Today Joe explores Theosis, a teaching that sometimes doesn’t get enough attention in the West, but arguably is the entire reason God created us. Joe shows you how theosis has been revealed in Scripture and how the Church Fathers tried to wrestle with this amazing concept.

Transcript:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to talk today about a Christian doctrine that sounds heretical. If I just go around saying, I believe that if I’m holy when I die, I’ll become a God or I’ll become God. Many people’s heresy alarm is just going off completely and understandably that sounds polytheistic. That sounds like a repudiation of pretty core tenets of Christianity. What if I were to tell you that this is the historic Christian understanding of what happens when you die and that if you understand this properly, it’ll change how you understand a whole slew of Christian doctrines for the better. But I want to start with a problem and that problem is our view of heaven is too small that I think one of the reasons that we don’t strive for heaven as hard as we could, we don’t strive for holiness as much as we could, is that we just don’t desire it enough and we don’t desire it enough. In part because I has not seen an ear, has not heard what God has ready for those who love him, and it’s hard to desire an unknown gift. We know it’s great, but our vision of it is often pretty limited.

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Joe:

Even Billy Graham in his early days when he was trying to describe heaven said, we’re going to sit around the fireplace and have parties and the angels will wait on us and we’ll drive down the golden streets in a yellow Cadillac convertible. Now, leave aside how tacky it is to drive on golden Streets in a yellow convertible. They’re going to clash horribly. The point is that’s obviously too small of vision of heaven and in Billy Graham’s defense, he evolved from that. He developed as he matured as a Christian and he stopped preaching that kind of idea. But for many of us, I think our idea of heaven might be stuck sort of at that level. It’s going to be really cool. It’s going to be really fun. We’re going to see people we like and we’re imagining basically us as we are now maybe with a white robe, maybe with a harp, but not all that transformed and that is too small of you of heaven.

But the second problem is that it’s often too selfish of you of heaven that it just becomes, okay, I’m not going to selfishly enjoy a bunch of pleasures now so that I can selfishly enjoy a bunch of pleasures in heaven and it won’t count as a sin then. And so a lot of times, even when Catholics and Protestants are talking about the saints praying for us, for instance, you’ll sometimes hear the objection, well, how do we know the saints are praying for us? And it’s a shocking question from a Christian perspective. How do we know that the saints love their neighbors? How do we know that they’re praying for their neighbors and are treating them and not just watching the biggest screen TV we could possibly imagine? Well, because that’s at the heart of Christianity that they are more in love with God and more in love with neighbor than we are here.

But I think that it exposes something that we just don’t think about this stuff very deeply, and so it’s a very easy trap that we can fall into. There are some biblical cues that point us in the right direction. For instance, in the book of Revelation in Revelation seven, we see the great multitude and they’re worshiping together. It’s not this radical individualism you see in the heavenly liturgy, which looks like a Catholic liturgy. You’ve got the incense which represents the prayers of the saints being offered up by the angels, and it’s very clear that those in heaven are interceding for those on earth. Whether we’re talking about the angels in this intermediate capacity presenting our prayers before the father or the saints themselves who are in glory like the saints under the altar for instance, who are crying out for justice on earth. So there’s much more to the heavenly story, but even still, even with everything I’ve just given you rooted in scripture, we haven’t gone far enough.

We need to think bigger. We need to think much bigger, unimaginably bigger. And so for this, I would turn to the secret hidden wisdom about glorification. Now that sounds maybe really gnostic. Oh, come on Joe. How could there be this secret hidden wisdom? Well, Saint Paul in one Corinthians says that there is, he says that among the mature we do in part wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away, we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. So this is a message so radical that it seems like St. Paul was even a little cautious about advertising this because it’s so prone to misunderstanding, but it’s also so important to get right. So he says, none of the rulers of this age understood this for if they had they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

But as it is written, and then that line I quoted before, what no eye has seen nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived what God has prepared for those who love him. Nevertheless, St. Paul’s says, God has revealed to us through the Spirit for the spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. So we’re given two things. Number one, there is this hidden wisdom of God that is tied to our glorification. We’re going to have to unpack what that means and it is somehow tied to the depths of God. Now I’m going to cut to the chase and present a thesis. In that thesis. You can find it in the catechism of the Catholic church in paragraph four 60 that the word became flesh to make us partakers of the divine nature. That is that God’s mission in sending Jesus to earth is not just that he will save us from our sins, although it’s certainly that, but that he wants to do something more than just save us because saving us is, if you think about it in a negative term, it just says you’re not going to hell.

