Origen is frequently hailed as the most important Christian writer of his period. This book examines whether there was a system to Origen's thinking about prophecy.

Origen is frequently hailed as the most important Christian writer of his period (c.185-c.255 AD), and the first systematic theologian. Origen and Prophecy: Fate, Authority, Allegory, and the Structure of Scripture examines whether there was a system to Origen's thinking about prophecy. How were all of these quite different topics - future-telling, moral leadership, mystical revelation - contained in the single word 'prophecy'? Origen and Prophecy presents a new account of Origen's concept of prophecy which takes its cue from the structure of Origen's thinking about scripture. He claims that scripture can be read in three different senses: the straightforward, or 'somatic' (bodily) sense; the moral, or 'psychic' (soul-ish) sense; and the mystical, or 'pneumatic' (spiritual) sense. This threefold structure, says Origen, underpins all of scripture and is intimately linked through Christ with the structure of the Holy Trinity. This book illustrates how Origen thought about prophecy using the same threefold structure, with somatic (future-telling), psychic (moral), and pneumatic (mystical revelatory) senses. The chapters weave through several centuries of Greek pagan, Jewish, and Christian thinking about prophecy, divination, time, human nature, autonomy and freedom, allegory and metaphor, and the role of the divine in the order and structure of the cosmos.

The final book of the Bible, Revelation prophesies the ultimate judgement of mankind in a series of allegorical visions, grisly images and numerological predictions. According to these, empires will fall, the "Beast" will be destroyed and Christ will rule a new Jerusalem. With an introduction by Will Self.

Origen is frequently hailed as the most important Christian writer of his period. This book examines whether there was a system to Origen's thinking about prophecy.

Against claims that Origen causes History to evaporate into barren idealism, his theology is shown to have no other source and aim than historical occurences. Fronting assertions that he has no eschatological ideas, this Eschatology is explicated in all its clarity. Light is cast upon the Aristotelian character of Origen's doctrine of "apokatastasis," proving this based on "ontological" necessity, not a "historical" one.

In Did God Care? Dylan Burns offers the first comprehensive survey of providence (pronoia) in ancient philosophy, from Plato to Plotinus, that takes into full account the importance and innovations of early Christian thinkers, including Coptic Gnostic and Syriac sources.