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Deification: Consensual and Cogent1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

F. W. Norris
F. W. Norris
Affiliation:
Emmanuel School of Religion, Johnson City, TN 37601
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Extract

Many traditional Protestants are rereading their heritages through the Church catholic. That includes reading them through Eastern Orthodoxy. To bring forward the best of any particular Christian heritage for the whole Church or to enrich such a heritage by drawing from the whole Church, we need to be keen students of church history, scripture and contemporary situations. Every effort to restate the gospel for the next century must recognize that people see through their participation in communities. All Christians worship together in some kinds of congregations. We may try to get distance from what we believe and how we act, but if we move outside the circle, we take up a stance within another community. As Christians we read and understand from within the Church.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , November 1996 , pp. 411 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1996

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References

page 411 note 2 See my presidential address to the North American Patristic Society, ‘Black Marks on the Communities' Manuscripts’, The jourmal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994), 443–466CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 411 note 3 Gregory of Nyssa Homilies on Canticles 6, PC 44, 892A–C notices that theōria can refer to the ‘consideration of something’, ‘the things meditated upon’, or ‘actual contemplation’. Diodore of Tarsus in the prologue to his Psalm commentary speaks of theōria as biblical interpretation, cf. cfMariés, L., ‘Proemium in Pss’, Recherches de Science Religieuse 9, (1919), 88Google Scholar. Also see Vaccari, A., ‘La “teoria” exegetica antiochena’, Biblica 1 (1920), 3–36 & 15 (1938), 94–101Google Scholar. The Suidae Lexicon, 2.103.6 (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1967) indicates that Diodore wrote a work, now lost, entitled On theDifference between Theory and Allegory.

Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)Google Scholar creatively constructed an epistemology of involvement. Crewdson, Joan, Christian Doctrine in the Light of Michael Polanyi's Theory of Personal Knowledge: A Personalist Theology (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1994)Google Scholar, discusses his usefulness for theology.

page 412 note 4 Within my own heritage of Christian Churches/Churches of Christ, William Robinson from Great Britain worked with Sergei Bulgakov in the Faith and Order Movement and the World Council of Churches. He had a broad appreciation of Orthodoxy: ‘The Eastern Church and the Unity of Christendom’, Christendom 3 (1938), 364–376. Yet deification was not one of his themes. Ashanin, Charles, an Orthodox theologian, pointed out eastern features of Robinson's positions in ‘The Sacramental Theology of William Robinson’, Essayson Orthodox Christianity and Church History (Indianapolis, IN: Broad Ripple Laser Type, 1990), 243–253Google Scholar, first published in Encounter48 (1987), 35–44. Walker, Dean E. often spoke in Irenaean terms of koinoia as fellowship with God and restoration to God as in ‘Alpha and Omega in Restoration: “sub specie aeternitatis”’, Adventuring for Christian Unity, (Johnson City, TN: Emmanuel School of Religion, 1992), 335–352Google Scholar. Fife, Robert has done the same in his ‘The Fellowship of Christ’, Celebration of Heritage (Los Angeles: The Westwood Christian Foundation, 1992), 125–138Google Scholar.

page 412 note 5 Irenaeus, Against All Heresies 5. Preface

page 412 note 6 Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54

page 412 note 7 Fiddes, Paul, Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1988)Google Scholar develops important criticisms of many theories of salvation as systematic explanations. Perhaps they are actually more like extended analogies or illustrations.

page 414 note 8 Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 38.13. The words reappear in Or. 45.9. Nellas, Panayiotis, Deification in Christ. Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person, trans, by Russell, Norman (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1987Google Scholar) makes this and its larger context one of six major patristic texts on which he bases his sense of deification.

page 415 note 9 Winslow, Donald, The Dynamics of Salvation: A Study in Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘Patristic Monograph Series, 7’ (Cambridge, MA: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1979), 179–180Google Scholar.

page 415 note 10 Callimachus, Hymn to Diana 159; Iamblichus, Concerning the Life of Pythagoras 23.103; Proclus, Commentary on Plato's Parmenides, 1498; Julian, Or. 5.178b.

page 415 note 11 Alexander of Aphrodisias, On Mixture 216.14–218.6 states what he takes to be Chrysippus's views on mixing and develops this understanding as Chrysippus's third sense. See Arnim, SVF 2.473, Long, A.A. & Sedley, D.N., The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Vol. 1, 290–294, Vol. II, 287–291Google Scholar, and Sambusky, S., Physics of the Stoics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 11–17Google Scholar.

