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Origen and the Third Century

The third century is where the honest continuationist has to slow down. The reports are thinner than in the second century, and Origen of Alexandria can sound, in places, like a man describing the aftermath of a golden age. This page faces that difficulty rather than skirting it.

Origen's evidence is evidence of decline, not of cessation, and that difference is the whole question. A church can be weaker than the apostles' church without God having withdrawn his gifts. Origen's testimony, read whole, is that the church of his day still healed, still exorcised, and still foreknew — only less than at the beginning.

The claim

Origen's church still knew healings and exorcisms, and his talk of "traces" is decline-talk, not a doctrine of cessation. The distinction is Origen's own: he says the power is present and lesser, not absent.

Origen at Caesarea

Origen was born in Alexandria around AD 185, saw his father martyred when he was a boy, became head of the catechetical school while still in his teens, later moved to Caesarea, and was tortured in the Decian persecution; he died around 253.

His Contra Celsum, written around 248, answers a pagan philosopher's attack point by point. It is one of the fullest third-century accounts we have of what Christians actually did, because Celsus had accused them of magic and Origen had to explain the practice he was being accused of.

The explanation is concrete. Christians, he says, "expel evil spirits, and perform many cures, and foresee certain events" (Contra Celsum 1.46). The verbs are present tense, offered as a description of the church's ordinary life. He speaks elsewhere of "traces" of the Spirit remaining among believers — the image is his, and it is the seed of the decline reading considered below.

He is also a first-person witness. In book 3 he says, "we too have seen many persons freed" from madness and chronic illness, not by charms but by the invocation of God and the name of Jesus (3.24). In book 7 he gives the method: "by prayer and simple adjurations," often by unlettered men, with no fees and no technique (7.4). The name of Jesus is the whole apparatus — exactly what a defender says when accused of sorcery: not "we have secret formulas," but "we have a name, and the power is not ours."

That setting has forensic value. A man answering a charge of magic has an incentive to describe what he can actually do, because his opponents are watching. If the healings were invented, Celsus's readers in Caesarea could have checked.

The honest difficulty: Origen on decline

Origen does not say every gift is as it was. He distinguishes the extraordinary signs of the first generation — given, he suggests, so that the faith might be founded — from what he sees around him. He can write as though the church has the Spirit's "traces" rather than his fullness, and he knows the apostolic age had a concentration of power his own does not.

Some scholars read this as evidence that the gifts were already dying out. It is a fair reading of the tone, and it deserves stating plainly: on this account Origen is a witness to a church in which the miraculous was becoming rare and exceptional.

But notice what that reading concedes. Origen does not say the gifts have ceased; he says they are lesser. He reports healings, exorcisms, and foreknowledge as present realities, in the first person plural, in a book designed to be checked by hostile readers. A doctrine of cessation would have been easier to state than this careful talk of traces, and Origen was not afraid of a controversial sentence.

So there are two readings.

  • Decline: the gifts were fading; "traces" is the sound of a fire going out, and the church's practice was weakening.
  • Continuation: the gifts were present but not plentiful; Origen distinguishes the founding signs from the church's continuing, lesser experience — what a persecuted, philosophically distracted church would look like.

The difference is not exegesis but expectation. And the second reading is not special pleading, because decline has causes that have nothing to do with a divine decree. The third century was a century of persecution, plague, and scattered congregations. A church in that condition may see fewer healings for the same reason a church in any age may: unbelief, fear, disorder, and neglect. Scripture diagnoses exactly that (Matthew 13:58; Mark 6:5-6).

The third century beyond Origen

Origen is not alone, and the other witnesses matter because they show the gifts inside the church's settled doctrine rather than at its philosophical edges.

Novatian, a Roman presbyter writing around 250-258, gives a doctrinal account of the Spirit in On the Trinity 29: the Spirit "places prophets in the church, instructs teachers, directs tongues, gives powers and healings." The verbs are present tense — a theologian's enumeration of what the Spirit does, not a story about what he once did.

Cyprian, bishop of Carthage until his martyrdom in 258, governs his congregation through the Decian persecution with dreams and visions he treats as divine guidance. He is not systematic about it; he simply lives as though God still speaks.

The martyr acts show the same expectation from below. The Acts of Perpetua and Felicity (Carthage, 203) preserve a prison diary with visions; the Martyrdom of Polycarp has a voice from heaven and fire arching around the martyr. These are prodigies at martyrdoms rather than gifts in the assembly, and should be graded as such — but they show a church that expected the supernatural at the edges of life and death.

What this does and does not prove

It proves: that the third-century church practiced exorcism and healing prayer as ordinary ministry; that a major theologian could describe the Spirit as still giving prophets, tongues, powers, and healings; and that the strongest voice for "decline" in this period still reports the gifts as present.

It does not prove: that the gifts were common, or that Origen's theology of the Spirit is ours in every respect. It proves that the line between "fewer" and "finished" is not one the third-century church drew.

Further reading

  • Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge University Press, 1953).
  • Novatian, On the Trinity, in Ante-Nicene Fathers (public domain).
  • Herbert Musurillo, ed., The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford University Press, 1972).

See also