During Lent I'm sharing a series of thoughts and summaries from reading N.T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God. They will be from the second half of the book dealing mostly with the New Testament Narratives...
While we have lost much of Origen’s writings, we are indebted to this great 
Alexandrian Christian of the late second and third century. Origen, like Clement of Alexandria incorporated Platonic philosophy into their theological constructs. In spite of this, Origen is quite non-Platonic concerning the subject of resurrection. Wright examines Origen’s doctrine of apokatastasis. Apokatastasis involves the restoration of all things to the original state of creation. His belief in apokatastasis was so strong that he even alludes to the possibility of Satan’s restoration. He was strongly rebutted by Augustine and ultimately condemned as a heretic by the Council of Constantinople in 543 AD. Origen theorized that the body was in a constant state of fluxuation, that matter in the body was consistently changing but a defining aspect stayed the same. He called the thing that stayed the same eidos, which seems similar to the concept of a genetic code. While Augustine attacked him from the Christian side, his significant opponent of the pagan side was Celsus who mocked Christianity, Jesus and the concept of resurrection. The attacks by Celsus led to some of Origen’s greatest work. Chapter Eleven, Page 518-26
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