page 416 note 12 Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 18.42; Or. 22.4; Ep. 101.31.

page 416 note 13 Athanasius, Discourse Against the Arians 3.1, 17, 19, 24–25.

page 417 note 14 Gregory Nazianzen, On His Life, 655f,.

page 417 note 15 Basil of Caesarea, Ep. 234.1. Gregory of Nyssa, Discourse Against the Arians 12. Mantzaridis, Georgios, The Deification of Man: St. Gregory Palamas and the Orthodox Tradition, trans, by Sherrard, Liadain (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1984), 105Google Scholar identifies these texts and says they represent a ‘patristic tradition … already formulated’. Palamas pushed it farther. Williams, Rowan, ‘The Philosophical Structures of Palamism’, Eastern Churches Review 9 (1977), 27–44Google Scholar pointed out what he and others have found to be philosophical errors in Palamas' development of the distinction between essence and energies and its lack of consistency with what the early tradition provided. But Ware, Kallistos, ‘The Debate about Palamism’, ECR 9 (1977), 45–63Google Scholar shows that Williams' attack grasps neither the connections with the Cappadocians, the monastic hesychast spirituality, the use of antinomy within the doctrine of God, nor the nature of the conflict with Barlaam, Akindynos and Gregoras. The best treatments of Palamas remain those of Meyendorff, John, A Study of Gregory Palamas, trans, by Lawrence, George, 2nd ed. (London: Faith Press, 1974)Google Scholar and St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, trans, by Fiske, Adele (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

page 417 note 16 Gregory Palamas, The Triads III.1. His opponent, Barlaam the Calabrian, used Platonism to battle against the hesychast spirituality which Palamas championed. Thus Palamas' concerns cannot be rejected summarily as Platonist perversion of the gospel.

Peacocke, Arthur, Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming—Natural, Divine and Human, Enlarged Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 185–186Google Scholar does not understand the distinction between essence and energies. He warns that transcendence must not be equated with the unknown essence and immanence with the known energies; there must be hiddenness in each. For Palamas, however, (Triads 3.1.28, quoting Maximus the Confessor, To Thalassius 61) deification is illumination and mystical union, but it defies comprehension, reason and intellect. Because there is hiddenness at the level of energies; immanence has its own mysteries.

page 418 note 17 Maximus the Confessor, Commentary on the Our Father 2, trans, by Berthold, George, Maximus the Confessor. Selected Writings, ‘The Classics of Western Spirituality’ (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 103Google Scholar.

page 418 note 18 Harnack, Adolf, History of Dogma, trans, by Buchanan, Neil. (Rpr. New York: Dover Publications, 1961), Vol II, 230–318Google Scholar speaks of Irenaeus as adopting Gnostic ideas and misunderstanding these concepts in physical ways. Kretschmar, Georg, ‘Die Rezeption der orthodoxen Vergöttlichungslehre in der protestantischen Theologie’, Lutherund Theosis (Erlangen: Martin-Luther Verlag, 1990), 61–84Google Scholar shows that Harnack was not alone in his suspicion of deification. Similar disquiet marked the work of other Protestant historians of dogma and was apparently influenced by their conflict with Pietism.

page 417 note 19 Sadly the United States Library of Congress cataloguing system puts the texts of Gregory Palamas after the Gnostic texts of Nag Hammadi before various Manichaean texts.

page 419 note 20 For example Henry, Carl F.H. seldom uses john 10:34 in his systematic. When he does, God, Revelation and Authority (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1976), Vol. 2, 139Google Scholar, he restricts its use by Jesus totally to what he considers to be the context of Psalm 82:6, i.e., that some of the elders or magistrates ‘were gods’, in that they made final judgments.

page 419 note 21 Panikulam, George, Koinōnia in the New Testament. A Dynamic Expression of Christian Life, ‘Analecta Biblica 85’ (Rome: Pontificio Institute Biblico, 1979)Google Scholar reads all these along with 1 Cor. 10:16–17, 2 Cor. 8:9, Phil. 1:5 (Philm. 6), Phil. 3:10–11 and Acts 2:42 as ‘not a random coming together of men because they share a common interest; it is the coming together of those whom Cod has called into koinōnia with God Himself through His Son and in Him with one another’. He does not speak of 2 Peter 1:4 and perhaps thus not of deification because he is dealing with koinōnia, not koinōnos.

