Anthropology, Deification, and Asceticism (2 of 3)

Theological Letters

Greetings subscribers. Two weeks back, I announced a trio of theological letters on anthropology, deification, and asceticism, respectively. You can read the first of these, covering the anthropology of the Eastern fathers, here. Today marks the second installment, looking at deification.

By way of context, a dear friend, Raleigh, who works in the field of counseling-psychology asked me to consult on a forthcoming book project. The work looks at Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) in the light of Christian theology. Because Raleigh has grown increasingly sympathetic to Eastern Orthodoxy over the years, he asked me to help him better understand the Eastern patristic perspective on anthropology, deification, and asceticism. The request prompted the present series of letters. Be watching for the third letter next week.

To all my subscribers, thank you for subscribing. To my paid subscribers, thank you for your support. And to any visitors, please consider subscribing and supporting my work. Enjoy!

Dear Raleigh,

In my previous letter, I spoke about the creation of man, his Fall, and the road back to life. What I want to make clear in this letter is precisely what is meant by “life” in this context. 

In my first letter, I noted that man was created to partake of the very Life of God. As also mentioned, C. S. Lewis makes the same point in Mere Christianity with a distinction between the biological life of animals, bios (βίος), and the life found in God, zoē (ζωή). Though the former is native to us, we are called to partake of the latter — of the Eternal Life of God.¹ To the ear of many modern readers, the point may sound like a reiteration of the promise that the believer will live with God forever in Heaven — as if the Life spoken of here is mere longevity. But this simplistic reading misses the profundity of the claim. No doubt, there is some truth to the idea that the “eternal life” offered in the gospel of Christ entails longevity.² But as the Eastern Church fathers recognize, the biblical text is claiming something much more profound, and to see this something more, we must look at a term I introduced in my first letter. 

When mentioning the “attributes” of God, I said that “energies” is the more ancient term.³ This term in Greek, energeia (ἐνέργειαι), has a long history, but for our purposes we need only understand a couple of points.⁴ The first is that the term refers to those operative powers by which a thing expresses its nature, or what it is. For example, the mind expresses its rational nature by operations of speech or analysis. Fire expresses its pyrrotic nature with operations of heating and lighting.⁵ In other words, there is a distinction between the nature of a thing — what it is — and the energetic expressions of that nature.

This distinction paves the way for the second thing we must understand about the term. The Alexandrian Jews and early Christians — first St. Paul and then the Eastern fathers with him — observed that some “energies” are communicable, capable of being transferred from one being to another.⁶ Iron, for example, is naturally susceptible to the energies of fire. When  the two commune, the pyrrotic energies of fire take up residence within the iron, causing it to glow and burn. The iron remains iron, of course, but it bears within its person, as it were, energies from a foreign nature. 

The concept was critical to how Alexandrian Jews, St. Paul, and the Eastern Christians understood our relationship to the spiritual world around us. A human being is naturally an open system. Physically, we take in our environment — food, air, and water — and the things we imbibe become part of us. The same is true spiritually. We are made to be receptive to our spiritual environment. We are spiritually porous, you might say, imbibing the energies of the spirits that inhabit our world. 

While the notion may sound strange, most intuitive understand the point in a certain context. Evident enough to most is that toying with black magic or the occult is dangerous, precisely because it opens one up to malevolent spirits. The notion of “spiritual energy” offers some explanation of why this is so. Just as breathing in toxic air or consuming rotten food can make one physically ill, so communing with demons can make one spiritual ill. Such was the more ancient understanding of demoniacs. Persons in communion with demons were not puppets but participants, taking into themselves the energies of demons, much like the way iron takes into itself the energies of fire. And the concept was not limited to dark spirits. In 2 Maccabees, several angels appear to protect the Temple from desecration, and they protect it by the “energies” of God.⁷ 

Lest one recoil from such language, as sounding too “New Age,” this manner of speaking appears often in St. Paul.⁸ The Apostle speaks of himself being energized by God for ministry to the gentiles — and of the Apostle Peter being energized for ministry to the Jews.⁹ Paul also speaks of God’s energy working cooperatively with the energy of believers, making them “co-workers.”¹⁰ And much like in our above talk of demonics, Paul says the Children of Wrath are energized by The Devil.¹¹

Now, the importance of such concepts is that they shed light on two things stated in my first letter: The first is the nature of the divine Life we are called to partake of and the second is what it means that man is made to bear, not only the image of God, but also his likeness. I’ll begin with the former.

Before ever reading the Eastern fathers, I engaged in a study of death and the afterlife in ancient philosophy and religion, and this exploration awakened me to a series of anomalies in the New Testament. I was struck by what appeared to be three obvious falsehoods, if not outright contradictions, about resurrection and eternal life — all in St. Paul. The first was Paul’s statement that Christ, having been raised from the dead, cannot die again.¹² The point seemed to me a non sequitir.¹³ Surely Lazarus died again — as did Jairus’ daughter and the son of the widow of Nain.¹⁴ Yet, all were raised. What does being raised have to do with immunity to death? 

