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Today Joe explores Theosis, a teaching that sometimes doesn’t get enough attention in the West, but arguably is the entire reason God created us. Joe shows you how theosis has been revealed in Scripture and how the Church Fathers tried to wrestle with this amazing concept.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to talk today about a Christian doctrine that sounds heretical. If I just go around saying, I believe that if I’m holy when I die, I’ll become a God or I’ll become God. Many people’s heresy alarm is just going off completely and understandably that sounds polytheistic. That sounds like a repudiation of pretty core tenets of Christianity. What if I were to tell you that this is the historic Christian understanding of what happens when you die and that if you understand this properly, it’ll change how you understand a whole slew of Christian doctrines for the better. But I want to start with a problem and that problem is our view of heaven is too small that I think one of the reasons that we don’t strive for heaven as hard as we could, we don’t strive for holiness as much as we could, is that we just don’t desire it enough and we don’t desire it enough. In part because I has not seen an ear, has not heard what God has ready for those who love him, and it’s hard to desire an unknown gift. We know it’s great, but our vision of it is often pretty limited.
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Joe:
Even Billy Graham in his early days when he was trying to describe heaven said, we’re going to sit around the fireplace and have parties and the angels will wait on us and we’ll drive down the golden streets in a yellow Cadillac convertible. Now, leave aside how tacky it is to drive on golden Streets in a yellow convertible. They’re going to clash horribly. The point is that’s obviously too small of vision of heaven and in Billy Graham’s defense, he evolved from that. He developed as he matured as a Christian and he stopped preaching that kind of idea. But for many of us, I think our idea of heaven might be stuck sort of at that level. It’s going to be really cool. It’s going to be really fun. We’re going to see people we like and we’re imagining basically us as we are now maybe with a white robe, maybe with a harp, but not all that transformed and that is too small of you of heaven.
But the second problem is that it’s often too selfish of you of heaven that it just becomes, okay, I’m not going to selfishly enjoy a bunch of pleasures now so that I can selfishly enjoy a bunch of pleasures in heaven and it won’t count as a sin then. And so a lot of times, even when Catholics and Protestants are talking about the saints praying for us, for instance, you’ll sometimes hear the objection, well, how do we know the saints are praying for us? And it’s a shocking question from a Christian perspective. How do we know that the saints love their neighbors? How do we know that they’re praying for their neighbors and are treating them and not just watching the biggest screen TV we could possibly imagine? Well, because that’s at the heart of Christianity that they are more in love with God and more in love with neighbor than we are here.
But I think that it exposes something that we just don’t think about this stuff very deeply, and so it’s a very easy trap that we can fall into. There are some biblical cues that point us in the right direction. For instance, in the book of Revelation in Revelation seven, we see the great multitude and they’re worshiping together. It’s not this radical individualism you see in the heavenly liturgy, which looks like a Catholic liturgy. You’ve got the incense which represents the prayers of the saints being offered up by the angels, and it’s very clear that those in heaven are interceding for those on earth. Whether we’re talking about the angels in this intermediate capacity presenting our prayers before the father or the saints themselves who are in glory like the saints under the altar for instance, who are crying out for justice on earth. So there’s much more to the heavenly story, but even still, even with everything I’ve just given you rooted in scripture, we haven’t gone far enough.
We need to think bigger. We need to think much bigger, unimaginably bigger. And so for this, I would turn to the secret hidden wisdom about glorification. Now that sounds maybe really gnostic. Oh, come on Joe. How could there be this secret hidden wisdom? Well, Saint Paul in one Corinthians says that there is, he says that among the mature we do in part wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away, we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. So this is a message so radical that it seems like St. Paul was even a little cautious about advertising this because it’s so prone to misunderstanding, but it’s also so important to get right. So he says, none of the rulers of this age understood this for if they had they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
But as it is written, and then that line I quoted before, what no eye has seen nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived what God has prepared for those who love him. Nevertheless, St. Paul’s says, God has revealed to us through the Spirit for the spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. So we’re given two things. Number one, there is this hidden wisdom of God that is tied to our glorification. We’re going to have to unpack what that means and it is somehow tied to the depths of God. Now I’m going to cut to the chase and present a thesis. In that thesis. You can find it in the catechism of the Catholic church in paragraph four 60 that the word became flesh to make us partakers of the divine nature. That is that God’s mission in sending Jesus to earth is not just that he will save us from our sins, although it’s certainly that, but that he wants to do something more than just save us because saving us is, if you think about it in a negative term, it just says you’re not going to hell.
You get saved from falling off the side of a cliff That doesn’t tell me anything about where you are. Are you on the side of the road but you just didn’t fall off the cliff? Well, when we’re talking about being saved, the problem is this gives a clear sense of what we’re avoiding damnation but not a clear sense of what is being offered to us. What are we receiving? And I would suggest that we lack a clear vision of heavenly glory and I’m going to leave this part for another time. We lack a clear nature of the role of the body in all of this so that many Christians’ idea if they do think about heaven is like, well now my soul will be freed of my body forever. I’ve talked about that somewhat before. I’m going to leave that to one side except to say that it’s a problem and that the actual Christian message is as the catechism says found in second Peter when St.
