Theosis Quotes

Christ was made man that we might be made God.

If you, free as you are of every weight had stayed below, then that would be as strange as living flame on earth remaining still." And then she turned her gaze up toward the heavens.

God in Christ has taken into Himself the brokenness of the human condition. Hence, human woundedness, brokenness, death itself are transformed from dead ends to doorways into Life. In the divinizing humanity of Christ, bruises become balm.

He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man ... might become the son of God.

Dusty, dark, cold, and hard, coal has no beauty of its own, but when it is consummated by fire it is beautiful and becomes what it was designed to be.

But by the same logic as men become just through the possession of justice, or wise through the possession of wisdom, so those who possess divinity necessary become divine. Each happy individual is therefore divine. While only God is so by nature, as many as you like may become so by participation.

The crucial distinction can be discerned by differentiating between deification, an ontological sharing in the Godhead in which the human literally becomes divine, and theosis, a participation in the life of God the Father through union with Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit which the human becomes truly human.

This marvelous anthology of books and letters called the Bible is all for the sake of astonishment! It’s for divine transformation (theosis), not intellectual or “small-self” coziness.

He who aspires to divine realities willingly allows providence to lead him by principle of wisdom toward the grace of deification. He who does not so aspire is drawn, by the just judgement of God and against his will, away from evil by various forms of discipline. The first, as a lover of God, is deified by providence; the second, although a lover of matter, is held back from perdition by God's judgement. For since God is goodness itself, he heals those who desire it through the principles of wisdom, and through various forms of discipline cures those who are sluggish in virtue.

And of all illumination of which humanity can partake, none is comparable to the discovery of the potential divinity of the human being, the awareness that the human being is a god-in-the making.

When the cyclical law of repetition suddenly stops its rotating movement, creation, freed from vanity, will not be absorbed into the impersonal Absolute of a Nirvana but will see the beginning of an eternal springtime, in which all the forces of life, triumphant over death, will come to the fulness of their unfolding, since God will be the only principle of life in all things. Then the deified will shine like stars around the only Star, Christ, with whom they will reign in the same glory of the Holy Trinity, communicated to each without measure by the Holy Spirit.

God sees before Him in fact a self-centred, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human animal. But He says "Let us pretend that this is not a mere creature, but our Son. It is like Christ in so far as it is a Man, for He became Man. Let us pretend that it is also like Him in Spirit. Let us treat it as if it were what in fact it is not. Let us pretend in order to make the pretence into a reality." God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one. I daresay this idea of a divine makebelieve sounds rather strange at first. But, is it so strange really? Is not that how the higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does.

That's why this matter of inner peace is so important, because it lays a groundwork for that new life, that theosis, that transformation, that link with God, the ultimate destiny of our Spirits - not in the afterlife, but right here and now.

For then will be perfectly fulfilled in our case that prayer of our Saviour in which He prayed for His disciples to the Father saying that the love wherewith You loved Me may be in them and they in us; and again: that they all may be one as You, Father, in Me and I in You, that they also may be one in us, when that perfect love of God, wherewith He first loved us has passed into the feelings of our heart as well, by the fulfilment of this prayer of the Lord which we believe cannot possibly be ineffectual. And this will come to pass when God shall be all our love, and every desire and wish and effort, every thought of ours, and all our life and words and breath, and that unity which already exists between the Father and the Son, and the Son and the Father, has been shed abroad in our hearts and minds, so that as He loves us with a pure and unfeigned and indissoluble love, so we also may be joined to Him by a lasting and inseparable affection, since we are so united to Him that whatever we breathe or think, or speak is God, since, as I say, we attain to that end of which we spoke before, which the same Lord in His prayer hopes may be fulfilled in us: that they all may be one as we are one, I in them and You in Me, that they also may be made perfect in one; and again: Father, those whom You have given Me, I will that where I am, they may also be with Me. This then ought to be the destination of the solitary, this should be all his aim that it may be vouchsafed to him to possess even in the body an image of future bliss, and that he may begin in this world to have a foretaste of a sort of earnest of that celestial life and glory. This, I say, is the end of all perfection, that the mind purged from all carnal desires may daily be lifted towards spiritual things, until the whole life and all the thoughts of the heart become one continuous prayer.

A word of caution must be noted here. This ontological transformation that occurs in union with Christ is increasingly being referred to as theosis, a motif historically central to Eastern traditions and slowly making its way into Protestant traditions in the West.65 Within these Protestant—primarily Pauline—circles, Michael Gorman has written on this transformation as theosis.66 Gorman defines theosis as the “transformative participation in the kenotic, cruciform character of God through Spirit-enabled conformity to the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected/glorified Christ.”67 Gorman rightly emphasizes the role of the Spirit in this transformation, but, with Macaskill, I question Gorman’s theological use of the term theosis and the interplay between becoming “like Christ” and “incorporation into the divine identity.”68 Participation in Christ does not blur the ever-present distinction between God in Christ and believers in Christ. The glory in which believers participate is not innate to themselves; it originates in God alone and is received only as a gift from God in union with Christ.

The famous 20th-century writer and theologian C. S. Lewis was an ardent believer and advocate of the theosis perspective of God and humanity. As he said: It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which you would be strongly tempted to worship . . . There are no ordinary people.

theological fact of the body’s very purpose to be the dwelling place of God.

