The word about salvation as theosis

Exclusive. Perhaps the most "scandalous" doctrine of the Orthodox Church for non-Orthodox Christians is theosis, which is often translated as deification. This is a way of salvation that has been taught since the time of the apostles, but most Christians have never heard of it, and even some Orthodox are not familiar with it. When this doctrine is mentioned to devout but uneducated Christians, the typical reaction is shock. On the other hand, representatives of the New Age movement are quick to embrace this idea. But neither rejects nor accepts it for the right reason.

Protestants do not use this term because of the natural error associated with the formation of gods. We are not God and we will never be God. Only God possesses His divine nature. False religions sometimes teach that we can become godlike and even gods. For this reason, we must be very careful when describing the doctrine of theosis, and we must also be careful not to accept anything that supports the heresy of becoming divine by nature. At best, we become more like Christ, but we do not become divine beings by any means.

Surprisingly, the central idea of ​​Orthodox Theology is the concept of theosis, and Orthodox authors use this Greek word to denote both the initial vocation of humanity (the task that God gave to Adam and Eve at the time of creation) and salvation.

However, we must immediately recognize that deification does not mean that people become gods at all in any ontological sense; Orthodox theologians claim that God is unique and transcendent, as do Protestants. Rather, the Orthodox understand deification as the process of acquiring God-pleasing qualities, acquiring immortality and incorruption, and experiencing communion with God. As a result, deification corresponds to some extent to the concepts that Protestants describe using the terms sanctification, eternal life, and communion or relationship with God.

The Orthodox believe that obtaining these blessings was a task that God set before mankind at creation, a task that, through the fall, humanity lost the ability to achieve, and a task that the incarnation and activity of Christ made possible again. As a result, for Protestants interested in Eastern Christendom, the most relevant aspect of Orthodox theology is its understanding of the means by which sinful people undergo the process of deification (or, in Western terminology, the means of salvation), and it is this topic that will be the subject of this sermon.

Orthodox theologians consider deification as primarily the result of the action of the Holy Spirit in people. Volodymyr Loskyi writes: The Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ"...became like us in the incarnation; we become like Him through deification, through the communion of divinity in the Holy Spirit." In other words, theosis is proposed by Christ, but realized only by the Spirit. Only in the Holy Spirit will we achieve becoming like God. Therefore, it is the Holy Spirit that enables us to acquire those qualities, which Eastern Christianity associates with deification.

St. Athanasius of Alexandria wrote: "God became man so that man would become god" [the second god is always written with a lowercase letter]. His statement is a good description of the doctrine. What would otherwise seem absurd—that a fallen, sinful man can become holy like a holy God—became possible through Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate, that is, the God-man. Naturally, the important Christian statement that God is One, which sets an absolute limit on the meaning of theosis: no created being can become (ontologically) God, or even a part of God. Although we will become gods by His grace, if we choose to work with Him in this, we will never usurp the Divinity. As gods, our entire existence is still borrowed from the Self-existent; there remains a clear contrast between the created and the uncreated.

For many of the church fathers, theosis goes beyond simply restoring people to the state they were in before the fall of Adam and Eve, teaching that because Christ united the human and divine natures in His Person, it is now possible for someone to experience closer communion with God, than Adam Some Orthodox theologians go so far as to say that Jesus Christ would have been incarnated for this reason alone, even if Adam and Eve had never sinned. God's respect for human freedom prompted him to create Adam and Eve only with the possibility of union with Him, and not to force them to communicate with Him, which they may not have wanted. Similarly, the teaching of the church fathers states, God puts his authority before human freedom, refusing to deify people without their active consent and participation.

So, holy God and sinful humanity were fundamentally reconciled in One sinless man, Jesus Christ. This reconciliation is carried out through the struggle (in particular, with sinful passions and also through various forms of spiritual labor) for conforming to the image of Christ.

Theosis is said to have three stages: first, purification or catharsis; secondly, enlightenment, or the vision of God; and thirdly, holiness, or theosis proper. Thus, the term "theosis" describes the entire process and its main goal. With the help of purification, a person comes to the vision of God, and then to theosis itself. Adoration is a person's participation in the life of God. According to this doctrine, the holy life of God, given in Jesus Christ to the believer through the Holy Spirit, is expressed through three stages of deification, beginning with the struggle of this life against sin, growing in the experience of knowing God, and culminating in the resurrection of the believer, when God's victory over fear, sin and the death accomplished as a result of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ becomes evident in the believer forever.

Without the struggle, the practice of a godly life, there is no true faith; faith leads to action, without which it is dead. It is necessary to combine will, thought and action with God's will, His thoughts and actions. Man should make his life a mirror, a true likeness of God.

