily.  Much of what we know today about Origen’s thought, however, is derived from more occasional, less systematic sources, in particular his extensive Biblical commentaries and homilies.  As Peter Bouteneff has argued, Origen’s theology primarily was an exercise in Biblical exegesis in conversation with the Church’s experience with Christ and the Rule of Faith.[3]

A second problem is that the textual tradition for some of Origen’s key writings sometimes is ambiguous.  For some key writings, such as his Commentary on Genesis, only isolated fragments survive.  For other key writings, such as On First Principles, there is a Latin translation by Rufinus that might gloss some potentially heterodox passages, and some Greek fragments preserved in the Philocalia that may or may not always be faithful to the lost original Greek text.[4]

A third problem is a significant reason for the textual issues:  some of Origen’s ideas, which were controversial even in his lifetime, were seemingly anathematized by the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 C.E. upon the urging of the Emperor Justinian, about three hundred years after Origen’s death.[5]  The circumstances leading up to the anathemas included numerous intellectual and political disputes and intrigues between “Origenist” and “anti-Origenist” schools that developed after Origen’s death.  There is considerable question today about whether the concepts condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople could really be fairly traceable unalloyed to Origen himself.[6]  The result is that Origen’s intellectual legacy is somewhat obscured.

These three problems suggest that we cannot truly claim to know “what Origen thought” about Adam, sin and the Fall.  We cannot cite Origen as some sort of counter-authority to Augustine, even if an argument from authority in this context could otherwise be valid.  What we can do is peek into the workings of this great early Christian mind for insights that might help us make sense of these questions today.  We’ll start to do that in the next post.

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[1] See, e.g., Hans Urs von Balthasar, Origen:  Spirit and Fire, trans. Robert J. Daly, S.J. (Washington D.C.: Catholic Univ. of America Press 1984), 1 (stating that “[i]t is all but impossible to overestimate Origen and his importance for the history of Christian thought”); Pope Benedict XVI, Great Christian Thinkers:  From the Early Church Through the Middle Ages (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press 2011), 19-25 (stating that Origen was one of the most “remarkable” and “crucial” figures in the history of Christian thought).

[2] For a good discussion of the nature and sources of Origen’s corpus, see von Balthasar, Origen:  Spirit and Fire, 1-23.

[3] Bouteneff, Beginnings, 94-96.  For a good discussion on debates in contemporary Origen scholarship about how to read Origen, see Wilson, Origen.

[4] von Balthasar, Spirit and Fire, 21-22; Bouteneff, Beginnings, 95.

[5] An English translation of the Acts of the Second Council of Constantinople is available at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3812.htm.

[6] For a discussion of this history, see Wilson, Origen, 64-66.

Categories
Historical Theology Origen Patristics Science and Religion

Origen on Adam

800px-origen-768x911This will begin a series of posts on how the 3rd Century theologian Origen might help us think about “Adam.”  The question “who was Adam” presents difficult issues for Christian theology.  Following the lead of St. Augustine, “Western” Christian theology historically has emphasized the implication of each human being in the primordial sin of Adam – that is, Western theological traditions tend toward robust versions of the doctrine of “original sin.”[1]  There are significant philosophical, critical, and scientific problems with this approach.[2]  Philosophically, it is unclear why it is just for God to hold the rest of humanity accountable for Adam’s actions. [3]  Critically, it is unclear that the Hebrew scriptures ever meant to suggest any doctrine of “original sin” or whether the locus classicus for the doctrine in the Pauline New Testament literature was properly translated and understood by Augustine.[4]  Scientifically, it is now clear from various lines of evidence that the population of anatomically modern humans evolved gradually over millions of years from a common ancestor shared with the great apes, and that the present human population could not have genetically derived from a single common ancestral pair.[5]  In other words, a flatly literal “Adam and Eve,” which seems to be required by the Augustinian view, is scientifically impossible.

In response to these concerns, many contemporary theologians suggest that “Eastern” traditions, which are less connected to the “Western” / Augustinian view of original sin, can more easily manage these tensions.[6]  Some of these writers seek to bring Eastern views into conversation with modern liberal or neo-orthodox theology, which tends to emphasize the metaphorical nature of the Biblical creation accounts, and with the trend in recent theology towards social Trinitarianism, which can map onto a social (rather than Western “individualistic”) ontology of what it means to be “human.”[7]

These gestures towards “Eastern” thought are helpful in the sense that they do highlight the “mythic” dimensions of the Biblical creation narratives and the irreducibly social construction of human identity.  They tend, however, towards broad generalizations that often do not account for the more nuanced and complex philosophical matrix that informed many of the Eastern Church Fathers as they thought about creation, humanity, and the Fall.  In this regard, Origen is an interesting figure to study because of the historic anathemas against his supposedly aberrant neo-Platonic views about the pre-existence of souls.[8]  As we shall see, Origen did indeed draw heavily on Platonism, but his views about Adam and the Fall were far more subtle than is often supposed.  Indeed, I will argue that elements of Origen’s views could be useful to a contemporary Christian theology of Adam and original sin.