Peter says that it’s we’ll become partakers of the divine nature. Now that is wild that Jesus partakes of our nature in the incarnation and that somehow through divinization or theosis or deification, these are the three terms used for this idea that we somehow become adopted sons of God, not just in name, but we actually become partakers of the divine nature and the catechism goes on and it basically just gives quotations. First EZ talking about how the word became man and the son of God became the son of man. So that man entered into communion with the word and thus receiving divine sonship might become a son of God. That part for some reason doesn’t sound maybe as shocking to us if we can say we’re children of God and I don’t think anyone bats an eye. If you say you’re a son of God, people might look at you strange because that sounds like a divine claim and rightly so it’s, but if you say, well, as St.
Athanasius says, the son of God became man so that we might become God or some translations are going to say so that we might become Gods, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, that sounds shocking and that sounds heretical. So how do we distinguish this idea of theosis from, for example, the Greek pagan idea of apotheosis. This is the apotheosis of Hercules or Hercules and he’s going before Zeus in Herra and it looks like kind like saints and glory. So what’s the difference between the Christian vision and the Greek pagan vision or what’s the difference between this and the Mormon vision where you become a God with your own or your own planet? How do we make sense of all of this? Because I can understand why people would be confused or scandalized or troubled to put the pieces in place. I want to start with what the Bible has to say on this subject, and it turns out the Bible beginning with Jesus himself has a lot to say on the subject.
We often just overlook it. We don’t know what to do with these passages when we come across them. I think so in John 10, Jesus’ interlocutors are wanting to stone him for being a blasphemer because being a man, he makes himself God. Now, there’s a lot of things Jesus could do in this situation because the charge of blasphemy is wrong, but Jesus is in fact claiming to be God. They have correctly identified this, and so Jesus can’t deny this divine claim, but if he just says, I’m the second person of the Trinity, they’re not ready for that full truth. So he does something really fascinating. He quotes to them the Psalms, he says, is it not written in your law? I said, you are Gods. Just pause on that. Jesus says, you are Gods. Now, granted, he’s quoting the Old Testament, but he’s also the one speaking in the Old Testament.
Either way you cut it. Jesus says, you are Gods, and this is not contrary to the monotheism that is the hallmark of Judaism. He’s quoting the Old Testament here that Judaism is radically monotheistic. There are no other true gods beside the one God, and yet we can also talk about these others as Gods. What is going on here? Well, Jesus gives us a tantalizing bit of Jesus, but he is doing something again in response to the people trying to kill him. He just says to them in verse 35, if he called them Gods to whom the word of God came and scripture cannot be broken. Do you say of him whom the father consecrated and sent into the world, you’re blaspheming because I said I’m the son of God. So okay, notice a couple of things. Number one, as I said before, the claim to be a son of God is a divine claim.
Now, Jesus is the son of God. By nature, I’m a son of God by adoption in my baptism, but this is still a participation in something divine and without the proper warrant, that is a blasphemous claim that there’s a loose sense in which we could talk about being sons and daughters of God by being creatures of him. The way you might talk about in animators animations is kind of like his children, but that’s pretty metaphorical. Something much deeper is going on obviously with Jesus by nature, but also by us is we’re baptized into this community of God, this family of God. And so Jesus is pointing out this is a claim to have God as father, but there’s some sense in which God is talking about us sharing in Godhead in some way. So let’s unpack what that way is. St. Paul says, the Lord is the spirit and where the spirit of the Lord is, there’s freedom and we all with unveiled face, he’s just contrasted this with Moses beholding the face of God or beholding God, we all with unveiled faith beholding the glory of the Lord are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory into another.
Now that’s going to be important for a couple reasons. One, it’s important to get that this process of theosis, divination, deification, I’m going to just call it theosis now because it’s less divinization. I usually don’t use that term because it sounds too much like divination, which is an actual sin, and I don’t want people’s understanding to turn on whether they’re getting a middle IZ. Theosis is a weird enough word. It doesn’t sound like anything else in English, but it still means the same thing. So I’ll say theosis, it’s the Greek term, but if you prefer deification, glorification, divinization, all of those mean the same thing. Glorification is good, but I actually think glorification is too generic. Sounding like, okay, we’re going to get some glory. Well, you can get glory in a lot of ways, but we are going to become God or Gods, okay?
That’s a bigger claim. That means something more distinct than just we’re going to get some glory. So this theosis, it begins now. It doesn’t end now, but it begins now and we’re being changed into his likeness. We are being changed into the likeness of God himself one de degree at time, and this is somehow connected with our beholding the glory of the Lord that by beholding God we become more like him. That’s going to be an important key to how all of this works and we’re going to hear more of that actually right now. This is, I put John three, it’s actually one John three. John says, see what love the father has given us. We should be called children of God and so we are, okay. Remember, this is the starting point. Your sonship or daughtership being a son or daughter of God is already this radical thing and this is the foundation, but John says, this is only the beginning.
The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now. But then he says, it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. So notice that same theme, we are going to become like Jesus when Jesus and we encounter one another in eternity. It’s going to look like we are like him and why? Because we’re going to see him as he is that this process of beholden the Lord and his glory and being transformed will be brought to its fulfillment in heaven. Now we see as in a mirror dimly, but then we’re going to see face-to-face. And so this process begins now, but it’s going to be radically completed in heaven, this process of being glorified and transformed deified.
