12/06/2002
Mark,
I took seriously your request that I look into the verse in II Peter, which I have done and here is what I found. This is a brief report. I intend to do a fuller study since I’ve found this to be fascinating. If it’s not clear let’s go over it together.
‘Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, have escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.’ II Peter 1: 4 – 6.
The key words in Greek are qeias coinonoi fuseoV (theias koinonoi physios). The breakdown on these words is this. Theias is a form of theo, or rather derived from god and is used as ‘divine’ in this case. Koinonoi is a familiar word to the both of us; we have talked about community and koinonia fairly often. The meaning is to share. Physios is the word source from which English gets the word physical that can also mean natural, nature, as in physical science or natural science.
In placing these words together as Peter did we can unpack the sentence more. Koinonoi implies sharing in the benefits of a community or small group. Theias is rooted in the word theo, or god. Theias here indicates “godlike” or divine. Physeos suggests a substance or structure and is often translated nature when not being used as physical. Hence, ‘sharers together in the godlike nature.’ So, the translators are correct.
For the modern evangelically minded man, ‘partaker of the divine nature,’ is somewhat problematic because it connotes the possible meaning that man can become Very God. Of course, no man, with the exception of Christ can make this claim, yet in a very real way the design and destiny of man is to be like God. The evangelical mind has the necessary foundation to work through this teaching.
What follows is a brief discursus on the doctrine of deification/theosis.
The doctrine of theosis is dependent upon the doctrine of the Incarnation. Mankind without salvation lives in darkness and corruption, hopeless and bound by the fear and dread of death. He is subject to the devil, his own passions and the general nature of the world he was intended to subdue. He no longer subdues or is lord of the world but is a polluter and destroyer of the world and creation. In Christ, man is restored to his lordship over creation as much as Christ is ascended at the right hand of the Father, and as Paul says, who we are seated with in the heavens. All things are under the feet of Christ and if indeed we are in Christ, creation is also under the feet of mankind.
Theosis is the ‘teleological’ end for which man was created. Teleology meaning the final and perfect/mature state of a thing. From the beginning, man has been the Image of God. Despite the temporary condition of man under the Fall it has been God’s intention to complete his work in man to become His likeness in whom He can dwell and fellowship.
Gregory of Nyssa wrote ‘Against Eunomius’ by saying:
“The first time, [God the Logos] took dust form the earth and formed humanity; this time, he took dust from the Virgin and did not merely form humanity, but formed humanity around himself. The first time, he created; this time he was created. The first time, the Logos made the flesh, this time, the Logos was made flesh, so that he might change our flesh to spirit, by being made partaker with us in flesh and blood. Of this new order in Christ, therefore, which he himself began, he is called the firstborn.’
The ancient phrase of one of the Cappadocian Fathers was ‘what Christ has not assumed (in the flesh) he has not redeemed.’ He was like us in all ways except for sin. This is important because for him to redeem man he had to be man; a man no different from Adam. It should not appear odd to us that the Word of God who is the express image of God in everyway (though different in hypostasis, but not in ousia) take onto Himself the created Image of God so that the Eternal Word and the created Image may come together to form one person, both divine and human, reconciling the separation of God and man, heaven and earth.
‘The doctrine of deification (theosis), explicit in 2 Peter 1:4, ‘so that through these you might become sharers in the divine nature’, was taken up by early Christian theologians. Together with apophaticism, deification became a central pillar of Byzantine theology. For the Greek fathers, Christ is the paradigm of human deification, an idea summarized in the dictum: ‘God became human that we might become divine.’ Christs’ humanity is deified humanity. Christians are called to participate in Christ’s divinity, not to become disincarnate spirits but to attain a more authentic humanity. This participation (methexis) is a gift of grace we are called to accept.’[1]
One of today’s contemporary false teachings or misbeliefs is the concept proffered to the Church as to what happens after death and in his existence in heaven. It is important to remember that man is the Image of God in the wholeness of his being, to divest him of his body is to reduce his humanity, as much as to make him into a purely ethereal being co-habitating the sky with angels. Though post-mortem, the soul of man does enter the presence of Christ and is alive and cognizant of who he is and where he is, he is nevertheless removed from the body because of death and is less than what he was created to be…both a physical being and a spiritual being. Man is both heavenly since God breathed life into him and being made of the dust of the earth man is earthly. This combination of dust and divine life make man a living soul, irreducibly. When Christians believe that what is important is that the soul, implying spirit, is what is to be resurrected or that the body is ever unimportant, they believe in error, forgetting that Christ arose in body as a complete man.
Simeon Neotheologion, on ’Salvation as Deification’ writes:
‘But your nature is your
essence, and your essence your nature.