You get saved from falling off the side of a cliff That doesn’t tell me anything about where you are. Are you on the side of the road but you just didn’t fall off the cliff? Well, when we’re talking about being saved, the problem is this gives a clear sense of what we’re avoiding damnation but not a clear sense of what is being offered to us. What are we receiving? And I would suggest that we lack a clear vision of heavenly glory and I’m going to leave this part for another time. We lack a clear nature of the role of the body in all of this so that many Christians’ idea if they do think about heaven is like, well now my soul will be freed of my body forever. I’ve talked about that somewhat before. I’m going to leave that to one side except to say that it’s a problem and that the actual Christian message is as the catechism says found in second Peter when St.

Peter says that it’s we’ll become partakers of the divine nature. Now that is wild that Jesus partakes of our nature in the incarnation and that somehow through divinization or theosis or deification, these are the three terms used for this idea that we somehow become adopted sons of God, not just in name, but we actually become partakers of the divine nature and the catechism goes on and it basically just gives quotations. First EZ talking about how the word became man and the son of God became the son of man. So that man entered into communion with the word and thus receiving divine sonship might become a son of God. That part for some reason doesn’t sound maybe as shocking to us if we can say we’re children of God and I don’t think anyone bats an eye. If you say you’re a son of God, people might look at you strange because that sounds like a divine claim and rightly so it’s, but if you say, well, as St.

Athanasius says, the son of God became man so that we might become God or some translations are going to say so that we might become Gods, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, that sounds shocking and that sounds heretical. So how do we distinguish this idea of theosis from, for example, the Greek pagan idea of apotheosis. This is the apotheosis of Hercules or Hercules and he’s going before Zeus in Herra and it looks like kind like saints and glory. So what’s the difference between the Christian vision and the Greek pagan vision or what’s the difference between this and the Mormon vision where you become a God with your own or your own planet? How do we make sense of all of this? Because I can understand why people would be confused or scandalized or troubled to put the pieces in place. I want to start with what the Bible has to say on this subject, and it turns out the Bible beginning with Jesus himself has a lot to say on the subject.

We often just overlook it. We don’t know what to do with these passages when we come across them. I think so in John 10, Jesus’ interlocutors are wanting to stone him for being a blasphemer because being a man, he makes himself God. Now, there’s a lot of things Jesus could do in this situation because the charge of blasphemy is wrong, but Jesus is in fact claiming to be God. They have correctly identified this, and so Jesus can’t deny this divine claim, but if he just says, I’m the second person of the Trinity, they’re not ready for that full truth. So he does something really fascinating. He quotes to them the Psalms, he says, is it not written in your law? I said, you are Gods. Just pause on that. Jesus says, you are Gods. Now, granted, he’s quoting the Old Testament, but he’s also the one speaking in the Old Testament.

Either way you cut it. Jesus says, you are Gods, and this is not contrary to the monotheism that is the hallmark of Judaism. He’s quoting the Old Testament here that Judaism is radically monotheistic. There are no other true gods beside the one God, and yet we can also talk about these others as Gods. What is going on here? Well, Jesus gives us a tantalizing bit of Jesus, but he is doing something again in response to the people trying to kill him. He just says to them in verse 35, if he called them Gods to whom the word of God came and scripture cannot be broken. Do you say of him whom the father consecrated and sent into the world, you’re blaspheming because I said I’m the son of God. So okay, notice a couple of things. Number one, as I said before, the claim to be a son of God is a divine claim.

Now, Jesus is the son of God. By nature, I’m a son of God by adoption in my baptism, but this is still a participation in something divine and without the proper warrant, that is a blasphemous claim that there’s a loose sense in which we could talk about being sons and daughters of God by being creatures of him. The way you might talk about in animators animations is kind of like his children, but that’s pretty metaphorical. Something much deeper is going on obviously with Jesus by nature, but also by us is we’re baptized into this community of God, this family of God. And so Jesus is pointing out this is a claim to have God as father, but there’s some sense in which God is talking about us sharing in Godhead in some way. So let’s unpack what that way is. St. Paul says, the Lord is the spirit and where the spirit of the Lord is, there’s freedom and we all with unveiled face, he’s just contrasted this with Moses beholding the face of God or beholding God, we all with unveiled faith beholding the glory of the Lord are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory into another.

