Theology Today

Schleiermacher found himself caught between oppressive orthodoxy and religion's despisers. As a corrective, he described piety as nondual awareness of God that issues in equanimity and love. This essay examines his understanding of immediate self-consciousness and contemplation as they provide him with a way of describing the interdependence between divine transcendence and the primacy of love. The analysis of mind together with what it revealed about religion provided Schleiermacher, and potentially provides our own generation, with one way of retaining a generosity of spirit amid ongoing culture wars.

In the current renewal of interest in the deification theme, the consensual and homogeneous character of this concept in early Christian writers is generally assumed. This article concisely examines the intricate complexity of the emergence and development of theosis in patristic theology, with acknowledgement of the initially marginal, rhetorical, multidimensional, and often contextualized role of this concept prior to its theological consolidation in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor in the sixth and seventh centuries. Important to the Palamite and Neo-Palamite Eastern Orthodox theology, the distinction between the divine essence and energy is not necessarily a representative characteristic of early church fathers.

In Christ, we do not touch the divine essence or become divine essence, but we become God by grace through partaking of him in his uncreated energies. Streaming forth from the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation like rays from the sun, the doctrine of deification is the outer face of the Orthodox Church's answer to the ancient riddle of the one and the many. Reality is not a monism but a communion of the many in the Three in One. The doctrine of deification gives voice to the experience of the saints: God is altogether inaccessible to creatures, and yet he is at the same time altogether accessible in his uncreated energies.

Contemporary theology has increasingly attended to the category of the beautiful. The relation of beauty to the theme of theosis implies two questions: Is God beautiful? Does earthly beauty lead to God? A strong Christian tradition sees beauty as a quality of the divine and of grace, sometimes explicitly relating it to divinization. But for Christian theology, the revelation of God in Christ and in his cross transforms the notion of beauty itself to include what in itself seems unattractive. A converted sense of beauty is both the sign of theosis and a means to attaining it.

O Lord, save Your people and bless Your inheritance, preserve the fullness of your church; sanctify those who love the beauty of Your House; glorify them in return by your divine power.

—Prayer of the Second Antiphon, Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom

Theologians in the classical Reformed tradition have not always recognized the elements in their own theologies that bear striking similarity to the doctrine of theosis principally advocated in Greek patristic and Byzantine theology and carried onward by historic and contemporary Eastern Orthodox thought. After a brief review of the classical Reformed doctrine of Christus in nobis (“Christ in us”), I propose a reconsideration and reformulation of the viability of theosis within classical Reformed theology, positing not only its fidelity to the biblical soteriology that Reformed theology seeks to guard but its suitability within Reformed theological and ecclesiastical contexts. It is indeed possible to conceive of a “Reformed theosis” provided it enjoins a certain substructural transmutation from that of its Eastern theological forebears.