How does "Read Your Bible" Translate into "Formal Sufficiency"?

How does Origen teach the formal sufficiency of Scripture? Pastor David King received a hot response to his position that the following quotation supports formal sufficiency:

The more one reads the scriptures daily the greater one's understanding is, the more renewed always and every day. I doubt whether a mind which is lazy towards the holy scriptures and the exercise of spiritual knowledge can be renewed at all. 

Origen's Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, on the words "transformed by the renewal of your mind" (Romans 12:2).

The translation appears in Oden's "Romans" volume in the "Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture" (p. 308, cited as CER 5:32, referring to Heither's 5 volume edition) It comes from book 9 of Origen's commentary.

Thomas Scheck's translation, found in Origen: Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans Books 6-10 (Volume 2, Book 9, chapter 1, section 12, p. 196) published by The Catholic University of America Press (2002) is this:

(12) Our mind is renewed through training in wisdom and meditation upon the Word of God, and the spiritual interpretation of his law. And to the extent it makes daily progress by reading the Scriptures, to the extent that its understanding goes deeper, to that extent it becomes continuously new and daily new. I do not know if anyone can be renewed who is lazy in respect to the Holy Scriptures and training in spiritual understanding, by which it becomes possible not only to understand what has been written, but also to explain more clearly and to reveal more carefully. [fn39]
FN39: Heither in Origenes, Commentarii, 5:32 n. 17, observes, "The reading of scripture is for Origen the preferred way to make progress in one's Christian life."

These are two different translations of Rufinus' Latin translation of Origen's Greek original. Only fragments of the Greek original have survived. Origen's commentary on Romans is the earliest surviving Greek commentary on Romans by 150 years, and it has survived primarily because of Rufinus' Latin translation. Tyrannius Rufinus of Aquileia (345-411) was a prodigious translator into Latin from Greek. In 1941, a papyrus was discovered that contained the longest known fragment, a section covering Romans 3:5-5:5. As far as I know, we don't have the original Greek for the paragraph quoted above (just in case Nick, or anyone like him wants to accuse us of "hiding the Greek").

There have been various criticisms of Rufinus' work, but as long as we are not discussing the doctrine of the Trinity, we have good reason to believe that the thoughts are Origen's, even if the expression is Rufinus'.

The Latin, as provided in Migne at PG14:1206C-07A is this:

Renovatione sensus vestri. Renovatur autem sensus noster per exercitia sapientiae, et mediationem verbi Dei, et legis ejus intelligentiam spiritalem: et quanto quis quotidie ex Scripturarum proficit lectione, quanto altius intellectus ejus accedit, tanto semper novus et quotidie novus ellicitur. Nescio autem si potest renovari sensus qui piger est erga Scripturas divinas et intelligentiae spiritalis exercitia, quibus possit non solum intelligere quae scripta sunt, verum et explicare apertius, et manifestare dilgentius.

So, what does it all mean?

Meanwhile, another passage of Origen has been raised namely On First Principles, Book IV, Section 9:

English translation based on Rufinus' Latin translation:

Now the reason of the erroneous apprehension of all these points on the part of those whom we have mentioned above, is no other than this, that holy Scripture is not understood by them according to its spiritual, but according to its literal meaning. And therefore we shall endeavour, so far as our mod­erate capacity will permit, to point out to those who believe the holy Scriptures to be no human compo­sitions, but to be written by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and to be transmitted and entrusted to us by the will of God the Father, through His only-begot­ten Son Jesus Christ, what appears to us, who ob­serve things by a right way of understanding, to be the standard and discipline delivered to the apostles by Jesus Christ, and which they handed down in suc­cession to their posterity, the teachers of the holy Church.

English translation based on extant Greek of Origen:

Now the cause, in all the points pre­viously enumerated, of the false opinions, and of the impious statements or ignorant assertions about God, appears to be nothing else than the not understanding the Scripture according to its spiritual meaning, but the interpretation of it agree­ably to the mere letter. And therefore, to those who believe that the sacred books are not the compositions of men, but that they were composed by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, agreeably to the will of the Father of all things through Jesus Christ, and that they have come down to us, we must point out the ways (of interpreting them) which appear (correct) to us, who cling to the standard of the heavenly Church of Jesus Christ according to the succession of the apostles.

English translation provided by Peter Martens, an Origen scholar (in Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life, p. 130 - this is shorter because only this portion was translated):

Therefore we must show to those who believe that the sacred books are writings not from men, but that they were composed and have come down to us from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit by the will of the Father of the universe through Jesus Christ, what are the apparent ways [of interpretation] for those who hold to the rule of the heavenly church of Jesus Christ through the succession of the apostles.

As Martens acknowledges, there is considerable debate over what Origen mean by the "standard" (first two translation) or "rule" (Martens' translation):

As you can see from the quotation above, the ideas range from "the principle of allegorical exegesis" to "the canon of Scripture." Whichever sense you land on, Origen does not simply mean "go ask the church what the text means: the closest to that would be "the ecclesiastical preaching as enumerated in the preface ...." Martens seems to believe that Origen was referring to the church's rule of faith, without a lot of explanation as to what it means. For example, in a footnote on page 131, Martens writes:

As Martens argues: "adherence to the church's rule of faith and a discerning engagement with the Greco-Roman disciplines yielded viable interpretations of Scripture -- or at the very least, safeguarded interpreters from the sorts of doctrinal errors committed in the Gnostic exegetical circles." (p. 131)

Interestingly, it's quite possible to adopt both the "rule of faith" position and the canon of Scripture position simultaneously, if the Scripture is self-interpreting and the rule of faith for the church, and if the Scriptures were handed down by the apostles and those that followed them.

In any event, Origen himself clarifies his meaning two sections later, after discussing the challenges of reading prophesy and the apostles' letters and the need for the mind of Christ and the keys of interpretation:

From the Latin:

11. But, as we had begun to observe, the way which seems to us the correct one for the understand­ing of the Scriptures, and for the investigation of their meaning, we consider to be of the following kind: for we are instructed by Scripture itself in re­gard to the ideas which we ought to form of it.

From the Greek:

11. The way, then, as it appears to us, in which we ought to deal with the Scrip­tures, and extract from them their mean­ing, is the following, which has been ascer­tained from the Scriptures themselves.

So, it is not that there is a deficiency in the form of Scripture that must be made up by the church, but rather the Scriptures themselves provide the key to their understanding.

And that's, of course, one of the key principles of formal sufficiency: Scripture interprets Scripture.  This contrasts with the view expressed at CCC119 "It is the task of exegetes to work, according to these rules, towards a better understanding and explanation of the meaning of Sacred Scripture in order that their research may help the Church to form a firmer judgement. For, of course, all that has been said about the manner of interpreting Scripture is ultimately subject to the judgement of the Church which exercises the divinely conferred commission and ministry of watching over and interpreting the Word of God." (DV 12 § 3.)

If reading Scripture is the way we renew our mind, this implies that Scripture does not merely contain revelation, but that it does so in a form that permits our proper understanding of it. In other words, the Scriptures are formally sufficient.  Obviously, a person can inconsistently advise us to read our Bibles, even while teaching that the church has the final say (which is not what Origen said, even under Martens' view), but on its face every statement that affirms that reading the Scriptures is the way to make progress in the Christian life is an affirmation of the formal sufficiency of Scripture.