Now that’s going to be important for a couple reasons. One, it’s important to get that this process of theosis, divination, deification, I’m going to just call it theosis now because it’s less divinization. I usually don’t use that term because it sounds too much like divination, which is an actual sin, and I don’t want people’s understanding to turn on whether they’re getting a middle IZ. Theosis is a weird enough word. It doesn’t sound like anything else in English, but it still means the same thing. So I’ll say theosis, it’s the Greek term, but if you prefer deification, glorification, divinization, all of those mean the same thing. Glorification is good, but I actually think glorification is too generic. Sounding like, okay, we’re going to get some glory. Well, you can get glory in a lot of ways, but we are going to become God or Gods, okay?

That’s a bigger claim. That means something more distinct than just we’re going to get some glory. So this theosis, it begins now. It doesn’t end now, but it begins now and we’re being changed into his likeness. We are being changed into the likeness of God himself one de degree at time, and this is somehow connected with our beholding the glory of the Lord that by beholding God we become more like him. That’s going to be an important key to how all of this works and we’re going to hear more of that actually right now. This is, I put John three, it’s actually one John three. John says, see what love the father has given us. We should be called children of God and so we are, okay. Remember, this is the starting point. Your sonship or daughtership being a son or daughter of God is already this radical thing and this is the foundation, but John says, this is only the beginning.

The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now. But then he says, it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. So notice that same theme, we are going to become like Jesus when Jesus and we encounter one another in eternity. It’s going to look like we are like him and why? Because we’re going to see him as he is that this process of beholden the Lord and his glory and being transformed will be brought to its fulfillment in heaven. Now we see as in a mirror dimly, but then we’re going to see face-to-face. And so this process begins now, but it’s going to be radically completed in heaven, this process of being glorified and transformed deified.

But then St. Peter has, again, maybe the strongest language on this is hard to say. I mean John’s language is pretty strong, but Peter says that his divine power is granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence. It’s an easy thing to miss. This kind of language is all over the New Testament that we’re not just called to be great, we’re called to be great with God’s own glory and excellence by which he is granted to us, his precious and very great promises that through these he may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion. And so he doesn’t just tell us what we’re going to avoid, he also tells us what we’re going to become. We’re going to become, as he says, partakers of the divine nature.

That’s huge. I think it’s an incredible promise and I wish we talked about this more as Christians, particularly in the West. This is an area where in modern times, I would say Eastern Orthodoxy does a much better job of focusing on theosis and Western Catholicism and Protestantism have underemphasized this, I would argue. So they offer a few keys to making sense of this idea so that you don’t come away with the wrong view. Number one, Christ, the son of God is truly God and truly our brother, he is the son of God by nature. He’s the son of Joseph by adoption, the adoption into the family of Joseph. Now he is truly and literally man, he’s not just man by adoption. He’s a man by nature. He has a divine nature and a human nature, but he also experiences an adoptive sonship because Joseph is his foster father.

He’s not his biological father. And so Jesus is at one and the same time a son of David presumably along Mary’s line by blood, by ethnicity, by nature, but actually more importantly for the legal context, he is the legal son of Joseph. And so there’s all kinds of promises tied to the Davidic Messianic line and those promises aren’t actually achieved along bloodline. That’s kind of a recurring theme lately. People misunderstanding how the promises to Israel were received, but you could have what was called the lava marriage where you raised your dead brother’s child and that child was okay, yours biologically, but your brother gets married to a woman, he dies before he can give her any children. You then marry her and have a child with her, but that child stands to inherit the inheritance, the dead brother. This is a strange thing from our perspective, but it is good for inheritance law and for making sure that the widow isn’t deprived of being taken care of.

And it meant that there was this distinction in two types of sonship within Judaism long before the time of Christ. So Jesus is man, both by nature and in this ate adoptive sort of way, not LaVar but an adoptive sonship. That’s the first kind of key that you have to recognize the way that God becomes man, this is going to be an important first step. Second, through baptism, we become the adoptive sons and daughters of God. And third, this makes us heirs of God. Remember everything I just said, one of the reasons that there was this adoptive system in Judaism was for the distribution of inheritance. So sonship was closely tied to being an heir. One of the reasons it was important to know who the legitimate sons were, was to know where the property and the finances and everything else went when dad died.

