Origen and the History of Justification: The Legacy of Origen’s Commentary on Romans

Standard accounts of the history of interpretation of Paul’s Letter to the Romans often begin with St. Augustine. As Thomas P. Scheck demonstrates, however, the Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans by Origen of Alexandria (185-254 CE) was a major work of Pauline exegesis which, by means of the Latin translation preserved in the West, had a significant influence on the Christian exegetical tradition.

Scheck begins by exploring Origen’s views on justification and on the intimate connection of faith and post-baptismal good works as essential to justification. He traces the enormous influence Origen’s Commentary on Romans had on later theologians in the Latin West, including the ways in which theologians often appropriated Origen’s exegesis in their own work. Scheck analyzes in particular the reception of Origen by Pelagius, Augustine, William of St. Thierry, Erasmus, Cornelius Jansen, the Anglican Bishop Richard Montagu, and the Catholic lay apologist John Heigham, as well as Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and other Protestant Reformers who harshly attacked Origen’s interpretation as fatally flawed. But as Scheck shows, theologians through the post-Reformation controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries studied and engaged Origen extensively, even if not always in agreement.

An important work in patristics, biblical interpretation, and historical theology, Origen and the History of Justification establishes the formative role played by Origen’s Pauline exegesis, while also contributing to our understanding of the theological issues surrounding justification in the western Christian tradition.

Thomas P. Scheck is associate professor of theology at Ave Maria University. He is the first English translator of Rufinus’s Latin edition of Origen’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Most recently he has published new translations of St. Jerome’s Commentary on Isaiah and , Origen’s Homilies 1–9 on Isaiah, Erasmus’s writings on Origen and Origen and the History of Justification: The Legacy of Origen’s Commentary on Romans (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).

Fr. Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ, a native of the Bronx, has been a member of the Society of Jesus since 1958. He was ordained a priest in 1971. After studies at several places in the United States, he received the degree of Dr. theology from the University of Freiburg in 1975, with a dissertation on Paulinus of Nola. In 1986 he completed the “Habilitation” at Freiburg with a work on Marcellus of Ancyra. From 1975 until 1990 he taught at Marquette University in Milwaukee; since 1990 he has been at Fordham University. He has also held chairs or visiting appointments at John Carroll University, Boston College, St. Joseph’s Seminary Dunwoodie, the Pontifical Biblical Institute, and the Pontifical Gregorian University. In 2015, he published the volume St. Augustine: Writings on the Old Testament.