130} Origen, and
cannot be the case with any Christology or theology which really
understands the doctrine of Immaterial Reality. It is possible to have
a spirit, using the word in the popular and material sense, which looks
like a human being, but is not really one, but that cannot be so with
Immaterial Reality.

Origen achieved a synthesis with Greek philosophy which enabled
Christianity to accept a belief in Immaterial Reality without a Docetic
Christology, but it must be remembered that Origen was able to do this
largely because he stood in the line of succession from the Fourth
Gospel and Justin Martyr. He did not take the word Logos in the same
sense as Justin had done, and he permanently changed, and indeed partly
confused, Christian terminology by giving the meaning of immaterial to
the words spirit and spiritual. They have in the main retained this
meaning ever since, but students of the New Testament will do well to
remember that this is not the meaning of the words in the original, and
that Origen, though neither the first nor the last, is probably the
ablest of the long line of theologians who have introduced metaphysics
into Christian doctrine by a perverse exegesis of the words of
Scripture.

The Catholic Christianity which emerged from the struggle between
Adoptionism and the Logos Christology was a curious combination of
both. In the strict sense of Christology, Adoptionism was completely
abandoned. Jesus was regarded as the eternal Logos who became man, not
as the inspired {131} and perfect man who became God. But in the
sphere of soteriology the legacy of Adoptionism can clearly be seen.
The Christian became the adopted son of God, joint heir with Christ,
and this remained part of Catholic teaching. It is not, however,
really consistent with the Logos doctrine, and is logically part of
Adoptionism. The incoherence introduced at this point was met by the
splendid paradox of Irenaeus and Athanasius that God became man in
order that man might become God. But splendid though this be, it
remains a paradox, and it was diluted very considerably in later
theology, which seems to have felt that the abandonment of Adoptionism
in the sphere of Christology necessitated its abandonment in the
doctrine of salvation. Thus, at least in popular theology, the
grandiose conception of the apotheosis of humanity has passed into the
far more mythological one of becoming an angel after death--a view very
widely