Elizabeth Dively Lauro: The Eschatological Significance of Scripture's Sacramental Character According to Origen

This paper explores how Origen relates the functions of Baptism and Eucharist to Scripture.  Close examination of text within Origen’s exegesis reveals his understanding that Scripture, like these two sacraments, confers God’s grace upon willing recipients, changing them from sinners into likenesses of Christ. More specifically, Scripture’s psychic meanings, like Baptism, are regenerative:  they correct and reorder the hearer’s habits so that he is made new.  Scripture’s pneumatic meanings, like Eucharist, both lead the renewed believer to consume the Paschal Lamb and constitute that offering:  they anoint the hearer as the priest and direct him to sacrifice Scripture’s words and consume their deeper, spiritual meanings.  This examination further reveals that, for Origen, the Baptismal and Eucharistic functions of Scripture give it a uniquely eschatological significance, in that the hearer’s present interaction with Scripture directly embodies the eternal activity of heaven.