What part can either Adoptionism or the Logos Christology play in any modern form of thought? Adoptionism seems to me to have no part or lot in any intelligent modern theology, though it is unfortunately often promulgated, especially in pulpits which are regarded as liberal. We cannot believe that at any time a human being, in consequence of his virtue, became God, which he was not before, or that any human being ever will do so. No doctrine of Christology and no doctrine of salvation which is Adoptionist in essence can come to terms with modern thought.
The doctrine of the Logos is on a different plane. In the form in which it is presented by Justin Martyr it is probably as unacceptable as Adoptionism, but in the form presented by Origen the modern mind constantly feels that the writer is struggling to express its own thoughts, and is attracted to Origen not only by the recognition of a common purpose, but by a consciousness of a common failure, for, at the end, reality transcends thought and language, and the philosophy of Alexandria was no more completely successful than is that of our world.
I have often felt in talking with younger men of the present day how closely they have approached to the position of Origen and how tar they are from him in method. If I may put into my own words the form of thought which seems to animate them, it is something of this kind. They feel that the world in which we live is the expression of some great plan or purpose or pattern which is not yet complete, which shows no sign of finality, but is ever growing in complexity; which resolves itself again and again into simplicity, and then spreads out again on a yet wider scale. The plan or purpose is not a dead mechanical thing; the life which explains it is within and not without it. Men are partly the result, but partly also the instruments or even agents of this purpose. Wisdom is the right understanding of its nature; and righteousness is the attempt to subordinate human purposes to this great purpose of life. For man is not only an effect, he is a cause. When he acts, he brings into existence a new cause of which the results will follow in accordance with the established laws of reality. But there is a moment of choice, when he has it within his power to decide whether he will act or not. If he choose right, his actions will be taken up into the great web of existence, consistently with the great purpose. If he choose wrongly, the results will in the end be destroyed, not without suffering to himself and others.
To a more vivid imagination which thinks in pictures rather than in metaphysical language, life presents itself as a great web which is slowly coming from the loom, and sometimes there seems to be behind the loom the figure of the great weaver; at other times the weaving is being carried on by men and women whose weaving sometimes conforms, sometimes does not, to an infinitely complicated but symmetrical plan which, and here is the paradoxical tragedy, they can only see in the web which has been already woven; but they know that whether what they weave will remain, or not depends upon its being in accord with the pattern. And then the picture changes slightly, and it seems as though the pattern begins to reveal the same features as those dimly discerned in the weaver behind the loom. And yet again the picture changes, and it is not merely the great weaver, but the men and women who are working that reappear with him to live on in the pattern emerging in the web.
That is not the same thing as the Logos Christology or doctrine of salvation as propounded by Origen, but I think that he would have understood it had he lived now. It is not the same thing as the teaching of the Kingdom of God preached by Jesus, yet I do not think that he would have condemned it, for great men understand the thoughts of lesser ones though they themselves fail to be understood. The thoughts and words of Jesus, like those of Origen, were borrowed from his own time and race; they belong to the first century as those of Origen belong to the third. No historical reconstruction can make them adequate for our generation, or even intelligible except to those who have passed through an education in history impossible for most. But the will of Jesus and the will of Origen, if we can reach them through the language and thought of their time, have no such limitations. If I have understood them rightly, both were animated by a desire to accomplish the purpose of God, the God who is life.[[22]] And that purpose did not appeal to them as the achievement for themselves of any salvation, in this world or in the world to come, beyond the reach of other men, but rather to show them what is the way of life, the natural way, consistent with the purpose of God and the pattern of life. So far as they succeeded, in their teaching they did so because they devoted themselves to expressing clearly what they wished without troubling to ask whether it conformed to what other people said, and they spoke the clearest language which they could find in their own generation.
To do the same thing is the business of preachers and teachers to-day. The man who tries merely to repeat the thoughts or the words of past generations forgets that the call which comes to the teacher is not to repeat what others have said because they have said it, but to say what is true because it is true, and to say it in the language of his own time that it may be intelligible. He will often appear to contradict the thought or the language of Jesus or of Paul or of Origen, but he will be loyal to the purpose which was theirs, and yet so much more than theirs.