Paul and Origen and the urgent search for their successor

For reasons I am not entirely clear about, I have started something of a quest to get to know Origen (c. 185 - c. 253) and his writings. I now have two different translations of his most famous work of systematic theology, De Principiis/On First Principles.I have also started reading a book which has been on my shelves for many years, sadly unread.

That book is J. W. Trigg's Origen: The Bible and Philosophy in the Third-century Church (SCM Press - oddly, no date - it is the British edition of a book first published in the USA).

Trigg makes this observation at the beginning of the first chapter, p. 8:

When changed conditions call the church's message into question, a theologian must develop an all-encompassing religious vision that enables other Christians to interpret their experience. Two theologians, more than any others, have accomplished this for the entire Christian church. Paul of Tarsus is one of them. The other is neither Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, nor Schleiermacher, for none of them shaped the entire Christian tradition. The other is Origen, who lived at a time when the church's present divisions were, at most only incipient. 

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[p. 9] Even if few Christians grasped Paul's profundity, the forcible divorce he effected between Christianity and the Jewish ritual law endured and made possible the spread of the church throughout the Greco-Roman world. Though few Christians, likewise, accepted Origen's entire theology, he made Christianity compatible with the highest aspirations of classical Greco-Roman culture. We have Origen, more than any other single person, to thank that Athens and Jerusalem belong equally to our Western heritage.

It is no purpose of this post to argue for or against Trigg's case for the seminal-and-universal significance of Origen. (I take it for granted thate all readers here agree on the significance of Paul!)

What I want to put before readers is that what Trigg says here highlights a question for today - a fractious day within the church, a testing day for the church in respect of its role in the global mission of God, and a day when, arguably, our fractiousness is a consequence of the pressure of change in the world external to the church - and that question is this:

Do we need a new Paul/Origen for our day?

A larger version of that question could be this:

In the early third millennium of Christianity, viewing many aspects of Christianity today (its divisions, including its divisions within globally significant churches/communions; its loss of adherents in the West [the greatest heir of Greco-Roman culture?]; its inability (seemingly) to be both counter-cultural (challenging the ungodliness of culture) and cultural (becoming like X in order to win X to Christ); its dicing with the powers of our age (Christian nationalism in all its forms, in nations as diverse as USA and Russia); its competing demands to be vigorous in combatting the growh of Islam, especially in Africa and vigorous in responding to change in social and sexual ethics in Western societies); its confusion around the vernacular of Christian discourse (noting movements as diverse as those promoting the BCP and the Latin Mass) - etc - is there an urgent need for a new Paul/Origen, for a theologian-missioner who can lead a renewal of our global Christian mind in a resetting of the agenda for church, for theology, for liturgy, for mission?

Critical - I suggest - to answering such a question is that such a theologian-missioner can form and articulate a message with universal import and universal attractiveness to world Christianity.

Paul was a universalist of this kind because he grasped (i.e. he received and did not let go of Christ's revelation to him) that Christ was for all people, for Jew and for non-Jew.

Origen (in my limited understanding of him and his theology) was a universalist of this kind because he took utterly seriously texts such as 1 Corinthians 15:28, "... that God may be all in all." (Cf. Ephesians 1:22.)

(Whether Paul and Origen were "universalists" of a different kind - concerning the putative salvation of all - is another matter and not a focus of this post.)

What might a new and renewed understanding of the universalism of Christianity look like in this millennium? If Christ is Christ for all, if God seeks to be "all in all", if the purpose of God's plan of salvation is "to unite all things in Christ" (Ephesians 1:10), how might we see that being articulated for God's people today?