The Letter, the Spirit, and the Knife: Weighing the Case Against Origen
Fellowship Discussion Essay | 20 September 2026
Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. — 2 Corinthians 3:6
Occasion. On September 17, Scott Lively published an essay arguing that Origen of Alexandria, the third-century teacher most associated with the allegorical reading of Scripture, cannot be trusted on doctrine, because as a young man he castrated himself in obedience to a literal reading of Matthew 19:12 and never afterward renounced the way of reading that Mr. Lively believes produced the act. From that one wound he traces a line through Augustine to Rome, to much of Protestant teaching about the last things, and finally to the modern reinterpretations of the Bible’s teaching on sex. The essay raises a question every Christian has to answer whether or not he has heard of Origen: how does a reader know when the Bible is speaking plainly and when it is speaking in figure, and who gets to say? That question is worth a Sunday. This essay summarizes the argument, grants what is sound in it, tests what is not, and then offers a set of working rules for the fellowship to argue over.
I. The Argument in Brief
Mr. Lively’s case runs in five steps.
First, the history. The church historian Eusebius records that the young Origen read the Lord’s saying about men who have “made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” as an instruction and carried it out on his own body. Mr. Lively treats this as reliable, and he points to the first canon of the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325), which removed from the clergy any healthy man who had castrated himself, as evidence that the practice was real and known.
Second, the later Origen. In his commentary on Matthew, written late in life, Origen rejected the literal reading of that verse and condemned the act. Mr. Lively holds that this was not true repentance, because Origen kept and expanded the interpretive system: Scripture has a bodily, a soulish, and a spiritual sense, the literal is the lowest, and the spiritual is the highest and is often hidden. Mr. Lively says that scheme came from Plato and not from Moses.
Third, the diagnosis. Origen lacked the grounding in the Old Testament that would have told him when Jesus was speaking in hyperbole. He treated the Sermon on the Mount’s standard as something to be reached by willpower, which Mr. Lively calls Pelagianism before Pelagius (Pelagianism being the fifth-century teaching, condemned by the Church, that man can obey God by his natural powers without the inward help of grace). The youthful literalism was the error; the later allegory was the escape hatch that let him avoid naming its cause.
Fourth, the pipeline. Origen taught the Church that the concrete, Hebrew sense of Scripture is optional. Augustine inherited the habit, spiritualized the thousand-year reign of Revelation 20, and recast the place of the Jews. Rome made it an institution, and the Reformers kept more of it than they knew.
Fifth, the present. The same move that turns a plain text into a “higher” meaning is, he says, what modern revisionists do with Romans 1, Leviticus 18, and Genesis 1:27. The remedy is what he calls the Hebraic reading: the New Testament read through the Old as written, with metaphor and hyperbole recognized for what they are, and with the spiritual sense understood as the sense the letter was written to carry.
II. The Record
The story is ancient and the source is friendly. Eusebius was the pupil of Pamphilus, who was Origen’s devoted defender, and the sixth book of his Ecclesiastical History is largely a tribute to Origen. An admirer has no motive to invent such a story, and Eusebius tells it with evident discomfort. That is a fair point in Mr. Lively’s favor, and many historians accept the account.
Three cautions belong beside it. Eusebius was born a few years after Origen died and writes from the tradition of Origen’s circle, not as a witness. Epiphanius, writing in the following century, reports more than one version of how Origen was supposed to have achieved his continence, which shows the matter was already rumor-laden in antiquity. And the Nicene canon cannot be pinned on Origen. Justin Martyr, writing in Alexandria’s orbit a generation before Origen was born, tells of a young Christian who petitioned the Roman governor for permission to be made a eunuch. The practice was in the air among zealous ascetics; the canon addresses a pattern, not one famous man.
One more matter of proportion. The article’s opening states the act in cruder and more specific anatomical terms than Eusebius does. The source says only that Origen carried out the saying on his own body. When the purpose is to warn, it is tempting to make the picture as vivid as possible, but a fact stated larger than the evidence is a misstatement all the same.
