trinitarian or unitarian? 6 – Origen’s Against Celsus – Part 2
The pagan polytheistic monotheist Celsus presses the attack we looked at last time.
If you [Christians] taught them that Jesus is not his [God’s] Son, but that God is the father of all, all that we really ought to worship him [God] alone, they [Christians] would no longer be willing to listen to you unless you included Jesus as well, who is the author of their sedition. Indeed, when they call him Son of God, it is not because they are paying very great reverence to God, but because they are exalting Jesus greatly. [Origen answers:] We have learnt who the Son of God is, even that he is ‘an effulgence of his glory and the express image of his person’ …and we know that Jesus is the Son come from God and that God is his Father. There is nothing in the doctrine which is not fitting or appropriate to God, that He should cause the existence of an only-begotten Son of this nature. (Against Celsus 8.14, trans. Henry Chadwick, pp. 461-2, bold added)
Celsus pushes the point that a real monotheist would only worship God, and suggests that Christians exalt Jesus at God’s expense. (Never mind how he might reconcile this with his acceptance of traditional polytheism.)
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