Food for Thought
Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to
him, “Abba, as far as I can, I say my little
office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in
peace and I purify my thoughts. What else can
I do? ”
Then the old man stood up and stretched his
hands towards heaven. His fingers became
like ten lamps of fire and he said to him,
“If you will you can become all flame!”
---Joseph of Panephysis
Theophanes the Greek, late 14th
c. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
The Doctrine of Deification
in the Greek Fathers
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Biblical roots.
Deification and Christology.
Dimensions of deification.
Objections to the idea of
deification.
Deification outside Eastern
Christianity.
2 Pet. 1: 3-4.
“His divine power has given us everything
needed for life and godliness, through the
knowledge of him who called us by his
own glory and goodness. Thus he has
given us through these things, his
precious and very great promises, so that
through them you may escape from the
corruption that is in the world because of
lust, and may become participants of the
divine nature.”
Related biblical themes
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“I have said you are gods and sons of the Most High.”
(Ps. 82: 6).
Transfiguration (Mk 9:2-8 and par.) & OT theophanies.
“I came that they may have life and have it
abundantly.” John 10: 10.
“I am the way, the truth, and the life.” John 14: 6.
Pauline themes: salvation as incorporation into and
union with Christ (e.g., Rom. 6); acquisition of the
mind of Christ (1Cor 2: 16; Phil. 2: 5-8).
Terminology
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6.
Koinonia theou (fellowship, communion)
with God.
Metousia theou (participation in God).
Mimesis (imitation) of God.
Theopoiesis (lit.: “becoming divine”).
Theosis.
Apotheosis (problematic term).
Non-Christian use
Divinization (apotheosis)
of the Emperor or his
relatives.
 Plotinus: realization of
the essential self; soul is
divine by nature.

Apotheosis of Hadrian’s wife
Sabina.
Exchange formula:

Christ was rich, “yet for your sake he became
poor, so that by his poverty you might become
rich.” 2 Cor 8: 9.

“Because of his infinite love [God] became what
we are in order to make us what he is himself.”
– Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 5. Praef.

“He became human in order that we might
become divine.”
– Athanasius, De incarnatione, 54.
Irenaeus:
Recapitulation & Education
“Man was a little one and his discretion
underdeveloped. Wherefore he was easily
mislead by the deceiver.” (Proof, 12)
 As mediator, Christ accommodates God to
humans and accustoms men to receiving
God. Adv. Haer. 3. 18. 7.

Athanasius: deification requires the
Son’s full divinity

“For it is not possible that he who merely
possesses from participation should impart
of that partaking to others, since what he
has is not his own but the Giver’s; and
what he has received is barely the grace
sufficient for himself.” De synodis, 51.
Cyril: deification as appropriation

“For unless He [Christ] had been afraid,
human nature could not have become free
from cowardice; unless He had experienced
grief would never have been any deliverance
from grief; unless He had been troubled and
alarmed, no escape from these feelings could
have been found. And with regard to every
human experience, you will find exactly the
corresponding thing in Christ. The passions of
his flesh were aroused, not that they might
have the upper hand as they do in us, but in
order that when aroused they might be
thoroughly subdued by the power of the Word
dwelling in the flesh, the nature thus
undergoing a change for the better.”
– Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel
of John, 8.
Dimensions of deification
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Deliverance, spiritual battle, liberation from the power
of the demonic.
Purification, forgiveness, justification.
Filial adoption.
Reconciliation, communion.
Healing.
Illumination, perfection, transfiguration, regeneration,
(entire) sanctification.
Imitation of Christ, incorporation into Christ.
Second creation, regeneration, restoration of the image
and likeness of God.
Election.
Participation in the life of God, in divine energies.
Appropriation of D. by believers:
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Faith: direction of the will, acceptance of
revelation, right belief, trust.
Ascetic practices and charitable works.
Participation in the sacraments.
Spiritual senses.
Eucharistic dimension

“[The Word] enables us to participate in divine
life by making himself our food, in a manner
understood by himself and by those who have
received from him a noetic perception of this
kind. It is by tasting this food that they become
truly aware that “the Lord is good” (Ps. 34: 8),
for he transmutes those who eat it with a divine
quality, bringing about their deification (theosis)
since it is clearly the bread of life and of power
both in name and in reality.”
– Maximus the Confessor, Or. Dom. 2, 877C.
Deification as the main goal of
human life

“Because [God] is truthful he will give us
everything that he has promised. This is ‘what
no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of
man conceived, what God has prepared for
those who love him’ (1 Cor 2: 9). For that is also
why he made us, that we might ‘become
partakers of the divine nature’ and sharers in his
eternity and prove to be like him through the
deification bestowed by grace.”
--Maximus the Confessor (7th c.), Ep. 24.
Spiritual Senses
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Terminological problems.
Relation to the five ordinary senses:
separation or extension?
Relation to mind and heart.
Relation to the senses of scripture.
Spiritual senses and religious experience.
Spiritual senses lost in the Fall:
As a result of the fall, “instead of the divine and spiritual
knowledge [Adam] received fleshly knowledge. Since he
had been blinded in the eyes of his soul and had fallen
from the life imperishable, he began to look with his
physical eyes. He turned the vision of his eyes on visible
objects with a feeling of passion… Such knowledge is in
reality ignorance of all goodness, for had he not first
fallen from the knowledge and contemplation of God he
would not have been brought down to this knowledge.”
--Symeon the New Theologian, Discourses XV. 1.
Criticism of deification
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Deification is not biblical.
Deification is a pagan idea imported into
Christianity by the Greeks.
Deification is physical/ material, not
moral/ juridical.
Deification is impossible.
An account of deification
recently found in…Aquinas
And in…Luther (wow!)
And in…Calvin (wow! wow!)
And, yes, in Wesley too!
Book needed!!!