“You Are Divine Beings”
July 14, based on Psalm 82
The psalm is about the need for judges to be just. Verse six is very startling when it
that speaks of “gods” or “divine beings.” The word is elohim. Centuries before Jesus,
when the psalm was composed, this could mean either “an assembly of gods” or a
council of divine beings. Of course, neither Jesus nor any first century Jew would think
of an assembly of gods. They would see it as a council of angels or other high spiritual
assistants of God. What is surprising is that humans are equated this council of heavenly
beings, and are called to be as just as God’s council is.
God shows us how it’s done, but you humans are not following suit. God is
disappointed with human judges who are unfair. Verse 3 gives expression to the correct
and just attitude, defending the weak and powerless. Judges are meant to act in
accordance with divine qualities. We have the ability to imitate God, even though we are
mortal. This is a huge mystery: we will die, yet we carry a spark of divinity, enough to
reflect God’s nature. The human judges are really divine beings (verse six), yet they will
die, as all mortals do (verse 7).
This is one of the passages used by almost all of the early church fathers to talk
about the deification or divinization of believers. This has been the Christian doctrine
most neglected by the Western Churches, although it is getting a lot of attention lately.
It was not neglected by John Wesley, who used the terms “Christian perfection”
and “entire sanctification” for this process, and had arguments with his brother about it,
defending the biblical doctrine that this perfecting or transforming starts happening in
this lifetime, whereas Charles saw it happening “at the threshold of death or in the next
life” (Michael J. Christensen, “John Wesley: Christian Perfection as Faith Filled with the
Energy of Love,” in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of
Deification in the Christian Traditions [eds. M. J. Christensen and J. A. Wittung; Baker
Academic, 2007], 225). Both brothers believed that some of “the holiness of God” was
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“actually imparted” to the believer in this lifetime (Christensen, “John Wesley,” 220). So
in the Methodist tradition we talk about Christian perfection, but that doctrine is directly
derived from “the more ancient doctrines of deification as taught by theologians in the
Greek [patristic] tradition of the first four centuries” (Christensen, 223).
We have to remember that the Greek fathers read the New Testament and the
Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures in their native language. Their word theos had
a broader meaning than our word “god.” It could refer to any divine being, including
humans who have been made divine. To be made immortal is to be made divine. So the
best translation of Ps 82:6 is “You are divine beings, children of the Most High, all
of you.” The second part explains the first part. The divine beings are we humans—
children of the Most High.
The Greek fathers understood the reference to divine beings in Psalm 82 to be a
prophecy of the process of believer transformation that would come to be described most
fully by the Apostle Paul, the process by which believers are reshaped, “conformed” to
the divine image (Phil 3:21; Rom 8:29), [re–]“created according to the likeness of God”
(Eph 4:24). This psalm shows what God’s intentions for humanity are. Humanity is
supposed to show forth divine qualities.
The Greek fathers used Psalm 82 and a couple of other Old Testament passages,
along with about twenty New Testament passages, to speak of believers being
transformed by God, and becoming like God by grace, not by their own power, but by
the divine power operating upon them. Of course, for any ordinary Christian, “like God”
has a restricted meaning; it does not mean becoming infinite or all-knowing, nor taking
on the essence of God, but just taking on some of the “energies” or qualities of God.
This doctrine is now referred to by the name theōsis, a term that originated in the 4th
century. Theōsis was an central teaching for the first 600 years of the church, and
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remained important in many traditions since then, but has been suppressed by the
Western Christianity in favor of a focus upon sin and an alleged payment for sin.
But the emphasis is clearly not on sin, but on transformation, in passages from all
parts of the New Testament, starting with Jesus: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly
Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48); “You may become participants of the divine nature” (2
Pet 1:4); “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom 8:29); “All of us, with
unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being
transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor 3:18).
These last two sayings, by Paul, indicate that we are being transformed actually into the
image of Christ, who himself is the image of God.
All of this transformative theology comes from New Testament teaching and
Christian experience, and is not present in the original psalm. We are capable of being
immortalized. And this seems to be the way Jesus uses it, when he quotes this passage in
John 10. Some Jews challenged Jesus for saying he was the Son of God. He shoots back
“Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If those to whom the word of God
came were called ‘gods’. . . can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and
sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’?” (John 10:34-36).
Jesus is connecting (limited) divinity to the humans who received the law of God at
Mount Sinai. He is using a lesser-to-greater argument, saying if even those to whom God
gave the law could be called divine, how much more can he, who was actually sent by
God be called divine, be called “Son of God”? He is affirming that he and ordinary
humans both have divinity, but that he has a different level of divinity.
Our divine sonship comes from Jesus: “To all who received him . . . he gave power
to become children of God” (John 1:12). Jesus is the pioneer, leading the way: “where I
am, there you may be also” (John 14:3). Divinization is not in any way independent of
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Christ; it follows from Christ. Paul is the author who spells this out most clearly: “in
Christ you are all children of God . . . . no longer a slave but a child” (Gal 3:26; 4:7).
Theōsis is not separable from Christology. The church fathers said it is that it is
because the divine Word came into flesh, that mortals can be deified (see articles in
Theōsis: Deification in Christian Theology, edited by S. Finlan and V. Kharlamov; Wipf
and Stock, 2006). Believer divinization is a by-product of Christ’s pre-existing divinity,
and of his bringing that divinity into a human body, a human life in our world.
It is the Creator identity of Jesus, and his bringing of eternal life to us, that save us.
Further, it is the whole Incarnation of Jesus, not just his death, that saves us. Many of
you know that I have issues with standard atonement theologies that focus on the death
of Jesus. The death of Jesus is important because it was a part of his life, but it was his
whole life that revealed God. Jesus is the revelation of God. That is the message of
salvation throughout the New Testament. There are some passages that link salvation
only to the death of Jesus, but the more comprehensive understanding sees the divinity in
his whole life. Salvation is derived from the loving intention of God, the Creator power
of Jesus, and the Incarnation of the divine Son in a human life. The revelation is his
whole person and his whole life.
As Irenaeus wrote, “Out of his measureless love our Lord Jesus Christ has become
what we are in order to make us what he is” (Adversus Haeresis [Against Heresies]
5.preface). This means we take on some divine qualities, we reflect Jesus’ character. It
does not mean that we literally become a god, or that we become Christ or God. But we
do face the amazing prospect of being made, in a small way, Godlike.