I will take the account as probably true, as Mr. Lively does. The question is what follows from it.
III. What the Article Gets Right
A good deal.
The reading of Matthew 19 is sound. The disciples have just heard the Lord restore marriage to its creation pattern, and they answer that on those terms “it is not good to marry.” Jesus replies, “All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given,” and then names three kinds of eunuchs. The third is the man who gives up marriage for the sake of the kingdom’s work, as Paul did. It is a calling received, not a surgery performed. The verse closes, “He that is able to receive it, let him receive it,” which is the language of gift and vocation.
The reading of Matthew 5 is also sound. “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out” is hyperbole, and the proof is in the sentence itself: a man with one eye lusts as well as a man with two. The Lord says where the trouble lies: “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications” (Matthew 15:19). No blade reaches the heart. Paul names this whole family of remedies and dismisses them as having “a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body” (Colossians 2:23).
The central principle is sound: the spiritual sense of a passage stands on its letter and does not replace it. Mr. Lively’s illustration from Paul is exact. “That Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4), and yet a real rock gave real water to real people. The higher meaning is the meaning the history was arranged by God to carry. When a reader uses the higher meaning to dismiss the history, he has stopped interpreting and started composing.
And the criticism of Origen has a real target. In the fourth book of On First Principles, Origen says plainly that some passages have no true literal sense at all, that the Spirit wove in things that did not happen so that the reader would be driven to look higher. His test for which passages those are is whether the letter seems impossible or unworthy of God. That test is the weak joint. “Unworthy of God” by whose measure? In practice the measure was the philosophy of his age, which found bodies, land, wrath, and earthly kingdoms embarrassing. Every generation has its own list of what embarrasses it, and a rule that lets the reader set aside the letter whenever it offends his sense of fitness will serve every generation’s list equally well. On this, Mr. Lively is right.
IV. Which Method Held the Knife?
Here the argument runs into its own evidence. The act was committed by the literal reading. The allegorical reading was the correction. If the wound is an exhibit against a method, it is an exhibit against taking a figure of speech as a command, which is the opposite of allegory.
Mr. Lively sees the difficulty and builds a bridge: both errors, he says, grew from one root, a Greek mind without Hebrew grounding, assuming that the standard could be met by effort. The first half of that bridge bears some weight. A reader steeped in the Law would have had Deuteronomy 23:1 before him, “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD,” and would have known that the God who gave that statute was not now commanding the thing it describes. Scripture would have checked the reading of Scripture.
The second half bears less. Eusebius gives Origen’s motives as two: to obey what he took to be the Saviour’s word, and to put his teaching of women beyond the reach of slander. Neither is a program of self-salvation. This was a boy whose father was beheaded for the faith when he was sixteen, who tried to follow him to martyrdom and was stopped only because his mother hid his clothes. The simplest reading of the evidence is an excess of zeal in a very young man acting alone. Calling it Pelagianism reads a later controversy backward into a life that does not obviously fit it.
And the logic cuts both ways. If a bad act discredits the method that led to it, then the knife discredits literalism. Mr. Lively would rightly refuse that conclusion, since he is a literalist and the abuse of a thing does not condemn its right use. The same courtesy is owed in the other direction. A method of reading is tested by one question: does it recover what the Author meant? The wound does not answer that question either way.
V. The Teacher and the Teaching
The title of the article makes a further claim: that the man, having done this, cannot be trusted. This is the form of argument called ad hominem, judging a teaching by the failures of the teacher. Scripture does not reason that way. Moses killed a man and hid the body. David took a wife and arranged a death. Peter denied the Lord with an oath. Paul held the coats at Stephen’s stoning. If the worst act of a man’s youth disqualifies everything he afterward taught, we have lost most of the Bible’s human authors.
The Lord Himself separated the two questions. Of the scribes and Pharisees He said, “All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not” (Matthew 23:3). The teaching is weighed as teaching.
