Theosis: The Reason for the Season | Carl E. Olson | December 30, 2008 | Ignatius Insight
Theosis: The Reason for the Season | Carl E. Olson | December 30, 2008 | Ignatius Insight
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2008/colson_theosis_dec08.asp
"The Cross of Christ on
Calvary stands beside the path of that admirable commercium, of that wonderful
self-communication of God to man, which also includes the call to man to share
in the divine life by giving himself, and with himself the whole visible world,
to God, and like an adopted son to become a sharer in the truth and love which
is in God and proceeds from God. It is precisely besides the path of man's eternal
election to the dignity of being an adopted child of God that there stands in
history the Cross of Christ, the only-begotten Son..." — Pope John Paul II, Dives in Misericordia, 7.5.
"Love of God and love of
neighbour are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live
from the love of God who has loved us first. No longer is it a question, then,
of a 'commandment' imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but
rather of a freely-bestowed experience of love from within, a love which by its
very nature must then be shared with others. Love grows through love. Love is
'divine' because it comes from God and unites us to God; through this unifying
process it makes us a 'we' which transcends our divisions and makes us one,
until in the end God is 'all in all' (1 Cor 15:28)." —Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 18.
I.
What, really, is the point of Christmas? Why did God become man?
The Catechism of the
Catholic Church, in a section
titled, "Why did the Word become flesh?" (pars 456-460) provides several
complimentary answers: to save us, to show us God's love, and to be a model of
holiness. And then, in what I think must be, for many readers, the most
surprising and puzzling paragraph in the entire Catechism, there is this:
The
Word became flesh to make us "partakers of the divine nature":
"For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of
man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving
divine sonship, might become a son of God." "For the Son of God
became man so that we might become God." "The only-begotten Son of
God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that
he, made man, might make men gods." (par 460)
So that "we might become
God"? Surely, a few might think, this is some sort of pantheistic slip of the
theological pen, or perhaps a case of good-intentioned but poorly expressed
hyperbole. But, of course, it is not. First, whatever problems there might have
been in translating the Catechism
into English, they had nothing to do with this paragraph. Secondly, the first
sentence is from 2 Peter 1:4, and the three subsequent quotes are from,
respectively, St. Irenaeus, St. Athanasius, and (gasp!) St. Thomas Aquinas.
Finally, there is also the fact that this language of divine sonship—or theosis, also known as deification—is found through
the entire Catechism. A couple
more representative examples:
Justification
consists in both victory over the death caused by sin and a new participation
in grace. It brings about filial adoption so that men become Christ's brethren,
as Jesus himself called his disciples after his Resurrection: "Go and tell
my brethren." We are brethren not by nature, but by the gift of grace,
because that adoptive filiation gains us a real share in the life of the only
Son, which was fully revealed in his Resurrection. (par 654)
Our justification comes from the grace of God.
Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to
his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine
nature and of eternal life. (par 1996)
Filial adoption, in making us partakers by grace in the divine nature, can bestow true
merit on us as a result of God's gratuitous justice. This is our right by
grace, the full right of love, making us "co-heirs" with Christ and
worthy of obtaining "the promised inheritance of eternal life." The
merits of our good works are gifts of the divine goodness. "Grace has gone
before us; now we are given what is due.... Our merits are God's gifts."
(par 2009)
The very first paragraph of
the Catechism, in fact, asserts
that God sent his Son so that in him "and through
him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and
thus heirs of his blessed life." God did not become man, in other words,
to just be our friend, but so that we could truly and really, by grace, become
members of his family, the Church. Christmas is the celebration of God becoming
man, but it is also the proclamation that man is now able to be filled with and
to share in God's own Trinitarian life.
II.
Several years ago I wrote a short article about
theosis in which I stated the following:
This doctrine of divinization reverberated dramatically within my heart and mind. As
an evangelical Protestant I had not questioned the doctrines of the Trinity or
the Incarnation, but neither had I really seriously contemplated the dynamic
between mankind and these two greatest mysteries of the Christian Faith. They
were facts and truths, but were not, for me personally, the object of prolonged
scrutiny. In a real sense, I had not grasped what this data meant for me beyond
believing (rightly so) that God loved me and became man. My mental assent to
these facts was undeniable, but there remained a rather static and frozen
quality to my intellectual and spiritual life as a Christian.
