The Modern Retrievals and the Scholarly Debate

Over the last half-century deification has been “found” in Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, the Wesleys, the Anglican divines, and the Latin Fathers, and a substantial scholarly literature now argues that participation in God is not an Eastern peculiarity. This file reports that literature, names its principal contributions, and reports equally the critics who ask whether a theme has been mistaken for a doctrine. This is a question of evidence, not of dogma, and it is left unadjudicated.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Scope of This File — METHODOLOGY §4.2

Everything in this file falls under the both-sides rule. Whether Latin patristic, medieval, and Reformation sources contain a doctrine of deification is a source-critical and historical question, decided by evidence rather than by confession, and competent scholars — Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican — disagree about it. Positions are named, sourced, and not adjudicated here.

The dogmatic assessment of created grace and of the vision of the divine essence is a different matter, belongs to §4.1, and is made in the companion file, The Western Trajectory. An answer to the historical question does not settle the dogmatic one, and vice versa. Keeping them apart is the whole discipline of this section.

The Turn: From Archaism to Desideratum

The change in the standing of the word is itself the object of scholarship. Paul Gavrilyuk’s survey opens by noting that at the beginning of the twentieth century deification “stood for everything that was generally considered exotic and misguided about Eastern Orthodox theology,” and that it has since been discovered in Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, the Wesleys, and a large number of other Western authorities. His conclusion is measured and worth reproducing: there is little agreement on what is constitutive of deification, which makes the notion “an ecumenist’s dream and a philosopher’s nightmare,” and the agreement between the Greek Fathers and Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin amounts, on inspection, to their endorsement of some form of participatory metaphysics (Gavrilyuk, “The Retrieval of Deification: How a Once-Despised Archaism Became an Ecumenical Desideratum,” Modern Theology 25, no. 4 [2009]: 647–659).

The field now has a reference work: The Oxford Handbook of Deification, edited by Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Andrew Hofer, O.P., and Matthew Levering (Oxford University Press, 2024) — an Orthodox, a Roman Catholic Dominican, and a Roman Catholic systematician, which is itself an index of how the question has moved.

The Patristic Baseline

The historical work that made the rest possible is Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), which traces the vocabulary and its registers from the second century to Maximus and remains the standard scholarly history. Russell’s distinction between a “nominal,” a “analogical,” and a “realistic” use of theos language for human beings is the tool most often borrowed in the subsequent debates. His Fellow Workers with God: Orthodox Thinking on Theosis (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2009) gives the doctrine’s modern Orthodox reception, and his Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age (Oxford, 2019) examines how the twentieth-century Orthodox recovery of Palamas was itself shaped by modern concerns.

Aquinas and the Catholic Ressourcement

The Roman Catholic retrieval has proceeded on two fronts.

Aquinas. A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), argues that Aquinas has a genuine and substantial doctrine of deification, and further that Palamas does not intend an “ontological or fully real distinction” of the kind both his harsher modern interpreters and his critics have ascribed to him — so that the two stand much closer than the textbook contrast suggests. Her rapprochement thesis has been contested by other readers of both authors, and this collection presents it as a position rather than a finding (see St. Gregory Palamas: The Essence-Energies Distinction, which stages the same debate). Daniel A. Keating, Deification and Grace (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2007), gives a Catholic systematic account working from the Fathers and Aquinas together.

Reception of Aquinas in the East. Marcus Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), documents the substantial Byzantine and post-Byzantine engagement with Aquinas — including admirers among the Palamites — and argues that the modern Orthodox picture of an East that simply repudiated him is historically inaccurate.

Latin patristics. Jared Ortiz, ed., Deification in the Latin Patristic Tradition (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019), gathers studies arguing that deification is present across the Latin Fathers, not only the Greek. David Vincent Meconi, The One Christ: St. Augustine’s Theology of Deification (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2013), makes the case for Augustine specifically — a claim of some consequence, given how much modern Orthodox polemic has rested on the assumption that Augustine had no such doctrine.

Luther and the Finnish School

The most-discussed of the retrievals is the Finnish interpretation of Luther, initiated by Tuomo Mannermaa at the University of Helsinki.

Mannermaa’s central claim is that for Luther “Christ is really present in faith itself” (in ipsa fide Christus adest), so that justification is not merely a forensic declaration but includes the real indwelling of Christ in the believer — an account more ontological and participatory than the received Lutheran reading (Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005; German original In ipsa fide Christus adest, 1979). The school was introduced to English readers by Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, eds., Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), where Mannermaa’s colleagues argue that theosis is one of the main images of salvation in Luther’s soteriology and that union with God is his guiding soteriological motif.

The origin of the school is itself notable: it grew in part out of the Lutheran–Orthodox dialogues between the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland and the Russian Orthodox Church, in which the question of what Lutherans could say about deification was pressed by the encounter itself.