The article answers that Origen condemned the act but never repented of its cause. That reply assumes the point in dispute, namely that the threefold method was the cause, when the act came before the method and from the opposite direction. What the record shows is a man who did a rash thing at about eighteen, said in later life that those who do it act without understanding and bring reproach on the Word, labored for decades over the text of Scripture, and at the end was imprisoned and tortured under the emperor Decius without denying Christ, dying not long after from what he suffered. A fair summary of the man has to hold all of that. Origen did teach errors, some of them serious, and the Church said so. But they are to be shown as errors from the Scriptures, one by one. His body is not evidence.
VI. Allegory Before Origen
The article calls Origen the originator of allegorical interpretation. He was its most systematic Christian practitioner, but he did not begin it. In Alexandria, Philo the Jew had read Moses allegorically two centuries earlier, and Clement, Origen’s predecessor, did the same. More to the point, the practice of finding a meaning beyond the immediate one is in the New Testament itself.
Paul writes of Sarah and Hagar, “Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants” (Galatians 4:24). He takes the law about not muzzling the ox and asks, “Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written” (1 Corinthians 9:9-10). He says of Israel’s wilderness history, “all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition” (1 Corinthians 10:11). Hebrews reads the tabernacle as “the example and shadow of heavenly things.” The Lord made Jonah’s three days and the serpent on the pole into signs of Himself, and on the Emmaus road, “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27).
So the question was never whether Scripture has a sense beyond the surface. The apostles settled that. The useful distinction is between two words that are often used loosely. Typology is reading a real person, event, or institution as a God-designed pattern of something greater to come, with the original history left fully standing: a real lamb, a real Passover, and Christ our Passover. Allegory, in the sense that deserves criticism, treats the narrative as a code whose surface may be discarded once the hidden meaning is extracted. The apostles practice the first. Even Paul’s one use of the word “allegory” is typology by this definition, since he never suggests that Hagar and Sarah did not live.
In fairness to Origen, he did not pull his three senses from Plato alone. He argued them from Scripture: from Paul’s “spirit and soul and body” (1 Thessalonians 5:23) and from a verse in Proverbs as it read in his Greek Old Testament. He also said that the passages which are historically true far outnumber those that are purely spiritual. And the man accused of treating the letter as disposable spent some twenty-five years building the Hexapla, a six-column comparison of the Hebrew text and its Greek translations, which is among the greatest labors on the letter of Scripture in the ancient world. His fault was narrower than the article allows and is the one named in Section III: he reserved the right to set the history aside when the history offended his sense of what befits God.
VII. The Pipeline Examined
Does the line run from Origen through Augustine to Rome and into the Reformation? In part it does. Augustine tells in the Confessions that what freed him to believe the Old Testament was the preaching of Ambrose of Milan, who expounded it spiritually, and Ambrose had learned that manner of preaching from Origen and Philo. Augustine also admits in The City of God that he once held to a literal thousand-year reign and gave it up. The influence is real.
Three facts complicate the picture.
First, the disagreement over the millennium is older than Origen’s influence. Justin Martyr, around A.D. 160, held firmly to an earthly thousand-year reign (the view called chiliasm, or today premillennialism), yet in the same breath told his Jewish conversation partner that many Christians of pure and godly faith thought otherwise. Origen was not yet born.
Second, Rome did not enthrone Origen. Jerome turned against him. Augustine rejected his best-known speculation, the eventual restoration of all souls. The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 listed him by name among the condemned. To say that Rome depends on Origen for interpretive authority overstates it. He was an influence on the Church’s habits of reading, and he was also a man the Church formally censured.
