Thursday, August 23, 2012

An Orthodox Response to an Evangelical Friend's Questions on Theological Terminology Defining Deification and True Church's Meanings


The following is a response I made to an evangelical friend who had some questions and misunderstandings on some Orthodox theology, especially the view of deification and what they mean by true church. My attempt to answer is below thanks to much help from the book, The Orthodox Church by Timothy Ware (Bishop Kallistos Ware). It is a little long, but please be patient with me, they were packed questions that don't have short and simple answers- And thank you my friend for asking. Until we are bold enough to ask questions of one another's faith, we can never fully grasp what it is all about!


Hi My Friend!
I am going to try to tackle your questions and hopefully do the topic some justice! It is a difficult concept because we as evangelicals do not really understand the term deification. It is important to get a grasp of essence and energies and image and likeness. As stated in your quote, deification does not mean that one share in the pre eternal uncreated essence of God. When the early church fathers were arguing for the proper understanding of the incarnation, they used the terms essence and energies. The Holy Trinity was explained in terms of the essence and energies of God.  I want to state on this from the book, the Orthodox Church by Timothy Ware (Bishop Kallistos Ware). It helped me with these distinctions.
God is "One essence in three persons" (homo-ousious) "The divine is indivisible in its divisions (Gregory of Nazianzus), for the persons are united yet not confused, distinct yet not divided (John of Damascus), both the distinction and the union alike are paradoxical (Gregory of Nazianzus)."
The distinctive characteristics of the first person of the Trinity is Fatherhood: He is unbegotten, having His source and origin solely in Himself and not any other person. The distinctive characteristic of the second person is Sonship: although equal to the Father and coeternal with Him, He is not unbegotten or sourceless, but has His source and origin in the Father, from  whom He is begotten or born from all eternity- ‘before all ages’ as the Creed says. The distinctive characteristic  of the third person is Procession: like the Son, He has His source and origin in the Father; but His relationship to the Father is different from that of the Son, since he is not begotten but from all eternity He proceeds from the Father.
This is precisely at this point that this point that the western view of the Trinity seems to conflict with that of the east. According to Roman Catholic theology- as expressed, for example by St. Augustine of Hippo (360-430) or by the Council of Florence (1438-9)- the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son (Filioque). This doctrine is known as the ‘Double Procession’ of the Spirit. The Orthodox position is based on John 25:26 where Christ says “
‘When the Comforter has come, whom I will send to you from the Father- He will bear witness to Me.’ Christ sends the Spirit, but the Spirit proceeds from the Father: so the Bible teaches, and so Orthodoxy believes.
Image and Likeness. According to most of the Greek Fathers, the terms image and likeness do not mean exactly the same thing. ‘The expression according to the image’ wrote John of Damascus, ‘indicates rationality and freedom, while the expression according to the likeness indicates assimilation to God through virtue’. The image, or to use the Greek term icon, of God signifies our human free will, our reason, our sense of moral responsibility- everything in short which marks us out from the animal creation and makes each of us a person. But the image means more than that. It means that we are God’s ‘offspring’ (Acts 27:28), His kin; it means that between us and Him there is a point of contact and similarity. The gulf between creature and the Creator is not impassible, for because we are in God’s image we can know God and have communion with Him. And if we make proper use of this faculty for communion with God, then we will become ‘like’ God, we will acquire divine likeness; in the words of John Damascene, we will be ‘assimilated to God through virtue’. To acquire the likeness is to be deified, is to become a ‘second god’ a ‘god by grace’. ‘I said, you are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High’ (Psalm lxxxi 6; cf. John x 34-35) (quotation from Psalms the numbering is of the Septuagnt is followed. Some versions of the Bible recon this as Psalm lxxxii)
The image denotes the powers with which each one of us is endowed by God from the first moment of our existence; the likeness is not an endowment which we possess from the start, but a goal at which we must aim, something which we can only acquire by degrees. However sinful we may be, we never lose the image; but the likeness depends on our moral choice, upon our ‘virtue’, so it is not destroyed by sin.
Humans at their first creation were therefore perfect, not so much in actual, but potential sense. Endowed with the image from the start, they were called to acquire the likeness by their own efforts (assisted of course by the grace of God)- Adam began in a state of innocence and simplicity. “He was a child, not yet having understanding perfected’ wrote Irenaeus. ‘It was necessary that he should grow and so come to his perfection’ God set Adam on the right path, but Adam had in front of him a long road to traverse in order to reach his final goal.