But then St. Peter has, again, maybe the strongest language on this is hard to say. I mean John’s language is pretty strong, but Peter says that his divine power is granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence. It’s an easy thing to miss. This kind of language is all over the New Testament that we’re not just called to be great, we’re called to be great with God’s own glory and excellence by which he is granted to us, his precious and very great promises that through these he may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion. And so he doesn’t just tell us what we’re going to avoid, he also tells us what we’re going to become. We’re going to become, as he says, partakers of the divine nature.
That’s huge. I think it’s an incredible promise and I wish we talked about this more as Christians, particularly in the West. This is an area where in modern times, I would say Eastern Orthodoxy does a much better job of focusing on theosis and Western Catholicism and Protestantism have underemphasized this, I would argue. So they offer a few keys to making sense of this idea so that you don’t come away with the wrong view. Number one, Christ, the son of God is truly God and truly our brother, he is the son of God by nature. He’s the son of Joseph by adoption, the adoption into the family of Joseph. Now he is truly and literally man, he’s not just man by adoption. He’s a man by nature. He has a divine nature and a human nature, but he also experiences an adoptive sonship because Joseph is his foster father.
He’s not his biological father. And so Jesus is at one and the same time a son of David presumably along Mary’s line by blood, by ethnicity, by nature, but actually more importantly for the legal context, he is the legal son of Joseph. And so there’s all kinds of promises tied to the Davidic Messianic line and those promises aren’t actually achieved along bloodline. That’s kind of a recurring theme lately. People misunderstanding how the promises to Israel were received, but you could have what was called the lava marriage where you raised your dead brother’s child and that child was okay, yours biologically, but your brother gets married to a woman, he dies before he can give her any children. You then marry her and have a child with her, but that child stands to inherit the inheritance, the dead brother. This is a strange thing from our perspective, but it is good for inheritance law and for making sure that the widow isn’t deprived of being taken care of.
And it meant that there was this distinction in two types of sonship within Judaism long before the time of Christ. So Jesus is man, both by nature and in this ate adoptive sort of way, not LaVar but an adoptive sonship. That’s the first kind of key that you have to recognize the way that God becomes man, this is going to be an important first step. Second, through baptism, we become the adoptive sons and daughters of God. And third, this makes us heirs of God. Remember everything I just said, one of the reasons that there was this adoptive system in Judaism was for the distribution of inheritance. So sonship was closely tied to being an heir. One of the reasons it was important to know who the legitimate sons were, was to know where the property and the finances and everything else went when dad died.
And so we become heirs by being sons and we’re heirs of heaven, but we’re even heirs of God. I didn’t have this prescripted, this part, but lemme just add a point here. If you pay attention to the parable sometimes called the parable of the prodigal son, pay attention to the words that the father says to the older son when he says, all that I have is yours. Now imagine God saying that to you and you understand what it is to be an heir of God, that you are not just asking for the crumbs from the master’s table. You are being promised the whole house. That’s the promise of God, and that is an enormous promise. All of heaven is yours. You’re an heir of God, not just all of heaven, God himself is yours. The second person of the trinity is the bridegroom to the bride of the church and the two become one flesh.
As St. Paul says in Ephesians five, you don’t get a more radical union of humanity and divinity than this. It’s not just the union of humanity and divinity that happens in the incarnation. You now have this other union of humanity and divinity in the union of Christ, in the church and in the soul communion with God. And there’s going to be some ways we’re going to look at how that works, but if you get those things and hopefully you get how we can talk about human beings who are not divine by nature, nevertheless sharing in divinity, I think St. Paul connects these themes really nicely. He explains how all who are led by the spirit of God are sons of gods. You’ve got the theme of sonship for you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you’ve received the spirit of sonship.
Now, this by the way, is the point of the parable of the prodigal son. It’s not really about a son being a prodigal, so I don’t like that term. It’s about two men discovering that they’re not just the slaves of their father, but they’re true sons. And I would love to unpack that, but that’s not the point of this episode When we cry Abba Father, it is a 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, and then he says, provided we suffer with him, we’ll get into that later in order that we may also be glorified with him. So notice he goes from sonship to heirs and thus we suffering to glory These ideas, we need to keep them closely tied together because it’s how we make sense of this.
Pretty shocking but pretty amazing doctrine. This is one that the early Christians, by the way, loved to talk about. As a quick aside here, I talked about that whole idea of apotheosis, the pagan version of this idea. If you go in, I believe it’s the capital rotunda, it has the apotheosis of George Washington and it’s just straight up Roman paganism with George Washington along with some Roman goddesses in heaven in the place of God the father. It’s pretty wild stuff, but you might look at that and say, what’s going on there and what’s going on? There is a pagan version of this idea where the emperors would become gods and the Christians had some pretty fascinating things to say in response to it. So St. Justin Martyr right in the mid one hundreds, maybe one 60 writes, and remember he’s addressing this to the emperor and it’s going to get him martyred. He says, in one of the emperors who die among yourselves, whom you deem worthy of deification, and in whose behalf you produce someone who swears he has seen the burning Caesar rise to heaven from the funeral pyre, he’s mocking this idea of imperial apotheosis that emperors are going to just become gods.
But what’s fascinating is even though he mocks the pagan idea, he nevertheless concedes, there is a Christian version of this that doesn’t sound that different, only it’s not going to be for just random corrupt emperors. Instead, he says, we have learned that those only are deified who have lived near to God and holiness and virtue, and we believe that those who live wickedly and do not repent are punished an everlasting fire. So notice he doesn’t say apotheosis is totally crazy. He just is like, yeah, but your emperors are wicked guys, so let’s not naively assume that they’re all being glorified in heaven and becoming gods. You would think that this would be the fault line, but he would say, Hey, you believe the emperor has become Gods. We don’t believe humans become gods, but he actually says something a lot more shocking, which is only those who live near to God and in holiness and virtue become gods when they die.
