5 - Theosis and the Divine Image

Summary

Chapter 5 describes the restoration and theosis of the image God which, Gregory stipulates, begins at baptism. The chapter’s argument proceeds as follows: if we consider together a) Gregory’s theological anthropology in which God creates the human person specifically to be vulnerable or porous (borrowing these terms from Charles Taylor) to the spiritual realm, b) Gregory’s high pneumatology, c) his ideas about the sacrament of baptism and d) the interaction between the image of God and the devil, we can interpret the divinity of the image literally and in the broadest terms, since it incorporates the ontological, functional, ethical, relational and experiential aspects of being a divine image.