Theosis
Next week’s Gottesdienst Conference in Fort Wayne will be spending some time looking at the differences between our confession and that of the Eastern Orthodox (sign up now!). Among the differences, and perhaps near the heart of the differences, is a different perspective on the meaning of theosis.
God became man, that man might be made God. This startling declaration—so startling as to find many Christian theologians rejecting it altogether—is what is called theosis, or deification. St. Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373) is credited with having first made this declaration.[1] There are two differing points of view over its meaning, and the difference is at the heart of what we believe about salvation. Theosis (from the Greek theos, God) has much wider circulation in the Eastern Orthodox Church, among whom it refers to a process of becoming one with God, generally by way of spiritual exercise. For Confessional Lutheranism, by contrast, theosis is not a process at all, but another, beautiful way of looking at what we have received in Christ. The difference is ultimately as simple as the difference between works and faith.
Theosis as a process (which even Wikipedia calls it) is common with the Orthodox, something gained or achieved by asceticism or mortification of oneself. The Orthodox, while on the one hand being careful to reject the idea that theosis is akin to Eastern mysticism such as is seen in Hinduism or pantheism, nevertheless describe theosis as God’s allowing us “to know Him through His divine energies . . . through [which] we achieve union with God.” And this achievement, they say, is “very akin to the Wesleyan understanding of holiness or perfection, with the added element of our mystical union with God in Christ as both the means and the motive for attaining perfection . . . the gradual process by which a person is renewed and unified so completely with God that he becomes by grace what God is by nature.” And the means whereby this happens is “through perfection in holiness, the continuous process of acquiring the Holy Spirit by grace through ascetic devotion. Some Protestants might refer to this process as sanctification.” (http://ww1.antiochian.org/content/theosis-partaking-divine-nature).
But to make of theosis a process is essentially to ruin the Gospel itself, robbing the Gospel of its beauty. To say that we achieve union with God by any activity of our own is to deny that union with God is itself a gift, declared to us as of a reality bestowed upon the Christian and received by faith alone.
The late Kurt Marquart traces brilliantly the unfortunate trend even among prominent Lutheran theologians who have gravitated toward the former view, and how therefore Luther’s own thought on the matter has been lost. Marquart demonstrates how Luther’s theology of the cross squares perfectly with a healthy understanding of theosis or deification, and how “deification does not mean that God and His uncreated light are directly and experientially accessible by means of devotional exercises.”[2] On the contrary, it ought to be seen as another way of looking at the happy exchange between Christ and the sinner: “[T]he happiest exchange of all is that by which the Prince of Righteousness trades places with us paupers of sin—as Luther never tired of proclaiming in ever new and fresh imagery.”[3]
This interpretation plants theosis squarely in the realm of faith. By faith we believe that as Christ has taken upon Himself our sins, so has He also bestowed upon us the full riches of all that pertains to Him; and this includes His divinity itself. This is consistent with what Lutheran theologians call the genus maiestaticum, which means that in the Incarnation, all the attributes of Christ’s divinity have been communicated, or given, to His human nature, since Christ is one Person in two natures. And since by Baptismal regeneration we have received Christ, we have received the whole Christ, including His divinity. But this is not something achieved through spiritual exercise; rather, it is something we believe we have. As the great ascension hymn by Charles Wordsworth puts it,
He has raised our human nature
On the clouds to God’s right hand;
There we sit in heav’nly places,
There with Him in glory stand.
Jesus reigns, adored by angels;
Man with God is on the throne,
By our mighty Lord’s ascension
We by faith behold our own. (Lutheran Service Book, #494)
This belief arises from 2 Peter 1:4, the watershed Biblical reference to theosis, where the Apostle refers to “exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.” Here, there is nothing hinting at a process, or something gained gradually; rather, the language is of gift: “exceeding great and precious promises.” The promises are given in order that we might gain this status, or reality, of being “partakers of the divine nature.”
This is essentially what Luther meant when he referred to what he called the happy exchange. Luther uses the metaphor of Christ as the bridegroom and the soul as the bride. As bride and bridegroom share all things in common, so also do the church and her Christ. By faith “we are in Him, and He is in us. This Bridegroom, Christ, must be alone with His bride in His private chamber.”[4] In the exchange, Christ is not only seen as taking upon Himself our sins. That’s only the first part. What also happens is that Christ bestows upon us everything that pertains to Him. We receive from Him all good, while He receives all evil from us, and thus,
The believing soul can boast of and glory in whatever Christ has as though it were its own, and whatever the soul has Christ claims as his own. Let us compare these and we shall see inestimable benefits. Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ's, while grace, life, and salvation will be the soul's; for if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his bride's and bestow upon her the things that are his.[5]
To square theosis or deification with this view is therefore to see it as a gift that is received by faith. We have been called sons of God (I John 3:1). Therefore it is by faith alone that the Christian understands himself as being a partaker of the divine nature, and it is also faith alone which grasps and rejoices in grasping the present reality of Christian life, already accomplished by the coming of Christ to us in the flesh to redeem us and reconcile us to Himself: God became man, that man might be made God.
[1] Athanasius, "On the Incarnation of the Word," 54.3, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, 14 volumes, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1979), 4:65.
[2] Kurt E. Marquart, “Luther and Theosis” Concordia Theological Quarterly 64:3 (July 2000: 182-205), 195.
[3] Ibid., 198.
[4] “The Freedom of a Christian,” WA 40/I, 241:13-14; AE 26, 137.
[5] WA 7, 54:36-55:4; AE 31, 351.