Only they are deified. I don’t know. That just seems like a pretty shocking thing to read amongst the earliest Christians, and he’s not alone. Saint EU says that one of the Christ through his transcendent love became what we are, but as he became man that he might bring us to be even what he is himself, that is he became man so that we could become divine elsewhere in the same work. This is a little bit of a longer quotation, but he lets him unpack this idea at a much bigger level. He’s writing about those who assert that Jesus is merely a man and he says that they’re in a state of death having been none has yet joined to the word of God the Father nor receiving liberty through the Son as he does himself declare if the son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.
So that’s who he’s talking about. He’s talking about those who think Jesus is just a man born of St. Joseph but being ignorant of him, whom from the virgin is Emmanuel. They’re deprived of his gift, which is eternal life and not receiving the incorruptible word. They remain in mortal flesh and are debtors to death not obtaining the antidote of life to whom the word says. Again, this is actually to the wicked, not to the just to whom the word says, mentioning his own gifts of grace. I said, you are all the sons of the highest and gods, but you shall die like men. That’s a quotation from Psalm May two, and EU says He speaks undoubtedly these words to those who have not received the gift of adoption. In other words, these are people who were offered the gift of becoming gods but are going to die like men because they’ve rejected this gift and Ur united his words, they despise the incarnation of the pure generation of the word of God and thus defraud human nature of promotion into God and prove themselves ungrateful to the word of God who became flesh for them.
For it was for the end that the word of God was made man, and he who is the son of God became the son of man. That man having been taken into the word and receiving the adoption might become the son of God. This is how we become promoted into God is you start by becoming a son of God and here explains for by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality? That’s an obvious point, but let’s make sure we get that really clearly. We want eternal life. Nothing in our nature gives us eternal life. Our nature is destined for mortality, death and corruption. You’re going to die and rotten the grave left to your own devices. And so if there’s going to be a remedy for that, if you’re going to be given immortality and incorruption, it’s not going to come from within, it’s going to come from without.
EZ explains, okay, well, that means first incorruptibility immortality had become that which also we are. In other words, before we can become like God, God has to become like us. And that’s exactly what happens in the incarnation so that the corruptible might be swallowed up by incorruptibility and the mortal by immortality that we might receive the adoption of sons. So he’s just going into pretty great depth about how does this work? Well, it works because we can’t give ourselves any of that. We have to receive it from God. God gives it to us by first joining humanity and divinity in the incarnation, we couldn’t make that union happen. God can make it happen. He did make it happen in the incarnation and then he continues to make it happen. As we’re going to see through the Eucharist and through these other ways in which we participate in the divinity.
This is a point that Christians often return to in describing the incarnation, even that paragraph from the catechism in four 60 that’s describing why Christ came into the world. And so you often find this amazing theme unpacked in Christmas homilies. For instance, Saint Augustine in sermon 180 6 is one of his Christmas homilies just kind of throws out would any Christian deny after all that the son of man was born of that woman, but that all the same. God became man and only in this way did man become God. But hold on, he’s just said that through the incarnation, God became man, and in this way man becomes, God just sort of throws it out there as if we’re going to just recognize that and then he moves on and Augustine isn’t alone, this kind of formulation that God became man, so that man might become God.
We find it in both the east and the West in almost verbatim the same format as for instance, St. Athanasius says, for he was made man that we might be made God, and he manifested himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen father and he endured the insense of men that we might inherit immortality. Notice this connection between receiving immortality and becoming God are closely linked in athanasius’s mind because immortality is a divine trait, not a human trait. And so when you are living on an eternal glory, that’s not because of your just natural human attributes, this is because something has happened to you to make you like God. So at this point, it might be helpful to pause and ask, okay, well how is this not heresy? How is this not, how is this not denying that there is one and only God?
Because we want to say on the one hand, yeah, we believe everything the Bible says about you becoming God or becoming Gods, and on the other hand that there’s actually only one God. So how do we square that circle? And the same Athanasius who I just quoted gave what I think is the most helpful kind of explanation. He’s actually giving this in the context of another passage where we’re told to be merciful as our father in heaven is merciful. And he says, although there be one son by nature to only begotten, we too become sons, right? God sent his only begotten son. And so we can talk about Jesus as the only son of the Father, or we can talk about all of us as sons of God and sons of the Father. And every time you pray our Father, you are standing in that status as a son or a daughter of God without denying that there’s another sense in which there’s only one son, Jesus, the second person from the Trinity, we don’t say that there’s the Father, a bunch of sons and then the Holy Spirit, no, it’s Father, son and spirit.
So at the level of nature, there’s only one. But by participation in grace through adoption, there’s more than one. So similarly at the says, and though we are men from the earth, we’re yet called God not as the true God or his word, but as please God who’s given us that grace. And then he says, so also as God do we become merciful, not by being men equal to God nor becoming in nature and truth benefactor for it’s not our gift to benefit but belongs to God, but in order that what has accrued to us from God himself by grace, these things we may impart to others. And then he even says, only in this way can we anyhow become imitators and in no other, when we minister to others what comes from him. So think about when Jesus encounters rich young men and he says, why do you call me good?
