Since all God’s divine power has been given to us, the power of life and godly living, through knowing the one who called us by [or “to”] his own glory and virtue [and] through which we have been given weighty and majestic promises that through these you may become participants in the nature of divinity, having escaped the cosmic corruption fed by desire. 2 Peter 1:3-4
He became human so that we might be made divine. (Αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐνηνθρώπησεν, ἵνα ἡμεῖς θεοποιηθῶμεν) Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation, 54
Theosis “participation in the divine nature.” I was never taught this. Perhaps that is not entirely true. Perhaps the fault was not in the teaching but in the learning, not the fault of my teachers but of my grasp of what they were teaching. In any case, I was taught or I learned dogma instead, a cardboard outline of things divine and human, but not theology and certainly not theosis.
Dogma is rather like the sort of English grammar you and I were taught in grade school. The grammar we learned was mostly the imposition of rules on language—where to place commas, what to capitalize and what not to capitalize, making sure that the verb agrees with the subject, and so forth. Good rules mostly, but you can observe all the rules and not be able to write a good English paragraph.
In the same way, dogma is the rules. These rules are imposed by whatever church body or tradition you belong to. You were taught how to talk God. Say this and not that, you were told. And often these are, within the context of a tradition, good rules. But learning them is not theology.
Theology requires something more. Theology is like writing a good English paragraph, except in this case, one is not writing a paragraph but writing a life. Theology is not just statements about God—a collection of opinions and findings and rules—but engagement with God. And if engagement with God, then engagement with life and with what it means to be human. Or, better, how to be human. Good theology is life well lived.
Which brings us back to that strange word with which I began: theosis. It means “becoming divine.” Theosis is what the author of 2 Peter is talking about in the verses quoted above: “participation in the divine nature.” And what Athanasius, the great 4th century theologian, called “being made divine.” It’s a theme of the early church going back at least to Irenaeus, 2nd century and arguably the first theologian of the church. He said of Christ that “through his transcendent love [he] became what we are, that he might make us to be what he is” (James R. Payton Jr, Irenaeus on the Christian Faith: A Condensation of Against Heresies, p. 156).
I’ll have more to say about theosis presently, but before we look at what theosis is, perhaps we should look at what theosis does. Theosis is about salvation. I use that word, “salvation,” guardedly. “Salvation” has come to mean for many Christians what happens after death. It has little to do with life as we know it, which is why Christians can (and about 80% of evangelicals do) vote for policies that show little regard for the earth, for animals, or for the poor, contrary to what the Bible teaches. Their view of salvation is essentially getting out of here, here being life on earth. And making sure that no one gets in your way while you still are here. “Salvation” is in this way of thinking playing the pardon card. If God doesn’t care, why should I?
But what if God does care? And what if God cares not just about a few Christians in their churches but about all creation? What if God cares about lions and lambs, as Isaiah 11 has it, about cows and bears, about cobras and little children, about all creation? And what if salvation has to do not with getting out of here but learning how to live here in ways that are wise and loving and joyful? What would salvation look like then?
The answer would be theosis. Theosis is deeply rooted in trinitarian theology. In trinitarian theology—that great project of the early church, culminating in the councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon—God exists in as eternal call and response. The Father calls, and the Son responds, and the joy of the conversation spills over as Spirit. God is never alone. God is relationship. God is love.
God knows God’s own self as if in a mirror. The Father knows what it is to be the Father in relationship to the Son, and the Son knows what it is to be the Son in relationship to the Father. And the love between them is the Spirit.
Creation itself is the product—the overflow—of this love of God. God calls, and creation answers—creation, fragile, contingent, time-bound, entropic. And we humans are part of that creation. Not just part of it, but as Genesis 1 has it, we are in some sense its soul. We give creation—at least the part of it we know—its voice. Creation is at once atoms and molecules, chemistry and biology, and, at the same time, word of God. Logos. Creation is nothing without this relationship. Without a relationship to the eternal, time means nothing. Life means nothing. Death means nothing.
And this is precisely what life on earth threatens to become—to become just biology. It’s what the author of 1 Peter is talking about, “escape” from the corruption that would make us less than what we are. Not just as individuals, but as a human race. No, not just as humans, but as all creation. We have become estranged from that which we most truly are. We have become estranged from that which makes us human. And sadly, the Christian movement has fed this estrangement, not assuaged it.
We have lost the message. The message is that God has in Jesus, the Christ, stepped onto this side of creation, and so the call and response, the back and forth, between Father and Son now includes creation, includes flesh, includes us. It’s what Jesus says in John 14, a passage fundamental to this way of thinking: “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them” (John 14:20-21). It goes on. The love that is God now includes us. It’s as if the Trinity were opened, and we stepped in, in the relationship among Father, Son, and Spirit.
And or we may step in. As 2 Peter 1 has it, in the promise of the gospel, We “may become participants in the divine nature.” Theosis. We may discover who we are as human beings, as a human race, and find the power to be reborn if we step into this relationship. Or we may not. And tragically, we often choose the latter.
Always at the edge of this theology is the picture of the human race first offered in Genesis 2:7. In that passage, Yhwh God forms a human figure out of the dust of the earth. The dust is all that we are biologically and chemically. But if there is only the dust, only atoms and molecules, we have not yet become human. And then Yhwh God leans over the human figure, named “Adam,” which in Hebrew means, “Humanity,” and breathes into their nostrils, and they come alive. In the Hebrew way of thinking this is not God delivering an immortal soul to a soulless creature. No, it’s God establishing a relationship with humanity, waking us up, as it were, so that we recognize that we are not only atoms and molecules but relationship, that what makes us who we are is love.
And now in Jesus we have been offered that relationship anew. We breathe the Spirit of Christ (see John 20:22), and in breathing Christ, we are awakened to a relationship with the eternal in which we are both fully human and, in that entirely new way, also divine. Theosis.
This is not salvation as an escape from the world, but a reestablishment of the relationship for which we were created. And in reestablishing this relationship, we become, in Paul’s phrase, the “first fruit of a new creation.” We begin anew to try to find the wisdom to live wisely with each other and with all the rest of creation.
This is by no means easy. This is not a salvation that requires only that one say the right things in church. It’s salvation as a fundamental life orientation (or reorientation). What it requires above all is listening, listening for the voice of the one who calls us “out of darkness into light.” It requires humility, listening not only to our own voices but to the voices of the other, for in the other we hear the voice of God. Learning to listen together.
As I said in the beginning, theosis is not about getting the rules right for whatever theological grammar you learned. It’s about learning to live theotically, if I can coin a word. It’s a practice as much as a way of thinking. What matters are not the rules (Paul said this) but the life.
Clay (Advent 2024)