It was Origen, however, writing a generation after Irenaeus, who recognized
this very process of maintaining and recognizing the faith is more complicated
than it sounds. Origen’s life's work was principally the careful interpretation
of the texts used by the mainstream Christian Churches as Scripture. . . . The
problem facing Christians, however, even in the third century, as Origen sees
it, was not the availability of Scripture, but its correct interpretation.
There were many Christian sects, many individual lines of understanding;
everyone understood the Bible according to his or her prior assumptions about God
and the world. That the community of believers needed was a set of criteria for
making sense of the Bible itself, as the ultimate criterion of faith. He
continues:
Because, then, many of those who profess faith in Christ are in
disagreement, not only in small, insignificant things, but even in large, very
significant ones—for instance, on God or on the Lord Jesus Christ himself, or
on the Holy Spirit, and not only on them but also on the other creatures, that
is, on the dominations and the holy powers—for this reason it seems necessary
first to lay down a clear line and an obvious rule on these details, one by
one, and then to ask also about the other things. (De principiis, 2)
For Origen, this “clear line and obvious rule” can only be found in
actively following Christ, and in understanding Christ in the way the Apostles
have taught the Churches:
So since there are many who think they hold in their hearts what
Christ holds—and some of them are of very different opinions from their
forebears—yet the preaching of the Church is preserved handed down through the
order of succession from the Apostles and remaining in the Churches up to the
present time, only that truth is to be believed that in no respect departs from
the tradition of the Church and the Apostles. (Ibid.)
Concretely, this means that the “rule of faith” which is itself
distilled from biblical teaching—the ancestor of what we think of as the great
baptismal creeds—is the community’s common framework, within which the form of Christian
life and the meaning of individual biblical passages can be discerned. The Bible
is the originating norm, by which the rule of faith is first formed; but the rule
of faith—summarizing the Bible’s teaching as a whole—is in turn the
interpretive norm, by which individual scriptural passages are understood consistently
with the Bible’s whole message. (Brian E. Daly, “’In Many and Various Ways:’
Towards a Theology of Theological Exegesis,” in Biblical Interpretation and
Doctrine in Early Christianity: Collected Essays [Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 2025], 69-70)
