Why Orthodoxy

A fully-sourced case, claim by claim, with traceable citations

Chapter 04 of 12 · The case for Orthodoxy

Salvation as Theosis: the Healing of the Soul

"God became man that man might become god" — Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54. Where the West came to speak of salvation in the language of a courtroom, the East has always spoken of it as medicine: the healing of human nature by union with God. The difference is not cosmetic; it changes what you believe you are being saved from and for.

The form. The question here is the most intimate of the whole case, for it concerns not an article to be believed but a work to be wrought in the soul. The objections are the strongest forms of the forensic soteriology of the West; the sed contra states the New Testament and the earliest Church; the determination follows; the replies answer each objection in its own terms.

Whether man's salvation consists in his deification (theosis) — his healing and transformation by real participation in the uncreated life of God — and not merely in the remission of guilt and the infusion of a created grace.

Objections to the Orthodox position

  1. Obj. 1 — From the nature of forgiveness. Scripture speaks of justification, remission, acquittal: "being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (Romans 3:24); "in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins" (Colossians 1:14). Trent defines justification as the infusion of an inherent justice by which the sinner is made just, and warns that the Christian's whole assurance rests on the mercy of the tribunal. To make the goal "deification" is to say what the Bible does not say and to unsettle the conscience that the Gospel means to settle.1
  2. Obj. 2 — Against the ontological reading. "Partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4) and "that we might be made the righteousness of God in him" (2 Corinthians 5:21) are metaphors of moral and filial likeness. God is absolutely simple and infinite; a creature cannot "share the nature" of the creator in any but a nominal sense; and the Fathers' "exchange formula" ("He became man that we might become god") is rhetoric, not ontology.2
  3. Obj. 3 — Against the essence–energies distinction. The distinction between God's essence and His uncreated energies, dogmatized by the Byzantine councils of 1341–1351, is a fourteenth-century novelty: no ecumenical council of the undivided Church defined it; Rome rejected it at Florence (1439) through the categories of St. Thomas; and it divides the simple God into what He is and what He does in a way the Fathers never knew. A doctrine defined against the West, by local councils, cannot bind the Church.3

On the contrary

Whereby are given unto us 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.

2 Peter 1:44

And Athanasius: "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…" (On the Incarnation 54).5 And Irenaeus: "the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God" (AH 4.20.7), and "He became what we are, that He might make us what He is Himself" (AH 3.19.1).6 And the same Son who "took upon him the form of a servant" (Philippians 2:7) prayed "I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one" (John 17:23), and the Apostle promises: "we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2).7 And this is the language, not of a late Eastern sect, but of the Church's own worship in both East and West from the beginning.

I answer that

The question is not whether the Church of the West ever taught deification. It did: Augustine called the deification of man God's great promise; Irenaeus, Hilary, and the Latin fathers used the same language as the Greek. The question is which end the two traditions serve — what the Christian is for. And here the divergence is real and decisive. The West did not forget deification. The Catechism of the Catholic Church §460 quotes Irenaeus and Athanasius by name — "the Son of God became man so that we might become God" — and §1988 calls justification a passage into the divine nature. Aquinas speaks of grace as making the soul deiform. A site that pretends the Latin Church knows only a courtroom is not fully sourced; it is lazy. The real divergence is not whether deification is named, but what grace is and what the Christian is for. Scholastic theology, from the high Middle Ages, treated justifying grace as a created quality infused into the soul (the later handbook term is "created grace"), so that God indwells by a finite effect. The East has unbrokenly taught the grammar of medicine: salvation as the healing of human nature by the uncreated energies of God Himself, so that the goal is not a verdict plus a quality, but communion.8

