- Dec 12, 2002
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Just so that it's out there, post #16 in no way represents the view of the Alexandrian Church. That's my Church, and I know what we teach and believe, and it is not accurate to claim that Origen's doctrine on the preexistence of man is that of the Alexandrian Church itself. It isn't. We don't believe that, and our rejection of this idea has absolutely nothing to do with what the Chalcedonian churches did much later in the sixth century.
While our stance concerning Origen is admittedly more ambiguous than that of the Chalcedonian churches (because he was, after all, a son of Alexandria and the one-time dean of the Catechetical School), he was quite unambiguously condemned in his own time by HH Pope Demetrius (who is a saint in our Church, while Origen is not) and subsequent Pope HH St. Heraclas (who had been an assistant to Origen at the catechetical school), so everything he wrote after this condemnation (by a synod held in Alexandria in 232, which found him guilty of accepting ordination in a foreign see in Palestine, without the consultation of his bishop) is most definitely not to be taken as representative of the thought of the Alexandrian Church, as he was not a part of it anymore. And he never returned to Alexandria after this condemnation, dying probably in Tyre, Phoenicia (now Lebanon) around 253. So some of his most famous works, like Against Celsus (written well after his condemnation, in 248; I'm assuming this is the work the poster was referencing, since it is a famous refutation against the ancient world's most strident pagan critic of Christianity at that time), were written when he actually had no standing in the Alexandrian Church, and hence certainly could not have been working under its authority, or entrusted to convey its doctrines.
This is not a new stance or some kind of about-face, either. No less a figure in Alexandrian Church history than the champion fighter HH St. Athanasius the Apostolic (d. 373), who was Pope of the Church for 45 years (328-373), wrote against the pre-existence of man by his argument against the various schools of philosophy that argued that everything was created from preexistent matter (this is the Mormon argument, since Mormonism is nothing but ancient pagan heresies dressed up in a bunch of vaguely Jesus-y language to be sold to those who don't know what the early Church itself actually taught and believed), which would no doubt includes man. HH points out that the Holy Scriptures themselves say otherwise, and so the Church says otherwise as well (from his masterwork, On The Incarnation):
Thus do they vainly speculate. But the godly teaching and the faith according to Christ brands their foolish language as godlessness. For it knows that it was not spontaneously, because forethought is not absent; nor of existing matter, because God is not weak; but that out of nothing, and without its having any previous existence, God made the universe to exist through His word, as He says firstly through Moses: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth; secondly, in the most edifying book of the Shepherd, "First of all believe that God is one, which created and framed all things, and made them to exist out of nothing." To which also Paul refers when he says, "By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the Word of God, so that what is seen has not been made out of things which do appear."
This is what we still teach today. As HG Bishop Youssef of the Southern United States Diocese of the Coptic Orthodox Church puts it in response to a question on preexistence as relates to Jeremiah 1:5 ("Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee..."), "Pre-existence can only apply to the Holy Trinity. God is Omnipotent and Omniscient. Thus, He has foreknowledge of everything and everyone. There is no pre-existence of any other creature, not of mankind and not even of angels, but only God."
Thank you so very much.
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