About
this same time I also began reading Karl Adam's classic The Spirit of
Catholicism, in which he writes that
"the Church . . . cannot be contented with developing any mere humanity, or
perfection of humanity. This is not the object of her work. On the contrary her
ideal is to supernaturalize men, to make them like God." He also notes that
"the central fact of the glad tidings of Christianity" is that man is called to
"participation in the divine life itself." This was stunning language. It
seemed so bold and grand, almost a bit arrogant––wasn't this giving
too much credit to man? On the contrary, I soon realized that for so long I had
giving far too little credit to the Triune God. But didn't it fly in the face
of Scripture, which pointed to our unworthiness before the holiness of God?
No, it showed how great of salvation we have been called to receive, "For by
these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, in order that
by them you might become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the
corruption that is in the world by lust" (2 Peter 1:4)
What I soon discovered, in
the course of entering the Catholic Church on Easter Vigil, 1997, is that this
language and this manner of contemplating salvation is downright foreign to
many Catholics. It is disturbing for some and puzzling to others. For me, it
made sense of so many passages of Scripture that I had, as an Evangelical,
either passed over uneasily or interpreted as being somehow metaphorical or
poetic in nature:
See how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we
should be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world
does not know us, because it did not know Him. (1 Jn 3:1)
For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the
revealing of the sons of God. (Rom 8:19)
Well, yes, I thought: of course we are "called"
children of God. After all, God loves us and he sent his Son to die for us; in
addition, we know that "the one who abides in love abides in God, and God
abides in him" (1 Jn 4:16). But it was all rather hazy. What I knew with most
certainly was what I was saved from:
sin and death. What I was saved for,
strangely enough, was not nearly as clear. To be good, certainly. To do the
right thing, yes. But, frankly, there was something missing in the rather
standard Evangelical message of salvation I knew so well.
III.
These somewhat random remarks are inspired, in
part, by a November 9, 2008, article in Christianity Today. "Keeping the End in
View" was written
by James R. Payton, Jr., a professor of history at Redeemer University College
in Ancaster, Ontario, and author of Light From the Christian East: An
Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition
(IVP, 2007). On one hand, Payton's article is an interesting and often helpful
introduction for Evangelicals to "the strange yet familiar doctrine of
theosis." He puts his finger squarely on the problem I grappled with many years
ago:
Sometimes,
though, the way we talk about salvation makes it sound like little more than a
get-out-of-hell-free card. With our emphasis on what sinners like ourselves are
saved from, do we know what we are saved for? Is salvation solely about us and
our need to be forgiven and born again, or is there a deeper, God-ward purpose?
He then quotes from Against
Heresies by St. Irenaeus—the
same quote found in paragraph 460 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Later, he writes, "In his mercy, God promised
salvation through a deliverer, but for Eastern Orthodoxy, salvation is less
about rescue (though it is about that) and more about return. Christ rescues us
from our enemies and redeems us to God, so that we get back on the right track
to becoming like him." He quotes an Orthodox leader who sums up theosis succinctly: "We become by grace what God is by
nature."
This is all well and good. But it was curious
to me that no mention was made of the Catholic Church. Nor of any sort of ecclesiology,
or the nature of grace, or of the sacraments, all of which are essential to a
full and balanced understanding of theosis. Perhaps brevity was the problem as Payton does take up those issues in
his book.
IV.
Unfortunately, although Light from the Christian East contains much good material, it suffers from a generalized and often unfairly negative view of
"Western Christianity," which apparently refers to everything from "Roman
Catholicism" to Calvinism to fundamentalism. Payton never acknowledges the existence of the many Eastern Catholic
Churches and seems unfamiliar with substantial elements of Catholic theology. Sadly, it seems that for Payton nearly anything
having to do with the West or Rome is lacking, deficient, or simply wrong.
