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I’ll be blogging through two books this week. One is Philip R. Davies’ Scribes and Scrolls: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures. The other is Henri Crouzel’s biography of Origen.
1. For Davies’ book, I’m trying to pin down his view of canon. Yesterday, I only got to page 50. My impression is that he critiques approaches that act like the content of the canon is a decision made by the larger religious community. For him, the canon is formed when a scribal school chooses to preserve certain documents, which they believe contains Israel’s heritage. So he doesn’t focus on canon as a decision made within a committee as to which books are in and out; rather, as far as he’s concerned, if the book’s been preserved through copying, then it’s part of the canon. Davies also says (though I can’t find where) that what’s important to the scribal elite may not be on the radar of most Israelites, the peasants.
I wonder if Davies believes that the scribal elite had power or influence over most Israelites, though. Here’s a provocative passage on page 11:
In Foucauldian terms, a canon itself should be seen as a locus of power, facilitating cultural hegemony. The power of the Bible, for example, is quite blatantly invoked by preachers as a means of personal authority over their congregations, or even of political authority over national constituencies. Of course, its power resides in the willingness of people to recognize its canonicity and not in any intrinsic authority that its exploiters may seek to invoke as a disquise for their own ambitions.
For Davies in this quote, canon is a way to exercise power.
Davies is considered a biblical minimalist, which means that he doesn’t believe in the historical existence of David and Solomon and dates the Bible to post-exilic times. Some have told me that biblical minimalists have an ax to grind against religion, and this quote seems to reflect that. Part of me likes the quote, though, since I’m sick of people telling me what to do by hitting me over the head with “the Bible says.” In my opinion, whether and how I follow the Bible is my own personal decision, between me and God.
2. For Crouzel’s biography of Origen, two things stood out to me: the issue of whether or not Origen believed that the devil would be saved, and soul sleep.
Crouzel’s discussion of the first topic occurs on pages 20-21. Origen’s view of the salvation of Satan is discussed in Jerome’s Apology Against Rufinus. Jerome preserves a fragment by Rufinus in which Origen “is protesting against those who attribute to him something he never said, that the devil, ‘the father of malice and perdition, and of those who are excluded from the kingdom of God’ would be saved” (Crouzel’s words). In II.19, Jerome refers to a dialogue between Origen and a Valentinian Gnostic named Candidus. Jerome summarizes it as follows: “Candidus asserts that the devil has a very evil nature which can never be saved. To that Origen replies that it is not because of his substance that the devil is destined to perish, but that he has fallen because of his own will and that he could be saved. Because of that Candidus slanders Origen by representing him as saying that the devil has a nature that must be saved, when in fact Origen refutes Candidus’ false objection.”
Crouzel reads the dialogue in light of the Valentinian belief in predestination: that “there are those who are saved and those who are damned, not by the choice of their will, but as a result of the nature with which they were created.” Origen, however, rejected the deterministic stance that the devil was destined to damnation because of his nature; rather, Origen maintained that the devil had a say in the matter, since he was keeping himself from God’s kingdom through his obstinate opposition to God. For Origen, the devil could change his mind and be saved, but he chooses damnation over life. To bring C.S. Lewis into the discussion, Origen believes that, for the devil, the door of hell is locked from the inside. Candidus misinterprets this to mean that Origen thinks the devil will be saved.
At the same time, in II.7, 12, Jerome refers to ideas of Origen that appear to coincide with the devil’s salvation. Origen interprets the fires of hell, for instance, to be pangs of conscience that God will use to cleanse everyone of sin (universalism). And Jerome labels as heresy Origen’s notion that “in the restitution of all things, when the fullness of forgiveness will have been reached, Cherubim and Seraphim, Thrones, Principalities, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Archangels and Angels, the devil, the demons and the souls of men whether Christians, Jews, or Heathen, will be of one condition and degree…”
Maybe this all comes together and makes sense in some manner, but it’s morning, so I can’t say how. I don’t entirely understand Candidus’ accusation of Origen. Does he think Origen’s saying that the devil will be saved in his state of wickedness? Origen’s universalism doesn’t teach that. It says that God will cleanse all of sin. And I wonder if Origen may have a point when he talks about the ultimate reconciliation of spirit beings to God, for Colossians 1:20 says Christ died to reconcile things in heaven and earth to God. That doesn’t exactly gel with the notion that Christ only died for humanity because he became a man, but there it is!
Regarding soul sleep, on page 32, Crouzel cites HE VI, XXXVI, whose abbreviation I cannot find. Origen tries to refute the views of the Thnetophysites, who “said that the human soul in the present circumstance dies with the body at the moment of decease and that it sees corruption with the body, but that one day, at the resurrection, it will live again with the body.” According to Crouzel, a council was convened to discuss this, and Origen converted the “deviants” to orthodoxy. I’d be interested to learn more about this, but I’ll have to save that for another day!