The second apparent falsehood was that Paul speaks of Christ as the first fruits of the resurrection, or of “those who have fallen asleep.”¹⁵ Likewise, Paul refers to Christ as the Firstborn from the Dead — a title repeated by Christ himself in the book of Revelation.¹⁶ Yet, Christ is not the first to be raised. He himself raised three before his own resurrection, and we could name several more raised in the Old Testament.¹⁷ In what sense, then, is Christ the firstborn from the dead or the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep?

The third is that, when writing to Timothy, Paul identifies God as he who alone is immortal.¹⁸ From what I could tell, however, the gospel offers to the believer immortality,¹⁹ and this is not to mention the angels who, too, appear to be immune to death.²⁰ So in what sense is God alone immortal? 

I would eventually discover answers in the NT, Paul offering his own explanations. What I didn’t realize at the time, however, was that this thread, if tugged, would lead straight to how the Eastern Church fathers understand the promises of the Christian gospel.²¹

The first key I discovered to unlocking this riddle is that the NT speaks about two different types of resurrection. Jesus himself speaks about the resurrection to (eternal) life or of the righteous, on the one hand, and the resurrection to condemnation or eternal punishment, on the other.²² Likewise, Paul, though affirming that the dead will rise for judgment,²³ speaks about his hope to attain the resurrection from the dead.²⁴ Notice he does not speak about his hope to be found righteous after being raised — rising being guaranteed but reward uncertain. Rather, his hope is to attain a certain type of resurrection, this being the goal. Likewise, the book of Revelation speaks about two different resurrections, declaring, “Blessed and holy are those who share in the first resurrection”²⁵ — the implication, of course, being that not all resurrections are blessed.

When considering what differentiates these types of resurrections, St. Paul offers an answer. In his lengthy discourse on resurrection to the Corinthians,²⁶ he defines resurrection as the putting off of corruption for incorruption, the putting off of death for immortality.²⁷ Resurrection of this kind is a metamorphosis, which is why Paul speaks about the unique glory of each body and explains that the believer’s body is buried one way but raised another.²⁸ The body is transfigured from a body susceptible to death and corruption to one that is not.

Upon seeing this, the answers to the first two anomalies were obvious. Not all raising is resurrection, and not all resurrection is the resurrection to life. So, while Lazarus (and others) were raised, they were not resurrected, which is why he (and they) remained susceptible to biological death. — I would later be stunned to discover that ancient iconography understood this full well, labeling icons of Lazarus’ reanimation “the raising of Lazarus” (ἐγείρω = egeirō), not “the resurrection of Lazarus” (ἀνάστασις = anastasis). — And this also explains why Christ is the Firstborn or First Fruits of Dead: He is the first to be raised in a way that displays the metamorphosis described by St. Paul and promised in the gospel. 

So, how is such a transformation possible? The answer to this question is also provided by the NT and addresses the lingering anomaly about the immortality of God. St. Peter says quite clearly how the believer is to escape the corruption that has come upon our world: We escape the corruption that has come upon the world by partaking of the divine nature.²⁹ And here, we see why Paul can say that God alone is immortal, and yet, God offers to the believer immortality. The offer of the gospel is the very same offer of Eden: To commune with God, partaking of his nature, and imbibing divine Life — the immortality that belongs to God alone.  

Before reading the Eastern Church fathers, I managed to put these pieces together, but I still lacked the mechanism for understanding how this is possible. What does it mean to partake of the divine nature? Upon discovering the concept of spiritual energies, however, I finally saw in Paul the very things the fathers saw as well. Just as iron might commune with fire and come to carry within itself the energies of fire, so the believer, by communing with God, might partake of the divine nature and with it divine immortality and incorruption. Such is the offer and the hope of the gospel: The Life of God, which is in Christ, is the very Life he offers to us.³⁰

The transformation of a believer by communion with God is what the Eastern fathers call “deification” (θέωσις, or theōsis). The term does not, of course, suggest that any creature might ever become a member of the Holy Trinity — certainly not.³¹ Just as the iron remains iron despite being enflamed by fire, so the resurrected believer remains human, even when ablaze with God. But to be transfigured by God’s energies, bearing within our person the Life of God, is the promise of the Christian gospel. Just as Christ transfigured his human body and soul by its communion with his divinity, raising it immortal and incorruptible, so, too, our hope is that through our communion with him, we, too, might be transfigured and raised as he was.³² 

As I said at the outset, to think of eternal life as mere longevity is to miss the profundity of Christian hope. I trust you can now see why. The offer of eternal life is not an offer to perform a magic trick, suspending biological death indefinitely. Rather, divine Life is a categorically different mode of life. God is not subject to the throes of biological life and death. God is not susceptible to corruption or malformality. God is the source of Life, utterly immune to death in all of its manifestations. The Life of God is something wholly different in kind than mere biological life. And this type of Life is the thing we are offered in the gospel.

This goes to a second point I raised in my first letter. I spoke about man as an image-bearer, created in the image of God and made to reflect his likeness. As I explained, the image of God refers to our spiritual nature. But likeness is an active imitation of God. Like the concept of “eternal life,” the temptation is to read the point in a rather mundane fashion, missing the profundity of the point. For example, one might be tempted to think, “God is kind to people, so we, too, should be kind to people.” The thought is not entirely false, but again, it falls far short of the truth.