Theosis Devotions

Father, As we look at this topic that has been hushed up in Western Christianity for so long due to misunderstanding, I ask that you would send the Holy Spirit to enlighten our minds and hearts to grasp, or at least begin to grasp the truth of it. Help us to break through the molds of Western Christendom that have taught us that we are less than, or far away and need the Church to help us get closer to God. Help us to see that there really is not much difference between theosis and sanctification, other than language. Let the Spirit in which you prayed in John 17 permeate these brief thoughts. Thank you, Lord. In Jesus’ name, Amen. What is theosis? Simply put, it is the ultimate goal or telos of salvation in Orthodox Christian traditions. What is it, though? It is the belief that Jesus came to earth as a man, so that by believing in Him, we humans might become one with Him. What is sanctification, then? The process of walking out our salvation, with the help of the Holy Spirit, until we become “perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect”. It is the process of becoming holy so that we are fit for heaven when we die. Do you see the difference in language? In stance? In Orthodox belief, original sin is not a reality. Was there a fall? Yes. Do they tend to see it as having or being a norming norm for humanity, in the way that many protestants, at least, see the doctrine of total depravity? No. Gregory of Palamas, whom we will look at over a couple of memesplanations in the coming week, believed that human passions were actually not native to us. He believed that they were things which were actually counter to our nature. The process of becoming holy (whether you term it sanctification, theosis, or divinization doesn’t matter much) is the process by which we grow closer to God, toward the end of becoming one with Him in heaven. Does this mean that we lose our individuality? No. It means that we gain communion with Him, for eternity. We get all of God, for eternity, and God gets all of us, His whole image, reunited. The way I see it, heaven is unity with God. What is this based on? There are several prooftexts, and a long tradition of thought about it among the Orthodox Churches. Ever wonder what the image of God is? Ever wonder why there is such an emphasis on unity in the New Testament, in particular? Theosis can explain some of that. The unity in question for the New Testament writers is not a top-down thing, but rather it is a Spirit-up kind of thing. The Holy Spirit comes and knits us together, and we grow in unity and love among ourselves as we grow closer to God. That is the unity I am talking about, mutually self-sacrificial love. That is what is supposed to characterize the Jesus Community, not infighting, empire building, or sniping at one another for doctrinal misunderstandings. I digress. So what is theosis, then? It is the process of walking out your justification, of, “Working out (y)our salvation with fear and trembling”. That is not a favorite scripture for many of us, I’d wager. That is not fluffy bunnies and rainbows, that is the meat of the Word, boys and girls. So what is sanctification, then? It is the process, aided by the Holy Spirit, of doing good works in response to the Love that we have received. I think that is more or less how most Western Christians would probably define that term, in a rough sense. It is the Holy Spirit working in and through us to realize the justification we received at the foot of the cross when we surrendered our lives to Jesus and made Him our Lord and Savior. How different are these terms, really? In practice, not very, in end goal, particularly in terms of linguistics, worlds apart. I touched on that earlier. In the West, we are nothing but poor, miserable sinners, saved by grace. That, while saying that we still in some small, corrupted way, carry the image of God in us. This line of thinking puts a great chasm between us and God, which only the cross can span. Most of the West would agree with these metaphors. In the East, man is still basically good to start with, but in need of a doctor and a hospital to heal and restore him, not a judge in a courtroom to merely declare him righteous. In the East, the cross does pave the way, but to wholeness and Communion, not to penal justice and rule keeping, to “stay within the boundaries set by the law”. In the East, we can be restored to full Communion, and that is the expected end of the Christian life. In the West, we simply “go to heaven when we die”. Personally, the Eastern concepts speak far more to me. I want you to really consider these things, as we walk through the next month of teachings on this, both in devotions and in soundbite form in the memesplanations during the week. Part of what I want to do in this study is to show that although we have come to use different terminology, the ends truly are the same. I want to show that we are not as different as we have come to see ourselves as being. I hope to stoke your sanctified imagination with new metaphors and understandings as we go. Next week, I will show you some of the Old Testament texts used to support theosis, as an echo of some of my memesplanations this week, then the following week, we will dive into the New Testament to see what is there. After that, we will wrap it up with a nice little bow at the end of the month.