No one is good, but God alone, that’s true. And yet we can still talk about people as good, not as a separate goodness apart from God, but as imitators and participators in God’s own goodness, this is a really important point to make sure that we get right. We are told to be merciful as our heavenly father is merciful. And in fact, Jesus says, love your enemies and do good and lend expecting nothing in return and your reward will be great and you will be sons of the most high that Jesus connects acting in a godlike way, in a godly way to sonship. And at least for me, that was kind of a light bulb moment like, oh, okay, I get that. I get how? In one sense, the only merciful one is God. He is infinitely merciful, and I am not. And no one I’ve ever met is no offense.
I mean I haven’t met some of you either way. I don’t think you’re infinitely merciful, but you hopefully participate in God’s mercy. And so that isn’t coming from some other source besides God. It isn’t as if there’s God’s mercy over here and then you have your own storehouse of mercy. That’s not a participation. No. All the good you’re doing is a participation in God’s own goodness, whether it’s mercy or goodness of any kind, whatever it is. And so in this way, by cooperating with grace, by acting in a godly way, you become more godlike. And again, at least for me, that was a light bulb where it’s like, oh, okay, I get that we kind of squirm and calling people gods, but don’t squirm in calling people godly. And I think if we thought about that more deeply to say anyone is godly, would apart from grace be actually blasphemous because God is so infinitely other than humans.
So only by participating in this divine life are we able to become holy or godly or any of these things that are properly these attributes of God alone. And so if we’re ready to go that far, then it doesn’t seem like a major burden or major hurdle to go one step further and stay with St. Paul. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me and the life I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.
So if you want more of the kind of technical aspect of that, St. Thomas Aquinas talks about how with things like charity or wisdom or goodness, these are all participations in something that is properly found in the divine essence itself, that we are somehow connected to God’s own love, his own wisdom, his own goodness. When we are cooperating with those things, we are not creating charity in our own hearts, but God is giving us a share by grace in the order of charity. And that gets really theologically complicated in some ways. But again, this is what it looks like to become God-like, that you’re allowing God to transform you to becoming more like him. So how do we let this doctrine transform us? I want to suggest several different ways. The first of them, I’m going to give not nearly the attention that it deserves with the anticipation that I may come back into a separate episode just on this topic, which is I want you to let this idea change how you understand the Eucharist.
I think we should just change our understanding of the Eucharist based on this, and this is something that the prayers of the church emphasize that we often overlook. It’s amazing to me how many times the prayers at mass and sometimes the particular prayers of the day called the Propers mentioned something about this theme of theosis, and yet we don’t tune into it and think about like, wait a second, that’s a really big thing that was just said. And there’s this prayer. The priest prays silently when he’s pouring a little bit of water into the wine, the offertory, and he prays by the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity. And I hope by this point it’s clear that is a solidly Christian prayer and it’s an ancient Christian prayer.
Some version of that prayer has been prayed for a very long time during our liturgy. And so this idea is that the Eucharist is somehow important in this process of sharing in the divine life. St. Gregory of Nisa puts it like this. He says, well, since the God who is manifested infused himself into perishable humanity for this purpose, namely that by this communion with deity, mankind might at the same time be deified. Okay? So again, God becomes a man so man can become God for this end. He also disseminates himself and every believer through that flesh whose substance comes from bread and wine, blending himself with the bodies of believers to secure that by this union with the immortal man too may a sharer and incorruption, okay, what does that mean? He’s just said, Gregory of Nisa has an incredible eucharistic theologist. I spoke about this a couple of years ago at the Catholic Answers Conference and I thought I had an episode on this.
I cannot find it. And if I don’t have one, I’m really looking forward to just doing an episode on how Gregory of Nisa shows the Eucharist is connected to bodily resurrection and glorification because it’s incredible. But there’s this theme that you’ll find throughout the early Christians where they regularly connect this idea of the Eucharist and bodily resurrection. And Jesus actually talks about this in John six that if you eat his flesh and drink his blood, he’ll raise you up on the last day. That’s a reference to bodily resurrection. So those two themes, bodily resurrection, glorification, are connected with the Eucharist in ways that the early Christians took for granted and that are opaque to most Christians, including most Catholics today. Those seem like totally different topics to us. Gregory does an incredible job spelling out the different steps. So if I can find that episode, I will link to it below.
If I can’t find that episode because it doesn’t exist only in my mind, I will make it because it’s a great episode if it exists. I mean it’s just like Gregory is just incredible. I’m not saying my work was that good, but Gregory’s very eyeopening. It was very helpful understanding the steps that he kind of walks through. So that’s the idea that Christ wants union with us. That’s why the incarnation happens and it’s why the Eucharist happens and he wants to be united with us in our humanity and our humanity is bodily as well as spiritual. And so the Eucharist makes sense as a way that he unites himself to us in our full humanity bodily as well as spiritual saint cereal of Jerusalem for his part. Likewise tells us with full assurance, let us partake as of the body and blood of Christ for in the figure of bread is given to you, his body and in the figure of wine his blood.
