The Seekers
Origen: To Abolish Hell
The crowing feature of Origen's bold doctrine was that even the New Testament did not contain the conclusive revelation of God. The four Gospels alone did not contain all the mysteries of the faith. They only suggested to Christians the "shadow of the secrets of Christ." Such should be considered but the gateway into an eternal gospel whose pneuma could not even be expressed in letters of the alphabet.
The sum total of his achievements makes Origen the creator of Christian humanism, whose underlying religious ideal is "the unity of the divine and the human." (Redepenning; op. cit., II, 314)
In support of Origen: "To set up a hell in which God no longer has any say to all eternity, is to abolish the entire gospel. We must fight to the last breath, to the last drop of blood, so that the whole of heaven, the whole earth, the whole world of the dead comes finally into the hand of Jesus. If we must abandon hope for a single man, for a single region, there remains an intolerable burden of death, a burden of woe, a burden of night and darkness, and in that case Jesus is not the light of the world. Men may not set limits to God's mercy; his love pursues lost souls even into the flames of hell." (Christian Blumhardt the Younger, In Eugen, Jackh: Blumhardt Vater und Sohn (1925), p 264.
Unfortunately,
those unable to climb to the heights of such visionaries tend to attack and rend
what they fear. As a result, in 543 Origen was pronounced to be anathema. In
553, the Fifth Ecumenical Council condemned his teachings as heretical.
This set the course for how Christendom would deal with those it didn't
understand. After his condemnation, "everything became narrow, one-sided,
dogmatic and self-righteous; optimism and cosmic breadth had vanished." Koepgen;
op. v\cit., pp 323-324.
Have we not found this to be true?
Much more to come