Father, as we seek for hints as to who you meant us to be, be with us. Guide our hearts and our minds as we look at these Psalms today. Help us to understand who we are, so that we can be truly humble, cross-shaped, sacrificial lovers of you and others. Holy Spirit, be present with us today. Jesus, come and remind us of who you are that we might emulate you. In Jesus’ name, Amen So the only passages that I could find relatively easily that suggest humanity’s true nature are in the Psalms. That means that they are poetry, so take them for what they are. We will read sections from Psalm 8 and 82 this morning, and I will try to show that they support the idea (indirectly, mind you) of theosis. Feel free to flame me in the comments, call me a heretic or a proof-texter. Let’s have a conversation. Anyway, back to the passages at hand. (all passages are from The Passion Translation) Psalm 8:4-6 Why would you bother with puny, mortal man or care about human beings? Yet what honor you have given to men, created only a little lower than Elohim, crownedwith glory and magnificence. You have delegated to them rulership over all you have made, with everything under their authority, placing earth itself under the feetof your image-bearers. Psalm 82:6-7 Didn’t I commission you as judges, saying, ‘You are all like gods, since you judge on my behalf. You are all like sons of the Most High, my representatives.’ Nevertheless, in death you are nothing but mere men! You will be laid in the ground like any prince and you will die.” Taken together, these passages paint an interesting picture, don’t they? Psalm 8 opens with ecstatic praise to God for the splendor and glory of creation, then questions in v 5 why God would value us, when there are so many larger, more powerful, more majestic things that He made. Yet, we are just a little lower than Elohim (God) in the created order. Not lower than angels, for how can a lower being accurately judge one that is above it? (1 Corinthians 6:3) If it is the case, as Paul says, that we will judge the angels, then we must have greater authority and status than they do. If we are above the angels, but just a little lower than God himself, then we truly do have the right to judge all things, as Psalm 82 suggests. God gave us discernment and wisdom. He created us to partake in His nature, to fully partner with Him, but we asserted our own will, our own pride over realizing that truth. How is it that we have this delegated authority, that we are just a little lower than Elohim? We have been made in the very image of God. That topic has taken many great theologians many books to try to sort out, and I find most of their solutions incomplete at best, not that I would pretend to know better or to have a better solution or definition at the moment. Suffice to say, for now, that for our purposes here, relationality is the aspect of the imago Dei that I am leaning on. That is the necessary assumption, and seems to be the basis of this theosis and deification language in the East. If we are like God, then how are we like God? Clearly we are finite and He is infinite, so that cannot be it. He is Spirit, and we have a spirit, so that could be a part of it. We seem to have three parts which are nigh inseparable (Body, Soul, and Spirit, in community with one another... We see David talking to his soul in a handful of places in the Psalms), and God is three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (in Eternal, Perfect Community). That could be a part of it. We also exist in 3 clusters of relationship, God & Us, Us Among Ourselves, and Us & the World. Threes seem to matter. So that relationality is what I am after. God made us in His image, and because of that, we have the right to steward the world, the responsibility to care for one another, and the capacity for relationship and communion with Him. These passages establish those things for us, and we need that foundation to look at what theosis is in the New Testament next week. This week’s memesplanations will seek to support that with some patristic thought, and some verses, but more of that will actually come the week after next, after which we will wrap this series up. After that, we will shift to a more liturgical focus, with Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Resurrection Sunday.

Lord, As we open your Word, help us to get what we need from it today. Holy Spirit, come and open our minds and hearts to hear what You are saying. If we need a recalibration, then recalibrate us today. Help us to grasp who we are in Jesus so that we can embrace the suffering that will shape us to be ready to join with You. Sanctify us in Your Truth, cleanse and rest our divine imaginations that we would be able to see that which You put in Your Word accurately today. In Jesus’ name, Amen. There are many passages which could lend themselves to this project, but we will work from ones that we will talk about this week in the memesplanations: Philippians 2:5-7, John 10:34, Hebrews 2:7, and Romans 8:17. In John, we see Jesus defend himself against charges of blasphemy by quoting Psalm 82:6, which we just talked about yesterday. In that verse, God chastises the children of Israel (who were given the law), by saying that they are gods and children of God, and it was given to them to be judges in the earth, but they were failing in that task. So rather than ascending to the heavens, they would die, and die like men, then be buried. In Romans, Paul riffs on the theme of being “children of God”, and how can we be children and heirs if we cannot partake in His nature? But wait, if God is wholly other than us, then how can we participate in his nature and in his treasures? That is why Jesus came, was made incarnate, and died on the cross, only to be raised again on the 3rd day. He became human that we would be able to be made one with God. That is what At-One-Ment is about, not simply erasing our sin. There is, however, a condition on receiving the offered gift: we must partner with Jesus in His suffering. We cannot be resurrected without first dying, and