In my next post, I’ll examine some threshold problems in locating “Origen’s views” about Adam.

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[1] For a good summary of the doctrine and its Augustinian roots, see Ian McFarland, “The Fall and Sin,” in John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology (Oxford:  OUP 2007), 140-157.

[2] For a general discussion of contemporary objections to the Augustinian doctrine of original sin, see Alistair McFadyen, Bound to Sin:  Abuse, Holocaust and the Doctrine of Sin (Cambridge:  CUP 2000), at pp. 40-41.

[3] Concerning objections to the Augustinian doctrine, see McFarland, “The Fall and Sin.”  For a more in-depth discussion, see David Kelsey, Eccentric Existence:  A Theological Anthropology, Vol. 1 (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox 2009); Veli Matti Karkainnen, Creation and Humanity:  A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World, Vol. 3 (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 2015), Chapter 15.

[4] See, e.g., Peter Bouteneff, Beginnings:  Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Grand Rapids:  Baker Academic 2008).

[5] For a general overview of the evidences for human evolution, see Steve Jones, Robert Martin, and David Pilbeam, eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution (Cambridge:  CUP 1996).  For a series of articles on why population genetics precludes a single genetic ancestor of all modern humanity, See Dennis Venema, BioLogos Forum,” Letters to the Duchess,” available at http://biologos.org/blogs/dennis-venema-letters-to-the-duchess/series/adam-eve-and-human-population-genetics.

[6] For a general discussion of the “Eastern” view, see Peter Bouteneff, “Christ and Salvation,” in Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokrotoff, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology (Cambridge:  CUP 2008), 94; Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (New York:  Penguin Books 1997), 222-225.

[7] See, e.g., Kelsey, Eccentric Existence; Karkainnen, Creation and Humanity, Chapter 15.

[8] For a discussion of the historical disputes over Origenism, see Joseph Trigg Wilson, Origen (London:  Routledge 2002).

 

Categories
Historical Theology Patristics Science and Religion Theology

Behold, the Man

I have a new post up on the BioLogos blog.  Here it is:

Anyone interested in the faith and science conversation knows that there currently is considerable, heated debate over the problem of “Adam.” Genetic studies conclude that the modern human population could not have arisen from only one primal couple. Excellent Biblical scholars and theologians from various perspectives argue over whether “Adam” should be thought of as part of a population of early humans, or as an entirely non-historical figure. And of course, many Christians continue to insist that scientific data that appears to contradict a particular Biblical / theological interpretation of human origins should be rejected out of hand.

I’d like to suggest that this argument is in significant ways misplaced. The participants in this debate all seem to agree that what makes us “human” can be defined by genes and population studies. There is a pressing need for them to conform theology to population genetics, or to conform population genetics to theology, because the story of our genes is implicitly equated with the story of what it means to be “human.” The hypothesis that there was a “first human” – a capital-A “Adam” – can be tested in our genes.

But “genes” do not make us “human.” What makes us “human” is the irreducible phenomena of all of our material and immaterial being as persons.

Nothing we observe in the universe is flat. By “flat” I mean having only one aspect or “layer.” Consider, for example, an apple. What is it? Is it the fruit of an apple tree? The seed-carrier – the potentiality – of new apple trees? Beautiful and delicious? Skin, flesh, and core? Water and organic molecules? Caloric energy and roughage? Hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon? Physical laws? All of these things comprise some of what we mean by “apple,” but none of them are what an “apple” is. The reality that is “apple” cannot be reduced to any one of its aspects or layers.

It is possible to think of these aspects or layers hierarchically, with “higher” layers that emerge from “lower” ones. Physical laws emerge from quantum probabilities; molecules emerge from physical laws; seeds, skin, flesh and core emerge from complex arrangements of molecules; beauty and delight emerge from the connection of skin, flesh and core to human sense perception;1 “apple” emerges from all of this (and more) combined with the human cultural experience of this thing we call “apple.”

Notice that some “layers” can impinge or “supervene” on lower ones – for example, human sense perception and cultural experience do something to this thing confronting the subject in order for it to become “apple.” But notice also that “apple” is not merely a cultural construction. The word or signifier “apple,” of course, could be arbitrary, but there is an objective reality to the thing signified. The layer of human sense perception and cultural experience supervenes upon, but does not create, the lower-order reality from which it emerges.

Sociologist Christian Smith draws these strands together in a critical realist framework in his excellent book What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. In a critically realist approach to culture and human personhood, Smith suggests, “[h]uman beings do have an identifiable nature that is rooted in the natural world, although the character of human nature is such that it gives rise to capacities to construct variable meanings and identities….” Culture is a social construction, but it is not merely a social construction. Human beings are social, but they are not subsumed by the social. The reality we inhabit is “stratified”: it includes both the reality of individual conscious human agents and the reality of the social structures that emerge from the cultures created by those agents. These “personal” and “cultural” layers of the world interact with each other dynamically, each continually informing and changing the other.

