Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

He produced a book entitled Hexapla, which displayed six versions of the Old Testament in six parallel columns. He added to this scores of commentaries and hundreds of sermons on particular books. The Scriptures, he believed, are the treasury of divine revelation. Students, therefore, must see them as a whole. Any occasion where the apparent sense of a passage contradicted the morality or nature of God was a God-given sign that 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 Christian faith.