dying daily, as that old nature tries to reassert itself on the daily, doesn’t it? That old part of us that was given to the dominion of sin, though in the East, they would not use these terms, as they do not believe in original sin. For them, any sin nature we may have lived under was due to our own choices, not to some pre-existent original sin that is the domain of humanity since the Fall. I digress, though. How do we partner with Him in His suffering? We learn to love as He does. We learn to empty ourselves of pride, walking in a state of kenosis is suffering, and the world will try to beat up on us for living in such a radical way. In Philippians, we learn about the way of kenosis from Paul, and that we are called to live in the same way, forgetting ourselves in order to love God and others more fully. That does not mean that we neglect physical needs for extended periods. If Jesus can operate as a poor, powerless human, though He is God, even to the point of dying to save us from our own pride, so that we can be one with Him, even here and now, but to finish the process when we die. This is why elsewhere, Paul tells us to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling”. I could talk about this for far longer, just diving into these passages for their own sake... What do you guys think? A study on what it is to be “in Christ” after Easter? In the Hebrews passage, we see the writer pull directly from the Septuagint in Psalm 8. I will talk more about this passage in Saturday’s memesplanation. I find it interesting that they (whoever the author was) pulled from the Greek translation, rather than directly from the Hebrew original text. I don’t know, but this is one of the prooftexts, though the Greek used is what we get the word “angel” from , rather than the more controversial elohim or a Greek equivalent such as Theos. What do you guys think about theosis based on these texts? Do you think it is heretical or perhaps might be something that we have missed out on here in the West? Let me know in the comments.

Father, Send Your Holy Spirit to guide us and knit us together in love, that we would learn to love. That we would truly prefer one another and have that as a testimony in the world, rather than legalism and fractious competition. Let that shift in each of us unlock the way forward to greater unity with You. Help us to take the meat, so to speak, and throw out the bones. Help us to grasp the depth of this topic and cause that to birth a greater desire for you. In Jesus’ name, Amen In the last month, we have looked at definitions and scriptural references for the concept of theosis. I have a suspicion that if we grow closer to God on an individual level, then the larger divisions in the Church will start to fall away. I really love John 17, and you’ll see a glimpse of that in Saturday’s memesplanation. So, what is theosis? Theosis is the doctrine, from the Eastern Orthodox side of the family tree, that teaches that the purpose of salvation is that we would be able to be united with God in some way. This takes not only identity work, but a complete 180 in how we relate with the world. I say that it takes identity work because until we realize who and whose we are, in Christ, this whole process is unlikely to ever take place in us. We need to know that we do not need to defend ourselves because our Father will always protect us. We need to know that we are so loved by Him, that even were it only for one of us, He would have still sacrificed Himself to be reconnected with that one human being. Yes, even you. Yes, even me. Then, as we become rooted and grounded in that love, the next step is to allow it to flow out from us. Love on people. Bless them. Do not be concerned with reciprocation, let God deal with those who don’t handle it well. Love without boundaries or limits, as the Lord guides you. Yes, as you grow closer to to Him, you will begin to hear His voice more and more clearly. His voice will become life to you. His heart will begin to unite with yours. That is the essence of theosis, divinization, glorification, Christian Perfection, or deification, and I would even hazard that sanctification is not really that far off from this, either. Then we opened the Bible, first looking at the Old Testament (very quickly) for hints that that is something we should expect or not. I was not anywhere near exhaustive, but there were a few passages which I pulled at which seem to suggest these sorts of things. The most famous passages are in the Psalms (8 & 82, to be precise), and could be understood in multiple ways, given context. Maybe not the strongest argument for it, however, the notion of being “created in the image of God” from Genesis seems to be the strongest foundation for this line of thinking, at least in my opinion. Then, last week, we looked at a handful of passages in the New Testament. This is where we find the bulk of support for this idea. Jesus Himself, in John 17, and other places, not only taught that His Father is ours as well (which makes us Sons of God [son, here, is a neutral term. Women are not excluded or minimized in any way]) but prayed that we would live in a love-based communion, just as God does, and that that would draw the nations unto the Kingdom, and through that, change the world. Philippians 2 also speaks to the nature of Jesus’ love for us, a kind of love that we are exhorted to grow into in the Johanine and Petrine epistles (those from Peter and John), as well as elsewhere in Paul’s letters. As children of God, see Romans 8, we must share in our Father’s nature in some way, and we also stand to inherit all He is, but we must accept Jesus’ suffering as our own in order to fully activate that promise and become One with God. Without the suffering, we would simply revert to pride, and take the power and authority for granted, using it in precisely the opposite spirit to that of Jesus. What do you guys and gals think? Is Theosis a line of thought and belief that is worthy of more thoughtful and prayerful engagement? Let me know what you think in the comments.