Smith’s approach is helpful, but perhaps it does not go far enough. For Smith, as for critical realists in general, the phenomena of human culture remain subject to some degree of granular disaggregation, at least analytically. A phenomenological approach suggests that no “thing” can be broken into components and still comprise that “thing” – the genes that encode for apple trees are not apple seeds, apple seeds are not apple trees, and apple trees are not apples. The critical realist framework of stratification, emergence, and supervenience functions as a very useful heuristic device, but to describe what an apple is, we must approach the phenomenon of “apple” in its fullness. To know whether something falls into the kind “apple,” we must hold an ideal of everything an apple is, and compare the subject to the ideal.

And because of the transcendence of the ideal concept of “apple,” we can begin to speak of the relative excellence of particular instantiations of apples. What is an “excellent” apple? What distinguishes the excellent apple from a poor one? We can only ask such questions if “apple” means something more than the particular physical specimen in hand, whether firm, sweet and tart, or bruised and sour.

The same is true of human “persons.” We can say almost nothing about a “person” merely by observing genes, because genes are not “persons.” Populations genetics studies can provide models of the dispersion of genes through groups of biological entities, but they can tell us nothing whatsoever about when the first “human person” emerged. Indeed, for population genetics qua population genetics, there simply are no “persons” – for this is a science of the movement of genes, not a philosophical, sociological, or theological description of “persons.”

So what of “Adam?” It is often suggested that in Romans 5:12 Adam is a type of Christ. But, in fact, in Paul’s thought, as well as for the early Church Fathers, Christ is the type, the typos, a notion derived from the “stamp” or “seal” on an official document. There is a hint in Romans 5 of a truth that would only become clarified later in Christian theology – that the pre-incarnate Christ, the second person of the Trinity, always was. Whereas Arius declared that “there was a time when he [Christ] was not,” Nicea established the orthodox Christology of Christ’s eternal sonship. Thus Christ is and was the Redeemer, the one for whom creation was made and in whose death and resurrection creation always finds its fulfillment. Adam’s failure was that he went against type – he did not conform to Christ but rather tried to become something else, and thereby the true nature of humanity was broken.

Is the typos of Christ reducible to a set of genes? Surely not. It resides not in genes or in any other created thing but rather in the Triune life of God Himself. We might speak, in a roughly analogical way, of ideas we hold in our minds – say, the idea of a perfect Bordeaux, ruby-red, silky, smoky, plummy, luxurious. We could labor to instantiate that idea, combining genes and terroir and water and light and care, and perhaps we might achieve it, to the point where upon taking a sip we exclaim, “this – this – is Bordeaux. Nothing else is worthy of that name.”

This is what God said of Adam, when he gave him breath and a name. It is not something that God said of any other creature, even apparently some creatures that a modern population geneticist or paleoanthropologist might designate as ancestrally human based on genes or bones. Yet that Adam, and each of us in that Adam, fail to participate fully and unreservedly in the true nature of the true human, the nature of Christ. And so Pontius Pilot, an unwitting prophet, said of Christ: “behold, the man” (John 19:5, KJV). And so also Paul invites us to see: the sinful man, the broken seal, the first created Adam; and the true type, the seal of humanity’s future, the perfect Adam, the Christ. None of this is about the definitions and categories of modern science, as helpful and important as they may be for the progress of scientific thought. It is, rather, about the fullness of what it means to be human.

Notes

1. Human sense perception, of course, is an emergent property of an even more complex set of relations that give rise to the human “person.”

 

Categories
Hermeneutics Patristics Theological Hermeneutics Theology

The Fathers on Scripture

I’m auditing a Themes in Patristic Theology class at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary with Dr. John Behr.  A good portion of the first class was a reading of Melito of Sarids’ homily On Pascha.  There is some controversy about whether Melito was anti-Semitic, but as Fr. Behr explained it, the references to “Israel” in this text are really references to us, the hearers, as we approach the table:  we are the reason Christ died.

Here are some notes on on the lecture about the Fathers’ approach to scripture:

1.  Scripture is cryptic.  “If it were not cryptic, it wouldn’t be scripture.”  “You don’t have to work at interpreting a shopping list.”

2.  Scripture is harmonious.  It all speaks about Christ.

3.  Scripture is contemporary — it wasn’t written primarily for the benefit of the original hearers, but primarily for our benefit.

4.  Scripture is inspired, and inspiration is inseparable from how Christ opens the book to us.  It requires an “inspired” reading which turns on an ongoing encounter with Christ.  Christ is not a “lens” through which we view scripture, but is already present in scripture.  Scripture is a sort of thesaurus or treasury of Christ.

My sensibility as a theological interpreter who wants to be conversant with Biblical Studies might lead me to place more emphasis on the text’s reception by the original hearing community.  But with the Fathers, and Barth, and all good theological interpreters, notice this sense that scripture’s power isn’t so much in its static content as in its life as the reader encounters Christ in and through the text.