Seesemann, Heinrich. Der Begriff Koinōnia im Neuen Testament, ‘BZNW 14’ (Giessen: Alfred Tōpelmann, 1933)Google Scholar also does not find 2 Peter 1:4 as significant. He divides the meaning of koinōnia into three clusters: ‘die Mittelsamkeit’, ‘die Teilnahme, das Anteilhaben’, and ‘die Gemeinschaft’. His treatment of these categories emphasizes mystery and power less than they could. But his insistence that the New Testament usage is new and religious deepens discussion. His comments on 1 John 1:3–7 are excellent.

page 420 note 22 Cyprian, Ep. 58.6.3, trans. By Clarke, G.W., The Letters of St. Cyprian of Carthage, Vol. III, ‘Ancient Christian Writers, No. 46’ (New York: Newman Press, 1986), 65Google Scholar

page 420 note 23 Augustine, On John's Gospel, Tractates 1.4, 2.13, 23.5, 48.9

page 420 note 14 Bonner, Gerald, ‘Augustine's Conception of Deification’, The Journal of Theological Studies, N.S. 37 (1986), 369–386CrossRefGoogle Scholar carefully details Augustine's views. He also wisely notes that deification is more important in the West than some Eastern Christians find it to be. But it is not as closely tied to contemplative life as it is in the East. The Eastern charge that the West is too rationalistic and the assertion that synergism of free will and divine will solve the issues strike Bonner as failing to give proper attention to the problems.

page 421 note 25 Calvin, John. The First and Second Epistles of St. Peter, ‘Calvin's New Testament Commentaries, 12', ed. by David, and Torrance, Thomas, trans, by Johnston, William (Grand Rapids, MI: Win. B. Eerdmans. 1963), 330–331Google Scholar. In his Commentary on the Cospel According to John, trans, by Pringle, William (Rpr. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991), 419Google Scholar Calvin restricts John 10:34–36 to magistrates, a position he also takes in his Institutes 4.6.31. The indices of the Institutes in the ‘Library of Christian Classics’ ed. by Battles, Ford Lewis (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), Vol. 2, 1553–1734Google Scholar show no mention of Maximus the Confessor or Gregory Palamas, and few references to Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa or Gregory Nazianzen: none to the sense of theōsis.

page 421 note 26 Mannermaa, Tuomo, The Christ Present in Faith: Justification and Deification; the Ecumenical Dialogue (Hannover, 1989)Google Scholar. His article, ‘Theosisals Thema der finniscliven Liilherforschung’, Lutherund Theosis, 11–26 is translated in Pro Ecclesia 4 (1994), 37–48Google Scholar under the title ‘Finnish Luther Research’. Bakken, Kenneth, ‘Holy Spirit and Theosis: Toward a Lutheran Theology of Healing’, St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 38 (1994), 409–423 develops the theme further.Google Scholar

Barth, Karl, ‘An Introductory Essay’, trans, by Adams, James Luther in Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity, trans, by Eliot, George (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957)Google Scholar takes another twist, one which seems unaware of Luther's employment of deification. For Barth, Feuerbach's formula ‘God becomes man, man becomes God’ is ‘impossible and meaningless’. Worse it rests on Luther's misinterpretation of Christology and the Lord's Supper by using the communicatio idiomatum as a way to speak of the bread as the glorified body of Christ. That led directly to an ‘inversion of the above and the below’ and thus to Feuerbach's travesty.

The German essay first appeared in Die Theologie und die Kirche (Zollikon-Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1928), Bd. II, 212–239Google Scholar. Asamore mature theologian, Barth had a differently nuanced view. In Church Dogmatics: The Doclrine of Reconciliation IV.2, trans, by Bromiley, G. W. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1955) 103Google Scholar he notes that 2 Peter 1:4 speaks of a communicatio gratiarum.

page 421 note 27 Finger, Thomas, ‘Anabaptism and Eastern Orthodoxy: Some Unexpected Similarities’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 31 (1994), 67–91Google Scholar. He identifies five similarities: ‘Eschatological Awareness’, ‘Understandings of Redemption’, ‘Human Nature’, ‘The Church’, and ‘Natural and Social Life’. In his ‘Post-Chalcedoanian Christology: Some Reflections on Oriental Orthodox Christology from a Mennonite Perspective’, Christ in East and West, ed. by Fries, Paul and Nersoyan, Tiran (Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), p. 162Google Scholar, n. 16 Finger had tantalizingly noted that “Divinization” was explicitly taught by Hans Denck, Melchior Hofmann, Menno Simons, Dirk Philips and Peter Ridemann. While not using such a term, Balthasar Hubmaier and Pilgram Marpeck emphasized that salvation makes an ontological change in human nature’.

