Sonship, Glory, and the Transfiguration

Beyond the two technical texts stands a broader New Testament theology on which deification rests: the Pauline doctrine of adoptive sonship and conformity to the Son, the transformation “from glory to glory,” the hidden life to be revealed, and the promise of 1 John 3:2 that “we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” This file works through those texts and then turns to the Transfiguration, where the doctrine is not argued but shown.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Adoption: Sons in the Son

The Pauline vocabulary for what the Fathers call deification is adoption, huiothesia.

“For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs — heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
— Romans 8:15–17

Three points govern the patristic use of this text.

Adoption is by the Spirit, and it is real. The cry “Abba” is not a form of address the Christian adopts; it is the Spirit of the Son praying in him. St. Athanasius makes the pneumatological argument turn on this: it is by receiving the Spirit that we are made sons, and therefore the Spirit who deifies cannot himself be a creature (Athanasius, Contra Arianos 1.37–39; 2.59; Letters to Serapion 1; trans. NPNF II/4; see Pneumatology).

Adoption is by grace, not by nature. Paul’s own word marks the difference: an adopted son is genuinely a son and genuinely an heir, and is nonetheless not a son in the same manner as the only-begotten. This is precisely the asymmetry the Fathers require (see The Definition and the Vocabulary).

Adoption is inheritance and therefore glory. The passage continues: “if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together” (Romans 8:17), and then to the groaning of creation and the “revealing of the sons of God” (8:19). Deification in Paul is cosmic in scope: the liberty of the glory of the children of God is what creation itself awaits (Romans 8:21), which is why the Orthodox tradition speaks of the human being as the priest of creation whose deification carries the world with it (Ware, The Orthodox Way, rev. ed., Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1995; see Kallistos Ware: His Theology).

Conformity to the Image

“For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.”
— Romans 8:29

This verse joins the anthropology of Genesis 1:26 to the person of Christ. The image toward which the human being is being shaped is not an abstract divine likeness but the Son. That identification — Christ as the archetype of the human, and man as “the image of the Image” — is the foundation of the whole Orthodox anthropology of deification and is developed at Image and Likeness and in Nellas’s Deification in Christ (Nellas, Deification in Christ, trans. Russell, SVS Press, 1987, 24–25; see Panayiotis Nellas: Image of the Image).

Colossians states the same in the language of the new man: “put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him” (Colossians 3:10). And Ephesians makes the term explicit: the ministries of the Church exist “till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13). The measure of a finished human being is Christ.

From Glory to Glory

“But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.”
— 2 Corinthians 3:18

This is the most nearly technical of the Pauline texts, and four of its features matter.

The verb is metamorphoumetha, “we are being transfigured” — the same verb used of Christ on Tabor (Matthew 17:2; Mark 9:2). Paul’s word for the Christian’s transformation is the Gospel’s word for the Transfiguration.

It is present and continuous. “Are being transformed”: deification is a process under way, not only a promised state.

It is by beholding. The transformation follows upon vision. The whole hesychast tradition of purification, illumination, and vision presupposes this order (see Asceticism, Prayer, and the Church).

It is unending. “From glory to glory” — apo doxes eis doxan — is one of the texts behind St. Gregory of Nyssa’s doctrine of epektasis, the endless progress of the creature into the infinite God, which he draws principally from Philippians 3:13, “straining forward to what lies ahead” (see From Irenaeus to the Cappadocians; St. Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Moses).

Two further Pauline texts belong here. “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20) — read by Cabasilas not as apostolic hyperbole but as the literal description of a baptized person (The Life in Christ, Book I; trans. deCatanzaro, 1974). And “your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory” (Colossians 3:3–4) — which gives the eschatological structure: the reality is already possessed, and its manifestation is deferred.

“We Shall Be Like Him”

“Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”
— 1 John 3:2

This verse holds together three things the doctrine needs.

A present reality: now we are children of God. Deification has begun.

