But think of another example: The American Constitution and the formulas of their Amendments: they have absolute, even legal, validity; but in order to make this tolerable, there is the Supreme Court which interprets , ultimately. And interpreting always means applying to the present situation. Now the jurists of the Supreme Court do not apply the allegoric method, but rather use a method of adequacy, and the result is exactly the same. They speak of the “spirit” of the law, and the spirit of the law may often, even in evident things, contradict the letter of the law. . .
There are two classes of Christians: 1) The many simple ones, who accept on authority the Biblical message and the teachings of the Church without understanding them fully. They take the mythological elements, – of which Origen knew as well as Bultmann – literally and primitively, or, as he said, they prefer the healing stories to the story of Jesus with three apostles going to the mountain of transfiguration. This is an allegoric, or metaphoric, expression for those who go beyond the literal interpretation to the transformed meaning of it.
He calls the attitude of the primitives. . . “only faith”, “mere faith”, which is a lower degree of Christian perfection. This degree is something in which first of all all participate, because all are somehow imperfect. But on this common basis, it never shall be given up – here, Origen is exactly as we found it in Clement. To some people the charisma of gnosis is given (i. e., the grace of knowledge) as a special grace. In this way the converted, educated Greek becomes the perfect Christian, but he can become the perfect Christian only on the basis of Christian conformity to what he calls “the faith.” Now if we, as Protestants, look at this concept of faith, then we must see immediately that its meaning is: acceptance of doctrines, while in Protestant faith it is: acceptance of the reuniting grace of God. Therefore the first step is authority, in which every Christian, even Origen himself, lives. And the second step, which is not a recanting of the first but which is possible only on the basis of the first step, is the autonomous rational understanding of the Biblical message.