Now I’m a little cautious in using this line because I thought people might misunderstand what he was saying there, but he’s saying that this looks like bread and looks like wine, but it’s actually his body and blood. In fact, he goes on to say that explicitly, he says, consider therefore the bread and the wine not as bear elements for the are according to the Lord’s declaration, the body and blood of Christ. And he tells you to ignore your senses which would have them be bread and wine and instead trust your faith because the body and blood of Christ had been vouched faith to you. So very clear Sarah is saying this isn’t bread and wine, this is the body and blood of Christ. It’s a figure of bread, it’s a figure of wine that it’s not that the bread and wine are just symbols of body and blood, it’s that it’s only a symbolic bread or symbolic wine in the sense that it’s not really bread, it’s not really wine anymore, it is now the body and blood of Christ.
So just be aware that he’s using that language and somewhat the opposite way that you might at first hear it. He then makes that very clear I think in the next part where he explains that this is going to actually divinize us. He says that by partaking of the body and blood of Christ, we may be made of the same body in the same blood with him in by the way, solidly biblical idea that we are one body of Christ because we partake of the one Eucharistic loaf. St. Paul says this explicitly in one Corinthians 10, for thus we come to bear Christ in us because his body and blood are distributed through our members. Thus it is that according to the blessed Peter, we become partakers of the divine nature. Now we already heard that quote, but serial is just unpacking that this plays out eucharistically.
All of this I think can be summarized by the catechism in paragraph 1402, quoting an ancient prayer of the church, which it says about the mystery of the Eucharist of sacred banquet in which Christ is received as food. The memory of his passion is renewed, the soul is filled with grace and the pledge of the life to come is given to us. So the Eucharist is as the catechism goes on to say an anticipation of the heavenly glory, something in Theosis is both anticipated and promised and even in some ways brought about through the Eucharist that should change how we view the Eucharist. Second thing I think that should change is how we view justification. Because a lot of times justification can be, at least in my experience, this dry topic where Christians just debate whether we are declared righteous or made righteous when the reality is so much bigger than it sounds like either side is saying.
Now, to be clear, when we talk about being made righteous, we actually mean theosis. But I think to many ears being made righteous just means being made morally upstanding or something. And so a lot of the debate people are just not getting. The Christian promise is not that you’re just going to be declared righteous. It’s not even just that you’re going to be made righteous in the ordinary way we might imagine righteousness. It’s that you’re going to be made godlike. So I thought this pastor did a good job from a Protestant perspective of explaining the two sides. And then I want to unpack that a little bit here.
Clip:
Hi, this is John and I’m answering the question, what is the difference between being declared righteous and made righteous? This is really at the heart of the Reformation. The Roman Catholic theology teaches that through works and the sacraments, you are made righteous. You actually become righteous as part of your nature. And then as far as the reformation goes, we hold that for instance, Romans chapter five, verse one says that we are justified by faith, meaning that one is declared to be right with God by faith, not by their actions but by faith. So we did not actually gain forgiveness of our sins and we are not by nature righteous. So when God looks at us, he does not say you are righteous. He’s saying you have been declared to be righteous. It has been pronounced over you, it has been given to you. It’s not part of who you are.
Joe:
Now to be clear, I don’t think Pastor John does a great job of describing the Catholic view. I think that sounds more Ian than it does Catholic, and I know many people think that those are the same thing. They’re not. But I think what he does a good job of is expressing the Protestant view, at least in the ways I’ve often heard it, which is that you are declared righteous, but you don’t actually become righteous. It’s not part of your nature. I mean we would agree it’s not part of your nature in the sense it’s part of God’s nature, but you’re not even really partaking of the divine nature. You are instead just being declared that you’re partaking of the divine nature. And so you have the famous reformation image of a snow covered pile of dung. It’s still a pile of dung. It’s still horrible and smelly and wretched, but it’s been covered over without actually being transformed.
Now I want to be very clear about a couple of things. Number one, pastor John doesn’t think that’s where this stops, but number two, many ordinary Christians seem to meaning that there’s often this idea I’ve been made right with God because he’s declared me, but he hasn’t actually made me holy. And so it’s not clear how to connect the dots between the declaration of holiness on the Protestant side and then the actual work of sanctification or of theosis because if I’m already guaranteed salvation, what is this other project about being like God all about? Now, I’m going to let Pastor John speak into that because I think it’s important for us as Catholics if this isn’t a theology you’re familiar with to hear no, there is a place for this. But I still think certainly in people’s lived experience that one of the reasons Theosis gets kind of forgotten is in the Protestant world, dude, it is harder to see how it organically fits into everything if you’re not actually being made righteous. And the whole point of theosis is that you’re being made righteous and God-like
Clip:
Now, once we are justified, once we have been declared righteous, then God begins to sanctify us to actually transform us into the image of Jesus Christ. And we won’t be made righteous until we are glorified. That’s in heaven. When we are finally transformed into the actual image of Jesus Christ, that’s when we will be made righteous.
Joe:
But he’s just said that God is going to make us righteous. He doesn’t think that has anything to do with our salvation because he’s afraid that’ll make it like our thing. But if God is making us righteous, it’s God’s thing. Whether he’s declaring someone righteous who isn’t really righteous or whether he’s actually making the unrighteous become righteous, that’s still God’s thing, not ours. That’s not going to give me the credit for God making me a certain way. And if it did, then you’d have to say, well, the saints in heaven can’t be made righteous either because that would cause these same problems. And so this attempt to divorce theosis and the whole process of being holy from the process of being just pits justice and holiness against one another in a way that I don’t think stands very well, there’s a lot more kind of reformation theology that could go on there.