So uniting with your body, I share in your nature, and I truly take as
mine what is yours, uniting with your divinity, and thus becoming an heir, superior
in my body to those who have no body.
As you have said, I have become a son of God, not for the angels, but
for us, who you have called gods. I
have said: “You are gods and are all sons of the Most High.” Glory be to your kindness and to the plan (oikonomia),
by which you became human, you who by nature are God, without change or
confusion, remaining the same, and that you have made me a god, a mortal by my
nature, a god by your grace, by the power of your Spirit, bringing together as
god a unity of opposites.’[2]
Vladimir Lossky, the Russian theologian, wrote in 1953 this comment on Theosis:
‘”God made Himself man, than
man might become God”. These powerful
words, which are found for the first time in St. Irenaeus, can be found again
in the writings of St. Athanasius, St. Gregory of Nazianzen and St. Gregory of
Nyssa. The Fathers and Orthodox
theologians have repeated them with this same emphasis in every century,
wishing to sum up in this striking sentence the very essence of Christianity –
an ineffable descent of God to the ultimate limit of our fallen human
condition, even unto death – a descent of God which opens to men a path of
ascent to the unlimited vision of the union of created beings with the
divinity.
‘The descent (katabasis) of the divine person of Christ
makes human persons capable of an ascent (anabasis) in the Holy Spirit. It was necessary that the voluntary
humiliation, the redemptive self-emptying (kenosis) of the Son of God should
take place, so that fallen men might accomplish their vocation of ‘theosis,’
the deification of created beings by uncreated grace. Thus the redeeming work of Christ – or rather, more generally
speaking, the Incarnation of the Word – is seen as directly related to the
ultimate goal of creatures: to know union with God. If this union has been accomplished in the diving person of the
Son, who is God become man, it is necessary that each human person should in
turn become god by grace, or become “a partaker in the divine nature,”
according to St. Peter’s expression (2 Peter 1:4)…The Son of God came down from
heaven to accomplish the work of our salvation, to liberate us from the
captivity of the devil, to destroy the dominion of sin in our nature, and to
undo death, which is the wages of sin.
The Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ, by which his redemptive
work was accomplished, thus occupy a central place in the divine dispensation
for the fallen world. From this point
of view, it is easy to understand why the doctrine of the redemption has such a
great importance in the theological thought of the Church.
‘Nevertheless, when the dogma of the redemption is
treated in isolation from the general body of Christian teaching, there is
always a risk of limiting the tradition by interpreting it exclusively in terms
of the work of the Redeemer. Then
theological reflection develops in three directions: original sin, its reparation on the cross, and the appropriation
of the saving results of the work of Christ to Christians. In these constricting perspectives of a
theology dominated by the idea of “redemption,” the patristic sentence “God
made Himself man, that man might become God” seems to be strange and
abnormal. The thought of union with God
is forgotten because of our preoccupation solely with our own salvation; or
rather, union with God is seen only negatively, in contrast with our present
wretchedness.’[3]
Of the many significant points made in Lossky’s explanation of theosis it is important to take heed to his caution that redemption (especially as understood in the point of views common to both Catholicism and Protestantism since Aquinas, and Anselm) can be constricted to meanings that are only systematic and pedagogic. If we forget that man is called to dwell in, dwell with, and commune with God Eternally is to deprive the Church of its essentially spiritual life.
The life of the Church in Christ is the life given it by the Holy Spirit. Though all of our blood and breath will disappear from us all someday, it will happen that man will be resurrected and caused to live again by the power of the Holy Spirit. Man will be what the Holy Spirit is, for he is what Christ is, Christ is the Son of God, and the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, who together dwells in the Father, amen.
As a brief benefit of the study, I did on this subject I came across this quote on the Holy Spirit and what the relationship is between He and mankind that believes. In his historic dissertation in the 4th century ‘On the Holy Spirit’ St. Basil wrote:
‘From the Holy Spirit there is the foreknowledge of the future, the comprehension of mysteries, the understanding of hidden things, the distribution of graces, the heavenly way of life, association with angels, unending happiness, residence in God, the likeness of God, and the highest of all things to be desired, to become God.’
I hope this has been of some help in understanding the Eastern doctrine of redemption though theosis.
Your friend,
John Mark
[1] The Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity, Blackwell Publications, Inc. Oxford (1999) p. 159. Article by Ken Perry on ‘Deification.’
[2] Alister McGrath, The Christian Reader, Blackwell Publications, Inc. Oxford (1995) p. 339. This selection is from a poem St. Symeon wrote where he sets out to describe the fullness of union in Christ with God.
[3] McGrath, 371.