A real reticence: “it has not yet been revealed what we shall be.” The Church confesses the end without describing it. Every attempt to specify the content of the glorified state beyond what is revealed is speculation, and the tradition’s restraint here is deliberate (cf. Orthodox Eschatology).

A causal link between vision and likeness: we shall be like him because we shall see him. This is the same order as 2 Corinthians 3:18, and it is the text most often invoked in the Orthodox account of the vision of God — including in St. Sophrony of Essex, who took the phrase for the title of his central work (see St. Sophrony of Essex).

The Transfiguration as the Paradigm

The Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1–8; Mark 9:2–8; Luke 9:28–36) is the event in which deification is not asserted but seen, and it is for that reason the paradigm to which the Orthodox tradition constantly returns.

What was changed was the disciples, not Christ. This is the settled patristic reading and it is decisive. The Lord did not acquire a glory he lacked; he disclosed the glory that was always his, and the disciples were granted the capacity to perceive it. Palamas puts the point as a question: “Do you see that light is inaccessible to senses which are not transformed by the Spirit?” (Palamas, Triads II.3.22; trans. Gendle, CWS). The Transfiguration is thus a picture of what happens in deification: the same world, the same flesh, newly perceived because the perceiver has been changed (see St. Gregory Palamas: Tabor Light).

The light was uncreated. This is dogma, not opinion. The Synodal Tome of 1351 defines that the divine energy may be experienced by the saints as light — a light beheld even through bodily eyes yet in itself immaterial, intelligible, and uncreated: the same light manifested to the apostles on Tabor, seen by the saints in prayer, and destined to shine from the righteous at the resurrection (Synodal Tome of 1351, in Russell, trans., Liverpool, 2020; see The Palamite Settlement).

The body was included. Christ’s flesh shone. Deification is not the liberation of a soul from matter but the glorification of the whole psychosomatic human being, and the Transfiguration is the New Testament’s own guarantee of that (cf. Theological Anthropology).

It stands between the confession and the Cross. In all three Synoptics the Transfiguration follows Peter’s confession and the first prediction of the Passion, and Luke specifies that Moses and Elijah “spoke of His decease which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem” (Luke 9:31). The glory is not an alternative to the Cross; it is shown in order that the Cross may be endured. The Church’s placement of the feast on 6 August, forty days before the Exaltation of the Cross on 14 September, preserves the connection liturgically (see The Twelve Great Feasts: The Transfiguration; The Liturgical Witness and the Uncreated Light).

It is a pledge, not a possession. Peter’s proposal to build three tabernacles is gently set aside; the disciples come down the mountain. The tradition reads this as a warning against attempting to hold the vision, which is God’s gift to give and to withdraw — a point of the first importance in the ascetic literature on discernment (see Counterfeits and Confusions).

The Shape of the Scriptural Argument

Set together, the texts describe a single movement with a beginning, a means, and an end. Human beings are made in the image of the Son (Romans 8:29); they are adopted by the Spirit into his sonship (Romans 8:15); they are being transfigured from glory to glory as they behold him (2 Corinthians 3:18); they are made partakers of the divine nature through his promises (2 Peter 1:4); and they will be like him when they see him as he is (1 John 3:2). What that final likeness looks like was shown once, on a mountain, to three men who were permitted to see it and told to say nothing until the Resurrection.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. Orations against the Arians, 1.37–39, 2.59; Letters to Serapion 1. Trans. NPNF II/4.
Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Trans. Norman Russell. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1987.
Nicholas Cabasilas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
Palamas, Gregory. The Triads. Ed. John Meyendorff, trans. Nicholas Gendle. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1983.
Russell, Norman, trans. Gregory Palamas: The Hesychast Controversy and the Debate with Islam. Translated Texts for Byzantinists 8. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. (Includes the Synodal Tome of 1351.)
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. We Shall See Him as He Is. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1988.
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1995.
The Holy Bible, cited in the New King James rendering except where the Greek is specified.