With All the Fullness of God: Deification in Christian Tradition - ToC, Introduction (original) (raw)
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The Role of the Holy Spirit in Human Deification
This article focuses on introducing the teaching on the Holy Spirit and His relation with man. This article's main objective is to demonstrate the role of the Holy Spirit in human deification (theosis) and the experience of human relations with the Holy Spirit in Orthodox theology. When speaking of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and His grace, Orthodox theology also speaks of the kenosis of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity and human participation in the Holy Spirit.
The Heythrop Journal, 2008
The book began as lectures in the faculty of theology at Oxford University, and has the advantages of that format: each chapter stands alone as an introduction to its topic, making an excellent accompaniment to a course of study (for which I use it regularly), or as a pithy survey of the subject for the general reader. The chapters are mostly given to single figures, Plato, Philo, Plotinus, Origen, Augustine, Denys the Areopagite, and as a postscript, John of the Cross. Bridging chapters on 'Nicene Orthodoxy' (Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa) and 'The Monastic Contribution' (Evagrius of Pontus, the Macarian Homilies, and Diadochus of Photicē) complete the picture, with a concluding chapter entitled 'The Mystical Life and the Mystical Body'. The first edition was applauded for its contribution to our understanding of the Platonic influence on patristic mysticism. The thesis rights the famous dictum of A.-J. Festugie`re, that 'When the Fathers 'think' their mysticism they platonize. There is nothing original in the edifice.' Louth shows convincingly that while the first statement is correct, the second is not. Christian mystical theology belongs to a distinctive development which definitively broke from Platonism with the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in the Nicene Fathers. Christian mystical transformation draws heavily on Platonism, but begins a new trajectory centred on the incarnation, scripture, the liturgical community, and the graced relationship of God with creation. In the new Afterword, Louth expresses doubts about his understanding of 'the Christian mystical tradition' at the time that he wrote the book and therefore of the whole project of tracing 'origins'. Where he had defined mysticism before as 'a search for an experience of immediacy with God' (p. xiii), he now points out that 'mysticism' and 'mystical' are heavily freighted terms reaching us through layers of history which have changed their meaning beyond recognition. For the patristic writers, mysterion and mystikos referred more to strategies of thought and interpretation than to a set of 'facts': their mysticism 'is not esoteric but exemplary. .. not about special 'experiences' of God but about a radical opening of ourselves to God' (p. 201). The 'origins' in question may thus have no connection to what readers today think is being sought. But Louth's polemic risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. While the notion of mysticism is undeveloped, the book gives us a crucial layer in the history of mysticism, even if its context is alien to modern thought. The best way to challenge modern notions of mysticism is precisely with this detailed historical-contextual study of the ideas. Louth securely traces the themes of the soul and its transformation, of knowledge, contemplation and theology, showing the intimate links in the patristic writers-as contrasted with our own period-between dogma and mysticism, theory and practice, and the individual and communal.
Perichoresis, 2019
Some contemporary Baptists (Medley and Kharlamov) argue that the conservative Baptists in North America need to incorporate the concept of deification into their traditional soteriology because they failed to present the continual and transforming nature of salvation. However, many leading conservative Baptist systematicians (Garrett, Erickson, Demarest, and Keathley) demonstrate their concern about a possible pantheistic connotation of the doctrine of deification. Unlike the conservative Baptists, I argue for the necessity of working with the concept of deification in the traditional Baptist soteriology. The concept of deification is not something foreign to the Baptist tradition because Keach, Gill, Spurgeon, and Maclaren already demonstrated the patristic exchange formula ‘God became man so that man may become like God’. They considered the hypostatic union of two natures in Christ as the source and model of becoming like God or Christ, the true Image of God. Christians are calle...
2010
In recent decades there has been an increasing interest across the Christian spectrum in both the doctrine and teaching of deification as a tenet of the Christian life. Perhaps it was through the patristic revival of the Oxford movement (1833-45) that the concept of deification was recovered. The Oxford Dictionary describes deification (Gr: θєωσίς. Eng. Theōsis) or theopoiēsis, [as] "Becoming God", the normal term for the transforming effect of grace in Greek patristic and Eastern Orthodox Theology. Theologian-philosopher E L Mascall writes that "no term less than "deification" is adequate to describe the condition of the human being who has been taken by grace into the supernatural realm; and… not simply the condition of the mystic united to God… but also that of the newly baptized infant at the font or of the newly absolved sinner in the confessional."Recent scholarship has identified deification
Salvation as justification and deification
Scottish Journal of Theology, 2011
Many Christians in the Western tradition would find the idea of salvation as the deification of man alien because the concept of justification by faith has played such a central and influential role in Western soteriologies. There is, however, a renaissance of the concept of deification or theosis in contemporary theology even outside its traditional home in Eastern Orthodoxy. Many Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians have discovered that although the two metaphors, justification and deification, emphasise different aspects of salvation, they are not incompatible with each other. In addition, theologians in the Western tradition are arguing that although the forensic and declarative aspect of justification is important, justification also has a transformative aspect. An exploration of the transformative aspect of justification has resulted in the discovery of interesting ways in which this concept can be brought closer to that of theosis in the Eastern tradition.
Theosis (Deification) as a Biblical and Historical Doctrine
This is the first of the two articles by this author that research the doctrine of theosis, sometimes also called deification or divinization. The second article presents theosis as a New Testament and evangelical doctrine. This first article presents theosis as a biblical and historical doctrine. The first major section of this article analyzes the main biblical texts for the doctrine of theosis; their interpretation and appropriation for theosis. The second major section of this article gives an overview of historical development of the doctrine of theosis, from the beginning of Christian thought to modern era. It shows that theosis was not limited to Eastern theologians but was also represented in the West in certain mainstream theologians and movements. Because of its biblicity and historicity, theosis should be considered an essential historical doctrine of the Church.
Theosis/ Deification: Christian Doctrines of Divinization East and West, in J. Arblaster and R. Faesen (eds), Leuven – Paris – Bristol: Peeters, 2018
While the New Testament Christians rightly rejected the concept of deification as divinisation of the powerful, in the next generations two themes associated with deification re-emerged: the radical unity with God visible in the saints who became by grace who Christ is by nature, and the unity of love among creatures recreated through Christ-like kenosis. In my lecture I will explore more closely the content of these themes as it emerged in the spiritual advice on how to live a life relying on God’s grace which makes us alive – and in the two senses mentioned above – which deifies. I will bring into conversation insights learned from the Hesychast and the Ignatian traditions, as well as from modern and post-modern philosophical mysticism, Wittgenstein and Derrida in particular. The experiential approach will help me not to approach the doctrine of theosis/deification from the point of view of a “final product” – a deified human person, a deified creation. My main attention will be given to the process of deification, to a journey including struggles with darkness, the discernment of spirits, the kenotic losing of oneself, as well as the paradoxical encounters with the light. In attending to these elements I will ask how the personal/ascetic and the communal/liturgical expression of the journey overlap and create one whole, as well as to how a need for a radical solidarity with others gradually replaces any remains of individualism and exclusivism. In the conclusion I will consider the hermeneutical problem of how to hear and understand the experience of the journey of deification when it includes stages which we have not lived through ourselves. At the same time I will show that exploring the doctrine of deification through its experiential roots helps in appreciating the gradual and pluriform nature of our understanding of what becoming by grace what Christ is by nature may mean.