He claims that "for all their admitted
differences from each other, especially the divide between Roman Catholicism
and Protestantism ... [Western Christians] nevertheless approach issues from the
same mindset, asking the same kinds of questions and coming up with the same
kinds of answers." This is remarkable enough on its own, but he then adds: "In
the first place, for all the differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants
about how a person can be acceptable to God, both approach the question as
basically a legal matter—that of a person standing before God in a divine
court of law. Both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism look on this issue as
the ultimate question with regard to a person's relationship with God."
If such were the case, however, it would be
difficult to understand why the Council of Trent focused so intently on the
nature and purpose of justification. In other words, put bluntly, if Luther,
Calvin, and Co. were correct in saying that justification was indeed juridical
and external in nature, why did the Catholic Church so strongly denounce their
teachings? If the courtroom is the final model for a Catholic view of justification, why did the Council of Trent
use the language of divine sonship and adoption?
By
which words, a description of the Justification of the impious is indicated, as
being a translation, from that state wherein man is born a child of the first
Adam, to the state of grace, and of the adoption of the sons of God, through
the second Adam, Jesus Christ, our Saviour. And this translation, since the
promulgation of the Gospel, cannot be effected, without the laver of
regeneration, or the desire thereof, as it is written; unless a man be born
again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.
(Canon 6, ch. IV).
Whereas classical
Protestantism taught that justification is a legal, or forensic, term that
indicates man is considered righteous in the eyes of God because of Christ's
imputed righteousness, the Council of Trent asserted that justification is the
actual translation of man from a state of sin to a state of grace, through the
person of Jesus Christ and the sacrament of baptism. "In point of fact," wrote Robert W. Gleason, S.J., in his 1962 study, Grace, "it was this very idea of extrinsic justification
that lay at the heart of all the Reformers' negations, and this the council decisively
rejected, maintaining that man is justified by a justice which is proper and
interior to each one, poured into his soul by the Holy Spirit. ... Justification
is not only a genuine remission of sins but a profound interior transformation
of man by which he is enriched with the presence of the indwelling God, becomes
intrinsically just, a friend and son of God, and the heir to eternal life"
(Sheed & Ward, pp. 214, 216).
V.
Differences in language, culture, philosophical
influences, and theological emphases resulted in distinctions between
Catholicism and Orthodoxy when it came to articulating and expressing beliefs
about salvation. "This is a distinction not of opposition," Gleason observed,
"but of emphasis only, based on a different philosophical orientation" (p.
223). The bottom line is that theosis was not ignored in the West, even if it was sometimes obscured, as A.
N. Williams explained in an exceptional article, "Deification in the Summa
theologiae: A Structural Interpretation of the Prima Pars", published in 1997 in The Thomist:
As Western theology became more systematic in its structure, more propositional in
its form, it tended to lose sight of earlier forms of theological exposition.
Deification, even in its patristic form, has become virtually invisible to the
eyes of modern Westerners because instead of defining deification, or providing
a phenomenological description of the deified, the Fathers use a set of
cognates for deification that forms a quasi-technical vocabulary. Three of these
terms--participation, union, and adoption--function as virtual synonyms for
deification. Others, like grace, virtue, and knowledge, denote means or loci of
growth in sanctity that are common to all Christian doctrines of
sanctification. Another group, light, contemplation, glory, and vision, are
found in medieval and modern Western theologies, but tend to be appropriated
either to sanctification (light and contemplation) or consummation (glory and
vision), rather than denoting the unity of the two, as they do in a doctrine of
deification. The status of this last group becomes further complicated by their
use in the West primarily within the tradition of mystical and ascetical
theology, a position that leaves them largely ignored by modern theologians.