Third, and most telling, the Reformers form a test case that runs against the thesis. Luther and Calvin rejected Origen’s allegorizing in the strongest language either man used about any Church Father, and both insisted on the plain grammatical and historical sense. Yet both remained amillennial (reading the thousand years of Revelation 20 as a figure for the present age of the Church), and the Lutherans’ Augsburg Confession explicitly rejected an earthly millennial kingdom. Men who threw out Origen’s method with both hands still did not arrive at Mr. Lively’s eschatology. That means the millennium question is not decided by one’s opinion of Origen. It is decided by how one reads apocalyptic writing, a kind of Scripture that announces its own symbolism: “The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches: and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches” (Revelation 1:20). Whether the thousand years belong with the candlesticks or with the plain prose is a question to be argued from the text, and Christians who love the letter have landed on both sides. I leave it open here for the fellowship. My point is only that telling the story of Origen’s wound does not settle it.
VIII. The Modern Application
The article’s most urgent claim is that today’s revisions of biblical sexual ethics are Origen’s method at work. I share the concern and doubt the pedigree.
Those who reinterpret Romans 1 and Leviticus 18 do not, as a rule, allegorize. They argue history and vocabulary: that Paul had only exploitative practices or idol-temple rites in view, that a Greek word has been mistranslated, that the Levitical statute belonged to a purity code now lapsed. In form, these are appeals to the literal and historical sense, claiming to recover what the words meant to their first hearers. They must therefore be answered on that ground, and they can be: Paul’s argument in Romans 1 is built on creation and the Creator, not on local custom, and it reaches back to the same “male and female” of Genesis that the Lord cited in Matthew 19.
What this shows is that the grammatical-historical method can be bent just as the allegorical method can. The revisionists have bent it, and so no method is a lock that a determined reader cannot pick. Peter said of Paul’s letters that they contain “some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16). The wresting he describes is done by the reader’s will, and the method is only the instrument. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). A man who has decided beforehand what the text may not say will reach his conclusion by allegory in one century and by word studies in another.
The Lord states the real safeguard: “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God” (John 7:17). He makes willingness to obey the condition of understanding, so that a reader who is not willing to do what the text says will not see clearly what it says. A sound method is necessary, but it does not protect a reader who lacks that willingness.
IX. Is the Standard Impossible?
Mr. Lively writes that Jesus set the bar of the Sermon on the Mount out of reach on purpose, to drive us to Him and not to greater effort. There is truth in this that must be kept, and a way of hearing it that must be refused.
It is true that the flesh cannot keep the Sermon. No man purifies his own heart by resolution, and the man who tries in his own strength ends either in despair or in some technique, of which the knife is only the most extreme.
It is not true that the Sermon is merely a mirror held up to make us give up. It ends with a man who “heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them,” and he is the one whose house stands. Paul says the purpose of Christ’s work was “that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (Romans 8:4). Grace, by his account, is a teacher: “teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world” (Titus 2:12). And the two sides are joined in a single sentence: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12-13).
So Origen’s mistake was not that he took the Lord’s demand for purity seriously and tried to meet it. We should all take it that seriously. His mistake was the location and the instrument. The apostolic reading of “pluck it out” and “cut it off” is given by Paul, who uses the same picture and tells us what it means: “Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness” (Colossians 3:5). The “members” to be put to death are the sins, and the power is named elsewhere: “if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live” (Romans 8:13). The command is as severe as the young Origen thought it was. What he got wrong was the target, which is the sins and not the flesh, and the means, which is the Spirit and not a blade.
X. Working Rules for Rightly Dividing
If neither “always literal” nor “always look higher” is a sufficient rule, what is? I offer seven for discussion. None is original, and all of them can be seen operating in the apostles’ own handling of Scripture.
1. Begin with the letter. Ask first what the words meant, in their grammar and setting, to those who first heard them. Every further meaning must be able to show its footing there.
2. Let Scripture check the reading of Scripture. A reading of one verse that requires what another verse forbids is a wrong reading. Deuteronomy 23:1 and “your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost” (1 Corinthians 6:19) both stood between Origen and the knife. So does Isaiah 56, where the LORD promises the eunuch who keeps covenant “a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters.” God takes pity on the eunuch’s condition there and gives him a promise. He does not ask any man to bring that condition on himself.