The author, Ware, continues to explain further the different view of the fall held by Augustine, which greatly influenced western theology and then explains grace and free will, the fall and original sin, Jesus Christ, the incarnation, the Holy Spirit, and then what is meant by being Partakers of the Divine Nature. So here again I will pick up what he has to say.
‘Partakers of the Divine Nature’
 The aim of the Christian life, which Seraphim described as the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God, can equally be defined in terms of deification. Basil described the human person as a creature who has received the order to become a god; and Athanasius, as we know, said that God became human that we humans might become god. ‘In My kingdom, said Christ, I shall be God with you as gods.’ (Canon for Matins of Holy Thursday, Ode 4, Troparion 3.) Such according to the teaching of the Orthodox Church, is the final goal, which every Christian must aim: to become god, to attain theosis, ‘deification’ or ‘divinization’. For Orthodoxy our salvation and redemption mean our deification.
Behind the doctrine of deification there lies the idea of the human person made in the mage and likeness of God the Holy Trinity. ‘May they all be one’, Christ prayed at the Last Supper, ‘as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, so also may they be in Us’ (John 27:21). Just as three persons of the Trinity ‘dwell’ in one another in unceasing movement of love, so we humans made in the image of the Trinity, are called to dwell in the Trinitarian God. Christ prays that we may share in the life of the Trinity, in the movement of love, which passes between the divine persons; He prays that we may be taken up into the Godhead. The saints, as Maximus the Confessor put it, are those who express the Holy Trinity in themselves. This idea of a personal and organic union between God and humans- God dwelling in us and we in Him- is a constant theme in John’s Gospel; it is also a constant theme in the Epistles of St. Paul, who sees the Christian life above all else as a ‘life in Christ’. The same idea recurs in the famous text of 2 Peter: ‘Through these promises you may become partakers of the divine nature’ (1:4). It is important to keep this New Testament background in mind. The Orthodox doctrine of deification, so far as being unscriptural (as is sometimes thought), has a solid Biblical basis, not only in 2 Peter, but in Paul and the Fourth Gospel.
The idea of deification must always be understood in the light of the distinction between God’s essence and His energies. Union with God means union with the divine energies, not the divine essence; The Orthodox Church while speaking of deification and union, rejects all forms of pantheism.
Closely related to this is another point of equal importance. The mystical union between God and humans is a true union, yet in this union Creator and creature do not become fused into a single being. Unlike the eastern religions, which teach that humans are swallowed up in the deity, Orthodox mystical theology has always insisted that we humans, however closely linked to God, retain our full personal integrity. The human person, when deified, remains distinct (though not separate) from God. The mystery of the Trinity is a mystery of unity in diversity, and those who express the Trinity in themselves do not sacrifice their personal characteristics. When St. Maximus wrote ‘God and those who are worthy of God have one and the same energy’, he did not mean that the saints lose their free will, but when deified they voluntarily and in love conform their will to the will of God. Nor does the human person, when it ‘becomes god’, cease to be human: ‘We remain creatures while becoming god by grace, as Christ remained God when becoming man by the Incarnation’. (V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 87) The human being does not become God by nature, but is merely a ‘created god’, a god by grace or by status.
Deification is something that involves the body. Since the human person is a unity of body and soul, and since the incarnate Christ has saved and redeemed the whole person, it follows that ‘our body is deified at the same time as our soul’ (Maximus) In the divine likeness which we humans are called to realize in ourselves, the body has its place. ‘Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit’ wrote St. Paul (1 Corinthians 6:19) ‘Therefore, my brothers and sisters, I beseech you by God’s mercy to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice to God’ (Romans 12:1). The full deification of the body must wait, however, until the Last Day, for this present life the glory of the saints is as a rule an inward splendor, a splendor of the soul alone; but when the righteous rise from the dead and are clothed with a spiritual body, then their sanctity will be outwardly manifest. ‘At the day of Resurrection the glory of the Holy Spirit comes out from within, decking and covering the bodies of the saints- the glory which they had before, but hidden within their souls. What a person has now, the same comes forth externally in the body’. (Homilies of Macarius v.9). The bodies of the saints will be outwardly transfigured by divine light, as Christ’s body was transfigured on Mount Tabor, ‘We must look forward also to the springtime of the body’ ((Minucus Felix, late 2nd century, Octavius,34).

