Origen: Well Regarded in his Time

I'm reading selected books of Eusebius' The History of the Church. I previously have read several of his first books on the Apostles and the earliest Church, but for some reason I never took much time to read about Origen (at least from the pen of Eusebius). From my studies, I've known he in his own time was regarded as a Biblical scholar par excellence. What I did not know, and what Eusebius makes clear, is that many bishops, even patriarchal ones, came to Origen for spiritual guidance.

Origen often receives much flak for his concept of the pre-existence of souls; but what I find surprising is his Christological response that points to Jesus as divine in his own proper sense (Origen's subordinating tendencies besides present consideration). Beryllus, the bishop of Bostra in Arabia, had erroneous views; he believed that the Son did not have his own divinity but instead only was indwelt by the divinity of the Father. Many bishops challenged Beryllus on this point, and Origen was brought into the dispute. Interestingly, Origen set Beryllus back on the orthodox path, supposedly by highlighting the proper divinity of the Son.

Many "scholars" today write about the "birth of God"--as if Christians viewed Jesus as God only beginning at Nicaea. According to the scholarly myth, prior to the heavy-handed Council of Nicaea in 325, Christians generally did not see Jesus as God; Nicaea made the norm that which never was. The evidence of history points to the contrary. Christians believed in the divinity of Christ from the Apostolic Age--Jesus is God. For the early Christians, it was not an argument over whether or not Jesus is God, but rather a debate on how Jesus is God, and how Jesus as the Son of God relates with the Father, who by Christians (even heterodox ones) is undisputed as fully divine, fully God.

The early adoptionists went to one extreme, claiming that the Son is only an adopted human son of God--that the divinity of the Father indwells in him, but that the Son himself has no divinity proper to himself. This, of course, is unorthodox. Yet, there was always another side that elevated the especial nature of the Son as God, and which demonstrated, if less perfectly at first, the Son as ontologically distinct from the Father. Nicaea recognized the latter as what was passed down from the Apostles and contained in their inspired writings.