On the meaning of the doctrine, the answer must distinguish — for the caricatures on both sides are equally false. Theosis is not pantheism. The creature is never dissolved nor confused with the Creator; it remains itself, and God's essence remains wholly beyond every creature. Theosis is not a metaphor. Its ground in the Scriptures is ontological — "partakers of the divine nature," "that they may be made perfect in one," "gods" (John 10:34, on Psalm 82:6) — and it names a real participation, by grace, in the uncreated energies of God, of the very kind that the deified humanity of Christ and the glorified saints exhibit in the light of Tabor (Matthew 17:1–8). And theosis is not earned. It is the work of grace from first to last: "it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:13); yet it is received by a free and working faith — "faith without works is dead" (James 2:20) — in the divine-human synergy that Scripture everywhere assumes and the Church's ascetic tradition everywhere disciplines.9

The purpose of the distinction of essence and energies is exactly to hold together two truths that a creature cannot release: that God is utterly beyond every creature ("no man hath seen God at any time," John 1:18), and that God truly gives Himself to the creature ("that they may be partakers of his holiness," Hebrews 12:10; "I in them and thou in me"). By the essence, God is inaccessible; by the energies — His uncreated grace, light, life, love — He is truly, really, personally communicable, so that communion with God is not a cipher but the very substance of salvation. The alternative, in the later Latin school, is justifying grace as a created quality (ST I-II, q. 110), so that the believer receives a gift from God and, through it, the indwelling of the Trinity — but the gift itself is not God. The East has always said: if the gift is not the Giver, communion has been redescribed as a transaction. Little-known Eastern witnesses say it without the later Palamite vocabulary: Isaac the Syrian, that "the ladder of the Kingdom is within you"; Nicholas Cabasilas, that life in Christ is participation in His mysteries, not a legal status; Symeon the New Theologian, that the baptized who have not seen the light have not yet known what baptism is.10

And the consequences are not academic; they are the difference between two prayers. The soul shaped by forensic soteriology confesses as a debtor before a tribunal, anxious for acquittal, mindful of merit. The soul shaped by theosis confesses as a patient before a Physician, seeking healing, longing for union; and the entire life of the Church — the Mysteries, the fasts, the ascetic discipline, the prayer of the heart — is the therapy by which the healing proceeds. It is the same God; it is not the same religion. And it is worth noting, for the honesty of this site, that the Orthodox share Trent's own condemnation of "faith alone" (Trent, Session 6, canon 9) — the Orthodox are with Rome against Luther on the necessity of good works — while holding that the goal of those works is not merit but transformation: "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12).11

Why, finally, does a soul need this doctrine? Because only theosis makes the promises of the Gospel mean what they say. If the Christian's end is nothing but a verdict, then the Gospel is a transaction, and the world remains as it was; if the Christian's end is union with God, then everything is transfigured, for "we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). The Fathers did not devise this; they received it, and they guard it with their lives. The Church that still confesses it, and still practices the way to it, is the Church in which a soul with an actual sin and an actual hope can be healed.

Replies to the objections

  1. Reply to Obj. 1. Justification and remission are real and are part of the Orthodox confession; they are simply not the whole. The East confesses that God "justifieth the ungodly" (Romans 4:5) and forgives wholly; what it denies is that the end of forgiveness is acquittal. In Scripture, to be forgiven is to be set on the way to healing — "behold, thou art made whole" (John 5:14); the same Lord forgives and heals, and He forgives "that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins" (Matthew 9:6) — power, not bookkeeping. Justification in the East is not forensic fiction; it is the beginning of theosis, and the whole New Testament runs from forgiveness to union: "For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son" (Romans 8:29).12
  2. Reply to Obj. 2. The ontological reading is not late fancy; it is the plainest grammar of the texts, and the "rhetoric" objection is self-refuting. "Partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4) is not the language of imitation — imitation would be "partakers of godliness"; it is the language of participation in what God is. And the earliest Fathers, before any "Eastern" school existed, stated it as the very purpose of the Incarnation: Irenaeus and Athanasius (cited above) are second-and-fourth-century, universal, and echoed by the Latin West (Augustine, Enarr. in Ps. 49.2: God "makes gods of those who were men"). If this is rhetoric, then Irenaeus, Athanasius, the Liturgies, and the Latin fathers are all rhetorical together — and the Objection's "realism" turns out to be the novelty.13
  3. Reply to Obj. 3. The distinction is an explicitation, not an invention, and Rome's own rejection of it was not received even by Rome's own theologians in the end. The distinction between what God is and what God does, between God's transcendent being and His self-communication, is implicit in Scripture itself ("no man hath seen God" / "we shall see him as he is") and in the entire patristic tradition, not least Maximus the Confessor. The councils of 1341–1351 were councils of the Church that received the doctrine as the faith of the Church — the same principle of reception this chapter defends — and the Synodikon received them into the Church's perpetual confession. Florence's rejection of Palamas through Thomas's categories bound no one east of Latium; and modern Catholic theology has moved, step by step and without a fight, back toward the distinction Rome anathematized in 1439. What the Objection calls a novelty, the Church of the Fathers confesses as her own — and what Rome imposed on the East in 1439, Rome's own scholars now quietly concede.14

