Origen’s Response to Criticism

In this brief clip from his teaching series A Survey of Church History, W. Robert Godfrey explains how Origen responded to early pagan criticism of the church. Watch this entire message for free today.

Transcript

There had been an earlier pagan critic named Celsus. Celsus was an eminently thoughtful and philosophical man, and as a typical pagan, Celsus had said, “Those Christians, you know, if you wanted to gather just a group of thugs, you wouldn’t do any better than the local church. They’re stupid, they’re not well-educated, and for them to go around constantly saying that God is interested in them, they’re like a bunch of frogs croaking in a pond, trying to get attention to themselves.” And Origen took on this critique of Celsus, this elitist attitude on the part of Celsus, and answered it brilliantly. He said, “You know, Celsus is right. Christians aren’t much. And the glorious thing about Christianity is you don’t have to be much to come to Christ, because you don’t have to change yourself in order to come to Christ, but you come to Christ in order to be changed.”