page 422 note 28 Tamburello, Dennis, Union with Christ: John Calvin and the Mysticism of St. Bernard (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1994)Google Scholar shows that although Calvin was not a mystic and did not have the interest in the contemplative life that Bernard had, he spoke of mystical union with God. ‘[B]oth authors were ultimately concerned about the unity of the believer with God, rooted in faith and expressed primarily through love and service of God and others’. (110)

page 422 note 29 Bauer, Walter, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 2nd Edition, Revised and augmented by Wilbur Gingrich and Frederick Danker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 780.Google Scholar

page 424 note 30 John of Damascus, Orthodox Faith, Book Four, Chapt. 13. Adapted from a trans, by Franklin, Chase, Jr., Saint John of Damascus: Writings, ‘The Fathers of the Church, Vol. 37’ (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1958, rpr. 1970), 357–358Google Scholar

page 425 note 31 Clifton, Robert and Regehr, Marilyn, ‘Toward a Sound Perspective on Modern Physics: Capra's Popularization of Mysticism and Theological Approaches Reexamined’, Zygon 22 (1990), 73–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar critique Fritj of Capra and certain Christian theologians for falling into the trap of demonstrating the truth of religious positions on the basis of contemporary scientific views.

page 425 note 32 Polkinghorne, John, Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding (London: SPCK, 1988), 76.Google Scholar

page 426 note 33 Torrance's use of ‘objective’ and the ‘foundational’ may cause unease. Perhaps he only means that there are aspects of life which physicists bump into and sense they must account for. His insistence that physics is ‘faith seeking understanding’, that its ‘objectivity’ and ‘foundationalism’ are in many ways dependent upon faith stances would allow that meaning. See the sentences of chapter seven in his The Christian Frame of Mind: Reason, Order, and Openness in Theology and Natural Science, new edition (Colorado Springs, CO: Helmers & Howard, 1989), 145–146Google Scholar, ‘… the cultural unity we seek is not something that can be organised. It is something ultimately indefinable and unformalisable, akin to those ultimate beliefs which, while unverifiable and unfalsifiable in themselves, nevertheless are regulative of all our scientific knowledge of the universe as well as of our daily natural experience’.

page 426 note 34 Torrance, , The Ground and Grammar of Theology (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1980), 175–176Google Scholar. Polkinghome, , The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker, ‘Gifford Lectures, 1993–1994’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 184Google Scholar has a suggestive phrase which bears further study when he speaks of something being ‘fractal-like (infinitely interpenetrating)’. May fractals provide another model for perichōrēsis?

page 426 note 35 Torrance, , The Trinitarian Faith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988), 140Google Scholar. He insists in note 106 that Athanasius himself did not think in such terms. Ware, Kallistos, The Orthodox Way, rev. ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995), says it is wrong to think of God's energies as a ‘thing’ or a ‘part’.Google Scholar

page 426 note 36 Kragh, Helge, Dirac: A Scientific Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990Google Scholar. Pais, Abraham, Niels Bohr's Time: in Physics, Philosophy and Polity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

page 426 note 37 Bozack, M.J., ‘Conjugate Properties and the Hypostatic Union’, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith:Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 39 (1987), 105–107Google Scholar draws attention to the similarities. But his rejection of deification as a proper understanding of Christology — and thus of salvation — is more determined by his sense of physics than his understanding of Christian theology. That waves do not become particles and particles do not become waves does not determine Christology. It shows how modern physics — as ancient Stoic physics — can be used to illustrate but not to restrict. See Gregory Nazianzen's comments (Or. 31.31—33) that he never found an illustration for the Trinity which pictured more than part of the reality.

page 427 note 38 Polkinghorne, The Faith of the Physicist, 134 & 143 and Science and Creation, 94–95 & 66.

page 427 note 39 Bell, J.S., ‘On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox’, Physics 1 (1964), 95–200Google Scholar. Polkinghorne, , The Quantum World (London: Longman, 1984), chapt. 7.Google Scholar

page 427 note 40 Polkinghorne, , Reason and Reality: The Relationship between Science and Theology (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991), 103Google Scholar. Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age, in part III works to understand incarnation and salvation. He opens that section (189) with the quotation from Irenaeus about deification which is used above. Peacock suggests (430, n. 22) that deification is probably ‘more congenial to an evolutionary perspective than the traditional, often Western, language of redemption, salvation, sanctification, etc’ but he does not develop the claim. His rejection of other models for salvation is not convincing (319–326) because he has forgotten that they also are analogies: they fit and they do not fit.