3. Build the spiritual sense on the history, never in place of it. The rock was Christ, and the rock was also a rock. If the higher reading needs the event not to have happened, the higher reading is the thing to discard.
4. Read each kind of writing by its own signals. Narrative presents itself as narrative, law as law, and proverb as proverb, and a vision says when it is showing symbols. Hyperbole is marked by a literal sense that would defeat the speaker’s own purpose, as a plucked-out eye leaves lust untouched. The signals are in the text, and the reader’s discomfort is not one of them.
5. Let the apostles show how it is done. Where the New Testament interprets a saying or a passage, as Colossians 3:5 interprets the language of Matthew 5, that interpretation governs ours.
6. Read in company. Origen acted young, alone, and in secret, and tried to conceal what he had done. “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety” (Proverbs 11:14). “No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation” (2 Peter 1:20). A reading that a man would be unwilling to lay before sober brothers before acting on it is already suspect. This is a large part of what a fellowship is for. The Bereans “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11), and they did it together.
7. Come willing to obey. John 7:17 stands over all the rest. The reader who wants the text to say less than it says will find a method to make it so, and the zealous reader who wants to do more than it says needs the other six rules to restrain him.
XI. Conclusion
Mr. Lively’s warning has a sound core. The letter of Scripture is God’s own control on every higher reading, and a rule of interpretation that lets the reader drop the history whenever it offends the age will in the end let him drop the Bible altogether. Origen did hold such a rule, and the Church was right to be wary of where it led him.
But the argument from the wound does not carry the weight placed on it. The knife was in the hand of the literal reading. The man who used it repudiated the act, and he went on to give his life to the text and to suffer for the Name. The apostles themselves read Scripture spiritually. Rome condemned Origen as well as borrowing from him, and the Reformers who rejected him most loudly did not reach the conclusions the article says must follow. The present-day twisting of Scripture is done largely with historical tools. The constant across all of it is the one Peter named: an unstable will that wrests the text toward what it already wanted.
Neither a lower view of the spiritual sense nor a higher view of the literal will fix that by itself. The remedy is the whole counsel of God, read in the fellowship of the saints, by men who intend to do what they find there. “The letter killeth” when it is handled by the flesh, whether the flesh is zealous as the young Origen’s was or evasive as the revisionist’s is. “The spirit giveth life,” and the Spirit’s chosen instrument for giving it is that same letter, rightly divided.
I hold these conclusions as my best present judgment, and I would be glad to be shown a better argument on any of them.
Discussion Questions
- If a bad act committed under a way of reading Scripture discredits that way of reading, which way does Origen’s act discredit? Is there any sound version of the argument from the wound?
- Matthew 23:3 separates what the scribes teach from what they do. When, if ever, does a teacher’s conduct rightly count against his teaching? Does 1 Timothy 3 on the qualifications of overseers bear on this?
- Paul writes, “Which things are an allegory” (Galatians 4:24). How is what Paul does with Sarah and Hagar different from what Origen claimed the right to do? Is the distinction between typology and allegory a real one, or a convenience?
- Origen’s test for setting aside the letter was that it seemed “impossible” or “unworthy of God.” What passages does our own age find unworthy of God? By what test should a Christian decide that a passage is figurative?
- Luther and Calvin rejected allegory and yet did not expect an earthly millennium. What does that tell us about how much the question of Revelation 20 depends on interpretive method, and how much on something else?
- Section VIII argues that modern revisionist readings use historical arguments, not allegorical ones. If that is right, what is the most effective answer to them?
- Is the standard of the Sermon on the Mount meant to be kept? Hold Matthew 7:24, Romans 8:4, and Philippians 2:12-13 together and state in one sentence how effort and grace relate.
- Origen acted alone and in secret. Has anyone here acted on a private reading of Scripture that the counsel of other believers would have corrected, or did correct? What does Rule 6 require of us toward one another in practice?
Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. — 2 Timothy 2:15
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute Of one heart to make Christ King — 1 Chronicles 12:38