Deification, Williams notes,
was the "dominant model of salvation and sanctification in the patristic
period, from Ignatius of Antioch to John Damascene, in the West (in the
writings of Tertullian and Augustine) as well as in the East." While an
interest in and emphasis on the doctrine of deification, or theosis, did decline in the West, Williams argues that the
"conventional wisdom" that this decline took place in the Middle Age is
mistaken:
Indeed, the doctrine of deification pervades the Summa. If Western readers have failed to notice it, we may
conjecture they have done so for two reasons. The first is that it is precisely
pervasive and not localized: one finds no question "Whether Human Persons
Are Deified?" in the pages of the Summa. Second, Western readers may be unable to see the
doctrine simply because they are unfamiliar with it. Because this model of
sanctification has been absent from Western theology for so long, Western
readers do not recognize either the paradigmatic structure of the doctrine or
the language that traditionally conveys it.
Fast forward from St. Thomas
a few centuries to the work of Fr. Matthias J. Scheeben (1835-1888), considered
one of the finest German Catholic theologians of the nineteenth century. The Catholic
Encyclopedia summarily states,
"Scheeben was a mystic." It can fairly said that his book, The Mysteries of
Christianity (B. Herder Book Co.,
1946, 1964; originally published in German in 1865), originally written when
Scheeben was only thirty years old, is a profound examination of the realities
of deification, adoptive sonship, and grace, especially in relation to the
Trinity, the Incarnation, the Church, and the sacraments. It reflects
Scheeben's unique combination of prayerful prose, keen knowledge of patristics,
and deep love for St. Thomas. In his chapter on "The Real Presence," Scheeben
wrote:
Our
substantial union with the God-man is an image of the substantial unity between
the Son and the Father. Thus our participation in the divine nature and divine
life becomes a reproduction of the fellowship in nature and life which the Son
of God has with His Father, as their supreme, substantial oneness requires. ...
We must be overwhelmed with the fullness of the Godhead; we must be deified. We
must share in the glory that the Son has received from the Father; and this is
what really takes place through sanctifying grace and the glory in which it
culminates. And if the Fathers indicate the deification of man as the goal of
the incarnation of God's Son, this must be true in fullest measure with regard
to the Eucharist as the continuation of the Incarnation. (pp. 481, 487-88)
In a similar way, the French
theologian Fr. ƒmile Mersch (1890-1940) situated the doctrine of adoptive
sonship within the context of ecclesiology. In The Theology of the Mystical
Body (B. Herder Book Co., 1952; originally published in French c. 1940), Fr. Mersch drew heavily upon the early
Church Fathers, writing:
The Word is united to us in order to unite us to Him and to transform us into what
He is, that is, to make us sons of God, not by nature, like Him, but by grace;
to stamp us with His form and character of Son. Thus through One, He has taken
up His abode in us all. ... This is the great Christian truth: the Son was made
man that in Him and through Him, men might be adopted as sons. By our
participation in the only-begotten Son we become adopted sons, truly and
"physically." This shows clearly that He is the Son in the full sense of the
term, that is, by nature. ... As the Fathers repeat so often, we become by grace
what Christ is by nature. Christ is the Son by nature, and He is God because He
is the Son. The grace we receive ought to make us sons, that is, adopted sons,
who are divinized because we are adopted. Our divinization comes from our
adoption, and our adoption is no less sublime than our divinization; the
excellence of both is derived from that of the sonship of God the Son. ... Thus
we men, who used to be afar off, have been made to come near; (172) (Cf. Eph.
2:13.) we who were strangers and outsiders have been brought inside and
welcomed as members of the family. (173) (Cf. ibid., 2:19). Such is the superabundant riches of God's
grace that is given to us in the bountiful generosity He has toward us in
Christ Jesus. (174) (Ibid., 2:7.)
He has made us His own beloved children (175) (Ibid., 5:1) by sanctifying us in His well-beloved Son.
(176) (Ibid., 1:6.) (pp. 347-8,
372, 374)
Finally, the noted Swiss
theologian, Cardinal Charles Journet (1891-1975), penned a popular-level book
(with "study-club questions"!), The Meaning of Grace (Deus Books, 1962), in which he wrote:
Jesus is Son 'by nature,' he possesses necessarily the divine nature, by reason of
the identity of his being and nature with the being and nature of the Father.