I shall stop on deification here. What I wrote was taken from the book The Orthodox Church, as I mentioned above.
Now the other part of your question- What do Orthodox think of other Christian denominations.
First I shall tell you based upon what I wrote above on image and likeness, Orthodox look humbly as we regard ourselves and with love in regard to others regardless as to Christian, Orthodox, Other religions, even atheists. We understand the concept of spiritual life being a journey, and view others on this journey as well. We are cautious to judge. With that said, to understand Orthodoxy, you need to see historically, there was one church. The word Orthodox means correct teaching. In early times whenever factions or divisions occurred councils were held and the church worked together to uphold correct teaching and the truth of the Gospel. Therefore, if you held to the teachings of the universal church, you were Orthodox. It was not a denomination, it was the Christian church.  The Orthodox churches today still uphold those same teachings and nothing has been added or taken away from what was taught since the beginning. Changes on doctrine and dogma occurred in the west after the schism in 1054, but the east remained faithful to what had always been taught.  Now this does not mean that Orthodox think they are alone the only ones who will see heaven and all others are damned. It only means that what the church teaches is and continues to be “orthodox”.  Unchanged, historic, apostolic from its beginnings. This may sound exclusive, but you cannot say the same about any church in the western Roman Catholic, or Protestant tradition.  There have been many additions (The Immacculate, conception of Mary, purgatory, the filioque clause in the Nicene creed, just to name a few additons) Wile Protestant churches have subtracted a great deal of what was the early church (the stripping down of the sacraments, and sacred tradition and everything not Bible). So Orthodox is terminology for what the church represents, not a term of elitism or pride. There is a sacred responsibility to preserve what has been handed down through the centuries. Yet any Orthodox person will tell you that when we are face to face with God by His mercy, we may be quite surprised who we see, since God looks upon our hearts. One Protestant may be filled with the love of God, while a member of the Orthodox church may have no love for his neighbor or fellow man, and then again the opposite can be true.  I have often said of a very close Buddhist person I know, that she is a better Christian than most Christians I know.  Only God can judge.  My friend, don’t  let the meaning of the word Orthodox confuse you about our dealings with other Christians. It is the true church in terms of what has been taught has not been changed but,  that word true is dealing with an upholding of teaching, not the idea that if someone goes to a different church they can not be called Christian. Maybe instead it should be called original unchanged church, and new and improved flavor church. Just kidding, but basically the term is not a judgment. By the way remember how we as evangelicals sounded exclusive in our Gospel method of asking “are you saved? Is he/she saved? Did they accept Christ as Lord and Savior? There is only one way to get to heaven, Jesus is the only way!” yes, to a non- Christian or a person who holds a sacramental Christian tradition this sounds pretty exclusive too…just a thought.
 Finally I want to say a few words on your statement if orthodoxy alone holds theological views on certain positions, I read an excellent book called Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy by Andrew Stephen Damick, an Orthodox priest. He visits various denominations as well as non- Christian belief systems and writes about where they agree and differ on orthodox teaching. I learned quite a bit about the historical and theological views held and how many hit the same mark in several places and differ in others, and even those I would think are way off base actually get certain things more right than I thought.  It was a great read, and if you don’t feel like getting the book it has also been made into a free podcast on OCN.
Take things slowly, we have learned to think a certain way. New ideas are sometimes hard to digest but you just need to dig deeper to see the correct context. Get the context down when something is hard to understand- I never quite figured out for a long time why I felt uncomfortable with certain Calvinist ideas until I learned about dualism…a-ha! Now I see!
Wish we could talk more!
Love you,
holoholomom