The Scriptures, he believed, are the treasury of divine revelation. Students, therefore, must see them as a whole. If the apparent sense of a given passage contradicts the necessary convictions of morality or the nature of God, there must be some deeper lesson underneath the surface of the passage. This conviction led Origen into what we usually call the “allegorical interpretation” of Scripture. He held that there are three levels of meaning in the Bible: the literal sense; the moral application to the soul; and the allegorical or spiritual sense, which refers to the mysteries of the
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