The reading is contested. Critics within Luther studies have argued that the Finnish school reads the later Luther through the earlier, underweights the forensic material that the Formula of Concord subsequently made normative, and imports a category from outside the tradition. The debate is ongoing and no consensus has formed. [Disputed: whether Mannermaa’s “real-ontic” reading is a recovery of Luther’s own theology or a modern construction is argued both ways in the Luther-studies literature; readers should consult the responses collected around Braaten and Jenson 1998 and the subsequent journal discussion.]

Calvin and the Reformed Debate

A parallel and well-documented dispute concerns Calvin.

Carl Mosser, “The Greatest Possible Blessing: Calvin and Deification,” Scottish Journal of Theology 55, no. 1 (2002): 36–57, argued that Calvin has a genuine doctrine of deification, grounded in his exegesis of 2 Peter 1:4 and in his doctrine of union with Christ (unio cum Christo), which in the Institutes is prior to both justification and sanctification. J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), develops the participatory reading further.

The counter-case has been argued in the same journal: subsequent articles have replied to Mosser, holding that Calvin’s language of participation is Christological and covenantal rather than deificatory in the patristic sense, and that “deification” imports more than Calvin’s texts will bear. The exchange continues in the Scottish Journal of Theology and elsewhere, and it is a model of the wider dispute: both sides are reading the same passages.

Wesley, the Anglicans, and Others

John and Charles Wesley. The Wesleyan doctrine of “Christian perfection” or entire sanctification has been read by some scholars as a Western analogue of theosis, and a connection to Wesley’s reading of the Greek Fathers — Macarius in particular — has been proposed. [Disputed: the extent and directness of Eastern patristic influence on Wesley is argued both ways in Wesley studies (cf. the discussion in Randy L. Maddox’s work on Wesley’s sources); the thematic affinity is more widely granted than the genealogical claim.]

Anglicanism. A. M. Allchin, Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1988), argues for a continuous participatory strand in Anglican divinity from the Caroline divines onward.

Jonathan Edwards and various strands of Reformed and Puritan spirituality have also been examined for participatory theology, and the collected volumes in the field survey these.

The Critics: Theme or Doctrine?

The most important methodological objection comes from within the retrieval literature itself.

Gösta Hallonsten, in “Theosis in Recent Research: A Renewal of Interest and a Need for Clarity,” in Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung, eds., Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), draws a distinction that has since been widely used: between a theme of deification — occasional language about becoming like God, sharing in divinity, participating — and a doctrine of deification, which for Hallonsten involves a whole connected structure: a particular view of creation and of the human being; a soteriology including a specific account of the Incarnation; a view of the Christian life as sanctification bound to the Church and the sacraments; and union with God as the final goal. On his account much of the retrieval literature has found the theme in Western sources and reported it as the doctrine, without reckoning with the anthropological assumptions on which the doctrine rests.

Gavrilyuk’s finding runs in a similar direction: that what the various parties turn out to share is a participatory metaphysics, which is a real and significant agreement but a considerably thinner one than the word “deification” suggests (Gavrilyuk 2009).

The counter-argument, made across the retrieval volumes, is that Hallonsten’s criteria are drawn from the mature Byzantine synthesis and are therefore a standard no pre-Palamite Father would meet either, so that the test proves too much.

Where This Leaves the Reader

Three things can be said without adjudicating.

The retrieval is real scholarship, not ecumenical courtesy. The texts adduced from Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and the Latin Fathers are genuine texts, and their participatory content is not manufactured. Any Orthodox account that proceeds as though the West has no theology of union with God is not accurate.

The differences that the Church has defined are not dissolved by it. That Aquinas teaches deification does not make created grace uncreated; that Luther teaches the real presence of Christ in faith does not make justification ontological in the Church’s sense. The scholarly convergence and the dogmatic difference are both facts, at different levels (see The Western Trajectory).

The state of the question is open, and it should be reported as open. This is precisely the situation §4.2 exists for: named positions, real evidence on both sides, and no verdict issued by a reference file.

References

Allchin, A. M. Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1988.
Billings, J. Todd. Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Braaten, Carl E., and Robert W. Jenson, eds. Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.
Christensen, Michael J., and Jeffery A. Wittung, eds. Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007. (Includes Gösta Hallonsten, “Theosis in Recent Research: A Renewal of Interest and a Need for Clarity.”)
Gavrilyuk, Paul L. “The Retrieval of Deification: How a Once-Despised Archaism Became an Ecumenical Desideratum.” Modern Theology 25, no. 4 (2009): 647–659.
Gavrilyuk, Paul L., Andrew Hofer, O.P., and Matthew Levering, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Deification. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
Keating, Daniel A. Deification and Grace. Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2007.
Mannermaa, Tuomo. Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005.
Meconi, David Vincent. The One Christ: St. Augustine’s Theology of Deification. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013.
Mosser, Carl. “The Greatest Possible Blessing: Calvin and Deification.” Scottish Journal of Theology 55, no. 1 (2002): 36–57.
Ortiz, Jared, ed. Deification in the Latin Patristic Tradition. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019.
Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Russell, Norman. Fellow Workers with God: Orthodox Thinking on Theosis. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2009.
Williams, A. N. The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.