Moreover, since God and mankind are more than likeness in Christ, but rather a true union, the Christian life is more than mere piety, but rather a union with the life of God himself: so that he who works for salvation is of united with God, who works in man and through man, to both desire and do what pleases God.

Saint Grigory Palama asserted the possibility of humanity's union with God in His energies, while at the same time asserting that because of God's transcendence and total otherness, it is impossible for any human or other being to know or connect with the essence of God. But through faith we can achieve theosis. A common analogy for theosis given by the Greek fathers is that of metal thrown into a fire. Metal receives all the properties of fire (heat, light), and its essence remains the essence of metal.

The "Agent" in deification is the Holy Spirit, with whom man unites his will to receive this transforming grace through the practices of the Christian life and prayer. This synergy or cooperation between God and man does not lead to the absorption of humanity into God, as the Buddhists, for example, taught. Rather, it expresses unity in complementary nature between the created and its Creator.

Christian theologians have long discussed "theosis" (literally "becoming god") as the final stage of salvation, when people have true union with God. This idea is practically unknown among Protestants; but the goal of salvation, described by the terms "theosis" or "deification," is at the heart of Eastern Orthodox theology inherited from Byzantine and Greek patristic theologians. We could say that for the Orthodox, deification is the same as justification for Protestants.

Of course, Christian forms of theosis (as opposed to non-Christian "apotheosis") begin and end with the Trinity, the foundational doctrine that God exists eternally as three persons in one nature. The description of salvation as a theosis always implies that people are different from who the true God is. Therefore, Christian deification is always metaphorical — believers do not become God literally (as a member of the Trinity).

When we hear that we can become gods, our first idea is usually something like Mormonism, which has countless gods and demigods ruling parts of the universe. To the good uneducated Christian, it sounds as if we Orthodox are trying to replace the one true God. To New Agers it sounds like we're validating their belief that they can do whatever they want because they don't have to answer to anyone anyway. But neither that nor the other is true.

That being said, why even use such concepts if it sounds so heretical? If believers do not become God, what do they become?

Our earliest evidence of believers being called gods actually comes from the Savior of the world in John 10:34 when He quotes Psalm 81:6 which reads, "I said, 'You are gods and sons of the Most High.' The Church has followed Jesus Christ in this line of interpretation, although theologians since the patristic period have spent more time examining this passage in terms of its wider biblical context than Christ's use of this passage in the Gospel of John. Thus, two main exegetical themes emerge from their reading of Psalm 81(82): (1) the gods are immortal and (2) the sons of God are gods. This is a verse that most Protestants do not emphasize in their Bibles. What on earth does "you gods" mean? Doesn't our faith teach that there is only one God in three Persons? How can humans be gods?

Let's consider the first point. So the gods are immortal. Notice the connection in Psalm 81:6-7: "I said ye were gods...but ye die as men." The experience of death is the exact opposite of the status of being gods. This reading is directly in line with the ancient (i.e. Greek and Latin) notion that the gods were immortal. In broader biblical theology, we see that God created humans to experience immortality, but sin brought death. Accordingly, the hope of immortality and resurrection (eg, Romans 8; 1 Corinthians 15) became central to understanding what theosis entails.

Let's consider the second point. Therefore, the sons of God are gods. As with the first statement, patristic interpreters were careful readers of Psalm 81 and John 10 and noted the connection between gods and sons of God, for the text says, "I said that ye are gods, ye are all sons of the Most High." And this means that to be a son of God is to be a god in a certain sense. These interpreters knew that God did not have many children by nature (this status is reserved for His Only Begotten Son, that is, only for our Lord Jesus Christ). After reading this passage in the biblical narrative, they confirmed that these gods were children in another way—by adoption and by grace. As adopted sons of God, they did not naturally possess the attributes of divinity (ie immortality), but rather God adopted them to become His sons, only like (not consubstantial) with Christ the Son. Again, theologians read this text along with other New Testament texts that make the same claim, such as Romans 8, Galatians 4, and 1 John 3.

In Paul's epistles we find many descriptive passages dealing with the same concepts we have been considering: union with God, participation in the divine nature through grace, and full participation in Jesus Christ—the biblical concept of theosis/deification. In Ephesians 1, Paul states that we have been given "every spiritual blessing" (v. 3) so that we may be "holy and blameless" (v. 4); we are His "sons" (v. 5). He created “the riches of His grace . . . that we may have much" (vv. 6-7). We are given wisdom and understanding of the "mystery of His will" (v. 9), which consists in "gathering all things together in Christ" (v. 10). In addition, we are "sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise" (v. 13), "the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased property" (v. 14). We receive “wisdom and revelation” (v. 17) by having “the eyes of [our] understanding . . . enlightened" (v. 18); knowing "the exceeding greatness of His power over us" (v. 19). We are the "body" of Him who is the Head, and "the fullness of Him who fills all in all" (v. 23).