I would just say for now this notion that theosis is just something that happens later on is clearly not the biblical teach. And we are right now being transformed from one degree of glory to another as we behold God and the ways that we behold him. That’s the promise of Second Corinthians that Paul is not saying we are completely unrighteous now and later on are going to be transformed into becoming righteous. No, no, we already, we are not just declared righteous, we are actually made righteous. And that being made righteous is an ongoing process. There’s plenty of passages that actually speak to this. There’s a sense in which we’ve already been justified. We’re being justified, we will be justified. We’ve already been sanctified, we are being sanctified, we will be sanctified. And the same is truth glorification. And so I think this matters because I think sometimes we treat the spiritual life particularly without the seriousness that it deserves.
I’m going to return to that in a little bit here. And I think one of the reasons for that is that certain theologies, one saved, always saved perseverance of the saints, et cetera, can lead people to one of two extremes. Either this incredible anxiety where they are never sure if their true Christians are truly saved or a kind of complacency. I’m not saying it always does, but I’ve met enough people and I’m betting you’ve met enough people who fall into one of those two camps because of how they’ve received those doctrines that I don’t think you can say, oh, there’s no connection and there’s no correlation at all. On the other hand, if you say the project is to become a God by participating in God’s own divine nature, now the spiritual life makes sense in a whole new way. And now the debates about justification start to seem pretty trivial.
I’m not saying there aren’t important differences still, but now this question of being made righteous, it’s essential. You have to be made righteous. That’s the whole plan. That’s the program. And so the question about whether your initial justification happens with a declaration or a actual transformation, it matters, but it matters a lot less when you realize, well, both sides have to recognize that you do have to actually become righteous and that it’s not Ian to say that it’s just Christian. Alright, the third thing I think it should change is how we view suffering. Because one of the things that really struck me in reading about theosis in scripture particular is how often it’s connected to the theme of suffering. And I think it again, should go into how we experience the spiritual life and our just journey as Christians. So for instance, I’ve already quoted from St.
Paul and Romans eight, but I promise to get back to this, that we are sons and if children then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. Paul kind of just plugs that in without ever really explaining why do we have those two things connected? And I would just say you don’t get to Easter Sunday without going through the cross. And so what it is to be united with Christ is going to involve being united with his suffering. And here again, I think there are some theologies that can push against this in a way that obscures it where you’ll have some theological systems where Christ has the cross so that you don’t have to, or at least that’s how it can sound in reality, Christ says, take up your cross and follow me.
He is not just your penal substitute. He’s not the divine whipping boy that bears the divine wrath so that you don’t have to deal with the cross. No, you still have to deal with the cross, but now your cross has meaning and now united with Christ as a fellow heir with Christ, your cross is the good Friday that gets to Easter Sunday. I know that that probably is not the way you’re used to hearing about that, but I think if you read Romans eight, it’s like that’s what St. Paul’s taken for granted and he’s not alone, or maybe he is depending on who wrote Hebrews. Hebrews two talks about how Jesus was made lower for a little while than the angels crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death. So notice Christ’s own glory and honor is subsequent to the humiliation of the cross that he has to go through the suffering of death so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone, for was fitting that he for whom and by whom all things exist in bringing many sons to glory should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering.
Notice the model there. He’s not the replacement, he’s the pioneer. He’s traveling this road calvary to the grave, to the glory, not so that you don’t have to but to chart the course for you. For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified have all one origin. That is why he’s not ashamed to call them brethren. So he ties in all these themes of sonship, brotherhood, glorification. It’s all tied up there with suffering that when we are united with Christ, we’re not just united with Christ in glory, we are united with the man of sorrows. We are united with the suffering Christ. Hebrews returns to this theme 10 chapters later in which the author writes to these struggling Christians saying, in your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood and have you forgotten the ex expectation which addresses you as sons quotes from the Old Testament, my son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord nor lose courage when you’re punished by him.
For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves and chastises every son whom he receives the author of Hebrews and continues, it is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons for what son is there whom his father does not discipline. If you’re left without discipline in which all have participated, then your illegitimate children and not sons, you are not a son in the sense of being an heir. If you’re not a son that’s going through the cross. That’s what the Bible says. If you’re on easy street and you’ve just rejected the cross in your own life, you don’t think it applies to you, then you’re not living as a son. You’re living as an illegitimate son and illegitimate sons don’t inherit. They are not heirs. That’s the point that he’s making here in Hebrews 12. He goes on in verse nine.
Besides this, we’ve had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them. Shall we not have much more be subject to the father of spirits than live for they disciplined us for a short time at their pleasure, but he disciplines us for our good. We may share his holiness. We may share his holiness. There it is again. That theme of theosis just snuck in there in a way that you can overlook so easily for the moment. All discipline seems painful rather than pleasant. Later, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. So according to him, we’re not just declared righteous. We are throughout this life living what it is to be righteous so that we can receive the peaceful fruit of righteousness by being trained in these sufferings. The next area I think that should change is how we view the saints and by extension, how we view our neighbors.
Now, those are really two different kind of categories, but I’m using the same quote for both. One of the objections that as I said before, you’ll often hear, he’s like, oh, don’t ask the saints to help you because the saints in heaven can’t hear you. They’re dead and therefore they’re cutoff. And there’s plenty of scripture that seems to point to the opposite. I mean, we just got out of Hebrews 12 a second ago where it describes after listing all the red Hebrews 11, all the great saints of old then says, we’re surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. Well, the obvious implication there is that you’re in an arena, you’re running a race, and these are the people in the stands rooting you on. It makes no sense to imagine that image and say, and none of them are aware you’re running the race.