And so we become heirs by being sons and we’re heirs of heaven, but we’re even heirs of God. I didn’t have this prescripted, this part, but lemme just add a point here. If you pay attention to the parable sometimes called the parable of the prodigal son, pay attention to the words that the father says to the older son when he says, all that I have is yours. Now imagine God saying that to you and you understand what it is to be an heir of God, that you are not just asking for the crumbs from the master’s table. You are being promised the whole house. That’s the promise of God, and that is an enormous promise. All of heaven is yours. You’re an heir of God, not just all of heaven, God himself is yours. The second person of the trinity is the bridegroom to the bride of the church and the two become one flesh.

As St. Paul says in Ephesians five, you don’t get a more radical union of humanity and divinity than this. It’s not just the union of humanity and divinity that happens in the incarnation. You now have this other union of humanity and divinity in the union of Christ, in the church and in the soul communion with God. And there’s going to be some ways we’re going to look at how that works, but if you get those things and hopefully you get how we can talk about human beings who are not divine by nature, nevertheless sharing in divinity, I think St. Paul connects these themes really nicely. He explains how all who are led by the spirit of God are sons of gods. You’ve got the theme of sonship for you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you’ve received the spirit of sonship.

Now, this by the way, is the point of the parable of the prodigal son. It’s not really about a son being a prodigal, so I don’t like that term. It’s about two men discovering that they’re not just the slaves of their father, but they’re true sons. And I would love to unpack that, but that’s not the point of this episode When we cry Abba Father, it is a spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God and if children then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, and then he says, provided we suffer with him, we’ll get into that later in order that we may also be glorified with him. So notice he goes from sonship to heirs and thus we suffering to glory These ideas, we need to keep them closely tied together because it’s how we make sense of this.

Pretty shocking but pretty amazing doctrine. This is one that the early Christians, by the way, loved to talk about. As a quick aside here, I talked about that whole idea of apotheosis, the pagan version of this idea. If you go in, I believe it’s the capital rotunda, it has the apotheosis of George Washington and it’s just straight up Roman paganism with George Washington along with some Roman goddesses in heaven in the place of God the father. It’s pretty wild stuff, but you might look at that and say, what’s going on there and what’s going on? There is a pagan version of this idea where the emperors would become gods and the Christians had some pretty fascinating things to say in response to it. So St. Justin Martyr right in the mid one hundreds, maybe one 60 writes, and remember he’s addressing this to the emperor and it’s going to get him martyred. He says, in one of the emperors who die among yourselves, whom you deem worthy of deification, and in whose behalf you produce someone who swears he has seen the burning Caesar rise to heaven from the funeral pyre, he’s mocking this idea of imperial apotheosis that emperors are going to just become gods.

But what’s fascinating is even though he mocks the pagan idea, he nevertheless concedes, there is a Christian version of this that doesn’t sound that different, only it’s not going to be for just random corrupt emperors. Instead, he says, we have learned that those only are deified who have lived near to God and holiness and virtue, and we believe that those who live wickedly and do not repent are punished an everlasting fire. So notice he doesn’t say apotheosis is totally crazy. He just is like, yeah, but your emperors are wicked guys, so let’s not naively assume that they’re all being glorified in heaven and becoming gods. You would think that this would be the fault line, but he would say, Hey, you believe the emperor has become Gods. We don’t believe humans become gods, but he actually says something a lot more shocking, which is only those who live near to God and in holiness and virtue become gods when they die.

Only they are deified. I don’t know. That just seems like a pretty shocking thing to read amongst the earliest Christians, and he’s not alone. Saint EU says that one of the Christ through his transcendent love became what we are, but as he became man that he might bring us to be even what he is himself, that is he became man so that we could become divine elsewhere in the same work. This is a little bit of a longer quotation, but he lets him unpack this idea at a much bigger level. He’s writing about those who assert that Jesus is merely a man and he says that they’re in a state of death having been none has yet joined to the word of God the Father nor receiving liberty through the Son as he does himself declare if the son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.

So that’s who he’s talking about. He’s talking about those who think Jesus is just a man born of St. Joseph but being ignorant of him, whom from the virgin is Emmanuel. They’re deprived of his gift, which is eternal life and not receiving the incorruptible word. They remain in mortal flesh and are debtors to death not obtaining the antidote of life to whom the word says. Again, this is actually to the wicked, not to the just to whom the word says, mentioning his own gifts of grace. I said, you are all the sons of the highest and gods, but you shall die like men. That’s a quotation from Psalm May two, and EU says He speaks undoubtedly these words to those who have not received the gift of adoption. In other words, these are people who were offered the gift of becoming gods b... Read more on Catholic.com