In Romans 6, Paul gives us a wonderful picture of deification. Through baptism, we "walk in renewed life" (v. 4). We must not allow sin to "rule in [our] mortal [bodies]" (v. 12), but must "present [ourselves] to God" (v. 13) so that sin "does not rule over" us (v. 14). Our members must be devoted to "righteousness for holiness" (v. 19). Therefore, we "were freed from sin and became slaves of God" (v. 22). Our hope is to share in the "glory of God" (5:2). Even creation itself "looks forward to the revelation of the sons of God" (8:19).

Continuing in chapter 8, we are indeed called "sons of God" (v. 14) who have received the "Spirit of adoption" crying out (like Jesus Christ) "Abba, Father" (v. 15). The Spirit testifies "with our spirit"—oneness—that we are "children of God" (v. 16). We are children, "heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ...so that we too may be glorified together" (v. 17). Verse 17 also says, "If indeed we suffer with Him." We shall return to this in connection with the experience of saints who have attained deification.

In verse 29, St. Paul writes that we are destined to be "conformed to the image of His Son." In addition, those whom He "justified, those He also glorified" (v. 30). Notice that he did not say that God would glorify them only after their death, at the final resurrection. This glorification can be a present reality. Verse 32 says that God will "give us all things freely."

Doesn't that turn you on a little? Doesn't this describe something more than "being saved" or "going to heaven when I die"? Is your heart racing? If so, then you are beginning to understand theosis. This understanding of our purpose as believers is not just Orthodox, it is completely biblical.

In fact, the Holy Apostle Paul directly correlates becoming an adopted son of God with immortality in the eighth chapter of his epistle to the Romans. Therefore, to be an adopted heir of God means to be a joint heir with Christ and conform to His image. A key idea of ​​theosis is that people flourish and best fulfill their created potential when they draw close to God.

We began with a somewhat startling quote from St. Athanasius: "God became man so that man might become god." Keep in mind that this is the same Athanasius who defended the orthodox (in his common sense correct) understanding of the full divinity of Christ as opposed to the Arian heresy. Many other early Church Fathers made similar statements. Gregory of Nazianzus, another great champion of the correct views of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, said: "Man was commanded to become a god." His close friend, Basil the Great, said: "From the Holy Spirit is the likeness of God and the highest thing one can wish for is to become a god."

Origen noted that the spirit "adores what it contemplates." And Cyril of Alexandria commented that we are all called to participate in the divinity, becoming the likeness of Christ and the image of the Father through "participation." Irenaeus noted: "If the Word became a man, it was so that man could become a god." Finally, John of Damascus taught that the redemptive work of Christ allows us to restore the image of God so that we become "partakers of the divinity." Not only the Fathers of the Eastern Church are quoted. Most, if not all, are recognized by East and West.

Theosis is a truly Catholic understanding of the purpose of our relationship with God "through Christ, with Christ, and in Christ." For the Orthodox, the main means by which the Holy Spirit acts, bestowing grace and deifying people, are church sacraments (first of all, confession and communion) and human efforts. Repentance is the ongoing act by which a person returns to that life after he or she has left it because of sin. The Eucharist is the highest means of deification, since it is a sacrament through which people become the body of Christ, realizing their unity with the Head of the Church. The Orthodox emphasize the connection between the words of Jesus at the Last Supper, that the Eucharistic bread is His body, and the words of Paul, that believers are the body of Christ. They claim that through the Eucharist, consuming the bread that is the body of Christ, individual Christians become the body of Christ, the Church. Thus through the Eucharist we achieve union with Christ or deification.

The purpose of humanity is to be deified, and the church exists primarily to perform the sacraments. Therefore, it is logical that the church, through the sacraments, is the means by which the Holy Spirit conveys deification to people. Accordingly, the Orthodox concepts of church and deification are closely interdependent, and the Eastern emphasis on the church as a means of salvation grows out of this interrelationship of ideas.

In other words, believers do not become members of the Trinity, that is, they do not become God by nature. So, while theosis depicts the reality of the stage of salvation, it is a metaphor in that believers are accepted as gods by grace alone. Furthermore, it is through this adoption that believers are literally transformed into the image of Christ.

Hieromonk Feofan (Skorobagatov) of Polotsk,

doctor of theological sciences.