Then why are they surrounding us as a cloud of witnesses? It just doesn’t make sense of the image, but fine. The deeper problem, as I said before, is that it has too small a view of what the saints are currently enjoying in heaven. And then if you had this view, a lot of opposition to asking for their help is going to melt away. The objections just become kind of laughable in the sense that you say, well, of course there’s this very strange phenomenon where many Christians believe, okay, if I say to the devil, I want to make a deal with the devil, he can hear me. But if I ask the saints in heaven, if they will protect me, they can’t hear me. So the devil is more a part of my life than the saints and glory. The great clot of witness and the devil is more powerful.
He’s able to hear things rather than the saints and glory, and it’s a very strange vision of the spiritual life. And I would suggest that vision doesn’t hold up well when one reads what scripture actually says. For instance, do you not know we’ll be judging angels? Christ was made lower than the angels for a little while. All that suggests that the glorified saints are above even the angels, and if they’re above the angels, they’re certainly above the demons, the fallen angels, and so they’re not these irrelevant and impotent spiritual forces the way that many Christians, for some reason think they are. They’re incredibly powerful intercessors for our behalf because this is what it is to be a good Christian, and they’re not just like us here on earth a little bit better. They’re radically transformed into God likeness, which is then going to lead to this CS Lewis quote from Weight of glory.
But as we get there, I want you to think not only of what this says about the saints, but also how it changes maybe how we view our neighbors here on earth today. Lewis has one of the most incredible sermons on Divinization, and he’s coming as an Anglican to this and does a tremendous job with this doctrine. He says, it is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses to remember that the doles and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature, which if you saw it now, you’d be strongly tempted to worship or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare, the most boring person, the Trent Horn, whatever. I’m just joking. I think I can safely do Trent there. We’ll see, this person is destined to, they’re meant for eternal glory to become God-like in such a way that if you saw Saint Trent Horn of wherever Texas or Phoenix, I guess is where he’s from, then you’d want to worship him.
Or if something terrible happens that Trent goes in a pretty different direction. He would be such an abomination that you would shudder at the side of him. I’m just picking on Trent there, but I could pick on myself or any of you. That’s the idea. Now, that tells us two things. Number one, it tells us, okay, the saints are powerful spiritual forces. But two, it changes how we treat our neighbors because that makes me want to be a little nicer to Trent both to hopefully help him along in his journey. And also, I don’t want a future God-like creature threatening me. So I want to get in good graces with him. But in all seriousness, there’s this sense in which it should change how we view our neighbor. And ultimately, and this is where I think all of this is leading to, it should change how we view holiness itself.
So Lewis goes on to say, all day long, we are in some degree helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities. It is what the awe and the circumspection proper to them. Though we should conduct all our dealings with one another. All friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You’ve never talked to a mere mortal. Nations cultures, arts civilization. These are mortal and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is Immortals whom we joke with, work, with, marry, snub and exploit immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. Now you might hear that. I think those are ominous words in many ways, but incredibly encouraging words than others. And you might say, okay, if that’s true, maybe don’t make jokes about Trent. And in fairness, Trent’s not boring at all.
Trent’s a fascinating guy. But there’s a sense in which as Lewis says, this does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play, but our merriment must be of that kind. And in fact, it is the Mary Kind which exists between people who have from the outset taking each other seriously. No flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. We want to revel in one another and play in that sense. And our charity must be a deep and costly love with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner. No mere tolerance or indulgence, which parodies love is flippancy, parodies, merriment. Focus on this passage. That’s a line that’s very easy to miss. One of the things that flows from taking your neighbor seriously as someone who’s also destined for theosis, is that you have to take their sin seriously. You can’t just say, yeah, that’s their problem.
That you might actually be in a situation where a kind word from you, a word of correction perhaps is the difference between them becoming an eternal horror or glory. And that is a serious challenge. And this is the way in which all of our life’s decisions should be approached with an eye towards the eternal destiny of myself. But other people can hang in the balance. And so there’s a certain way with which I should approach other people, which again, not a way where you’re not having fun, but a way in which you’re not trivializing the other person a way in which you’re not demeaning and minimizing the other person. That can be a difficult thing, especially in a world where you have so many people. It’s hard to what Martin Buber calls the I vow as opposed to I it. Relationships. It’s hard to realize the humanity of every person who comes into your life, from the person next to you in traffic, to the waiter, to whomever, but realizing the small actions may help them get to heaven, may help you get to heaven, should change how you view every day of your life.
Lewis concludes, and I think this is a good place to wrap up next to the blessed sacrament itself. Your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he’s your Christian neighbor, he’s holy. In almost the same way for in him also Christ very la, the Glor and the glorified glory himself is truly hidden. Love your neighbor. Recognize God in your neighbor and strive to become God-like. And don’t settle for any form of Christianity offering you anything less than theosis, than divinization, than deification because you’re not just made to avoid help. You’re not just made to sit on a harp, sit in white robes, play music somewhere you are made to become a partaker of the divine nature, to become an heir of God himself and to share in all of the divine glory that God himself has. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.