We are sons of God 'by adoption,' we possess the divine nature by a free effect
of the divine goodness, by a finite participation in the being and infinite
nature of God. Jesus is Son of the Father by eternal generation; we are sons of
the three Persons of the Trinity by creation and adoption.
VI.
Theosis, deification, and adoptive sonship have received
much attention in recent decades from Catholic theologians and scholars. Ressourcement theologians such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, Yves
Congar, Henri de Lubac, and Jean DaniŽlou addressed them in a variety of books
and articles. Recent books such as Divine Light: The Theology of Denys the
Areopagite, by Dr. William Riordan,
and Deification And Grace by
Daniel Keating are scholarly studies worthy of attention.
Pope John Paul II's
Trinitarian encyclicals—Redemptor Hominis, Dives in Misericordia and Dominum et Vivificantem—often emphasized divine adoption:
For
as Saint Paul teaches, "all who are led by the Spirit of God" are
"children of God." The filiation of divine adoption is born in man on
the basis of the mystery of the Incarnation, therefore through Christ the
eternal Son. But the birth, or rebirth, happens when God the Father "sends
the Spirit of his Son into our hearts." Then we receive a spirit of
adopted sons by which we cry 'Abba, Father!'" Hence the divine filiation
planted in the human soul through sanctifying grace is the work of the Holy
Spirit. "It is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we
are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs
with Christ." Sanctifying grace is the principle and source of man's new
life: divine, supernatural life. (Dives in Misericordia, 52.2).
Coming full circle, the Catechism
of the Catholic Church refers time
and time again to the reality of theosis. "God created the world for the sake of
communion with his divine life," it states, "a communion brought about by the
'convocation' of men in Christ, and this 'convocation' is the Church" (par
760). Through the sacraments we are made "children of God, partakers of
the divine nature" (par 1692). The foundation of the
moral life, the living out of the Christian calling, is found in the
theological virtues: faith, hope and love, infused by the Holy Spirit. Those
theological virtues "adapt man's faculties for participation in the divine
nature" (par 1812). Our prayer to and adoration of the Father is rooted in
divine adoption, for "he has caused us to be reborn to his life by adopting us
as his children in his only Son" (par 2782).
It is fitting,
in speaking of the Catechism and the "reason for the season," to end with this quote, which
aptly and beautifully summarizes much of which has been haphazardly presented
here:
To become a child in relation to God is the condition for entering
the kingdom. For this, we must humble ourselves and become little. Even more:
to become "children of God" we must be "born from above" or
"born of God". Only when Christ is formed in us will the mystery of
Christmas be fulfilled in us. Christmas is the mystery of this "marvellous
exchange": "O marvellous exchange! Man's Creator has become man, born of
the Virgin. We have been made sharers in the divinity of Christ who humbled
himself to share our humanity." (par 526)
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles and Book Excerpts:
• The Dignity of the Human Person: Pope John Paul II's Teaching on Divinization in the
Trinitarian Encyclicals | Carl E. Olson
• The Liturgy Lived: The Divinization of Man | Jean Corbon, O.P.
• Jean DaniŽlou and the "Master-Key to Christian Theology" | Carl E. Olson
• Was The Joint Declaration Truly Justified? | An Interview with Dr. Christopher Malloy
• Why Catholicism Makes Protestantism Tick: Louis Bouyer on the Reformation | Mark Brumley
• Are Catholics Born Again? | Mark Brumley
Carl E. Olson is the editor of IgnatiusInsight.com.
He is the co-author of The
Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code and author
of Will
Catholics Be "Left Behind"? He has written for numerous
Cathlic periodicals and is a regular contributor to National Catholic
Register and Our Sunday Visitor newspapers. He has a Masters in Theological Studies from the University of Dallas.
He resides in a top secret location in the Northwest somewhere between Portland,
Oregon and Sacramento, California with his wife, Heather, their two children, two cats, and far too many books and CDs.
Visit his personal web site (now stuck in the middle of a major overhaul) at www.carl-olson.com.
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