Citations for this chapter

  1. Romans 3:24; Colossians 1:14 (KJV): Romans 3:24. Council of Trent, Session VI (1547), ch. 7 ("the infusion of justice… inherent"), and canon 9 (condemning "faith alone"): wikisource; hanover.edu.
  2. The treatment of 2 Peter 1:4 and 2 Corinthians 5:21 as metaphorical in the forensic tradition (Lutheran and post-Tridentine "imputation/infusion" schools) is the background of this objection; the texts: 2 Peter 1:4 (KJV).
  3. The novelties objection is that of Barlaam (14th c.) and of the Florentine Decree for the Greeks (1439): uoregon.edu (text); Denzinger 1302–1304.
  4. 2 Peter 1:4 (KJV): biblegateway.com.
  5. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word 54 (c. 318): NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 4, newadvent.org/fathers/2802.htm. Greek: αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐνηνθρώπησεν, ἵνα ἡμεῖς θεοποιηθῶμεν.
  6. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.20.7 and 3.19.1: ANF 1, newadvent.org/fathers/0103420.htm (Book IV) and newadvent.org/fathers/0103.htm (Book III).
  7. John 17:23; 1 John 3:2 (KJV): 1 John 3:2.
  8. Catechism of the Catholic Church §460 (Irenaeus, Athanasius, Aquinas on becoming God) and §1988: vatican.va (§460). Augustine on deification: Enarrationes in Psalmos 49.2. The remaining divergence — created quality vs uncreated energy — is treated in Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1957), chs. 6–8, and in Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 110.
  9. John 10:34 (Psalm 82:6); Matthew 17:1–8; Philippians 2:12–13; James 2:20, 24 (KJV): Philippians 2:12–13; James 2:20. Synergism (the divine-human cooperation) is the consistent Eastern reading of such texts; the standard treatment is that of Maximus the Confessor and the ascetic tradition.
  10. Created/infused grace: Trent, Session VI, ch. 7 (Denzinger 1528–1530); Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 110. Eastern witnesses beyond Palamas: Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies (Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1984), Homily 6 / the "ladder within"; Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ (SVS Press); Symeon the New Theologian, Discourses 22 and the Hymns. Palamas, The Triads III, trans. N. Gendle (CWS, 1983).
  11. Trent, Session VI, canon 9 (against "faith alone"): hanover.edu. That the Orthodox and Catholic positions against Luther on works are closer than either is to Protestantism is historical and theological common ground.
  12. Romans 4:5; John 5:14; Matthew 9:6; Romans 8:29 (KJV): Romans 8:29.
  13. Augustine on deification (fn. 8) and the second-century witnesses (fn. 6) are the reply in full; the "partakers of the divine nature" syntax is the standard grammatical argument that participation, not imitation, is meant.
  14. Maximus and the essence–activity distinction; the councils of 1341–1351 and the Synodikon; the modern Catholic rapprochement toward Palamas (acknowledged in Catholic scholarship since the mid-20th c.): Gregory Palamas, The Triads (n. 10); the Florence rejection and its non-reception: Chapter 1, fn. 10.