The fleeting tensions and movements within the body thus have a deep relationship with one’s thought life, and so by attending to sensations, which are the only things the body “knows” prior to their being conceptualized and interpreted by the mind, one can also calm both body and mind. ​As stated

It is a supreme form of attention by which one is aware of thoughts as thoughts, emotions as emotions, images as images, etc. Also called attentiveness,

​In order to watch the mind, all that one need do is simply note the presence of any thought, concept, image, or idea. These phenomena arise and pass away, arise and pass away, arise and pass away,

God reveals in His Word that we are made in His image, and that we are fundamentally spiritual, immortal, and intelligent, and that we are born into a world of cosmic meaning and purpose that transcends the empirical cycle of creation but extends rather into eternity. St.

Egocentric perception controls and renders any consequent conception correspondingly egocentric. Sensoriality in this way makes fallen man’s transcendence of circumstances impossible, and so circumstances always act as a controlling mechanism for all of his relationships and all of his responses.

Whereas in his ontological composition he is made to find his fulfillment in God as his ultimate referent, constant pleasure, and total purpose, since fallen man is sensorial in his mode of being then in his basic and rightful urge towards this infinite fulfillment he is tragically and constantly attaching it to the unreliable fluctuations of material

Because the mind is prepossessed by sense perception, we have the duality of desire and anger. These are irrational tendencies and under the influence of nature and not of reason, becoming a habit in the soul that penetrates all the parts of our being and is difficult to uproot.[23]

subtle process of judgment is not rooted in truth but in pre-rational sensoriality,

there is more to the spiritual life than what the intellect alone can provide, and sanctification more than correcting one’s moral math.

The basic elements of praxis that will be dealt with are three: watchfulness, stillness, and prayer. The basic objects of praxis are body, breath, and mind.

watchfulness is a continual process that attends to the presence and activity of thoughts, with the aim of their dissolution.

By interrupting the activity of thought, one keeps thoughts from entering into the heart. The essence of watchfulness is thus an increasingly clear and continuous attention that is sensitive towards the internal motions of passions and thoughts, sensations and emotions.

Subtler and subtler thoughts are then noticed, and as one maintains watchfulness, refusing to enter into thought’s narrative, then freedom from thought increases. This freedom brings stillness into the mind.

Christ calls us to entrust ourselves to Him so that we can have His mind (1 Corinthians 2:16) and therefore think with His mind and choose with His will. God wants to put His Law in our minds, write it on our hearts, abide in our hearts through His Spirit, and share His Kingdom

St. John Chrysostom said, “It is not enough to leave Egypt (sin and death), one must also enter the Promised Land (theosis). Between Egypt and the Promised Land lies a desert.

According to the teachings of the Holy Bible and the Fathers of the Church, man is able to achieve Theosis because within the Orthodox Church of Christ the Grace of God is uncreated. God is not only essence, as the West thinks; He is also energy. If God was only essence, we could not unite with Him, could not commune with Him, because the essence of God is awesome and unapproachable for man, as was written: "Never will man see My face and live" (Exodus 33:20). Let us give a relevant example from things human. If we grasp a bare electric wire, we will die. However, if we connect a lamp to the same wire, we are illuminated. We see, enjoy, and are assisted by, the energy of electric current, but we are not able to grasp its essence. Let us say that something similar happens with the uncreated energy of God. If we were able to unite with the essence of God, we would become gods in essence. Then everything would become a god, and there would be confusion so that, essentially, nothing would be a god. In a few words, this is what they believe in the Oriental religions, e.g. in Hinduism, where the god is not a personal existence but an indistinct power dispersed through all the world, in men, in animals, and in objects (Pantheism). As St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Dionysius the Areopagite, and other holy Fathers repeatedly say, God is filled with a divine eros, a divine love for His creatures. Because of this infinite and ecstatic love of His, He comes out of Himself and seeks to unite with them. This is expressed and realised as His energy, or better, His energies. With these, His uncreated energies, God created the world and continues to preserve it. He gives essence and substance to our world through His essence-creating energies; He illuminates man with His illuminating energies; He sanctifies him with His sanctifying energies. Finally, He deifies him with His deifying energies. Thus, through His uncreated energies holy God enters nature, the world, history, and human life.

According to the teachings of the Holy Bible and the Fathers of the Church, man is able to achieve Theosis because within the Orthodox Church of Christ the Grace of God is uncreated. God is not only essence, as the West thinks; He is also energy. If God was only essence, we could not unite with Him, could not commune with Him, because the essence of God is awesome and unapproachable for man, as was written: “Never will man see My face and live” (Exodus 33:20). Let us give a relevant example from things human. If we grasp a bare electric wire, we will die. However, if we connect a lamp to the same wire, we are illuminated. We see, enjoy, and are assisted by, the energy of electric current, but we are not able to grasp its essence. Let us say that something similar happens with the uncreated energy of God. If we were able to unite with the essence of God, we would become gods in essence. Then everything would become a god, and there would be confusion so that, essentially, nothing would be a god. In a few words, this is what they believe in the Oriental religions, e.g. in Hinduism, where the god is not a personal existence but an indistinct power dispersed through all the world, in men, in animals, and in objects (Pantheism). God, according to the Orthodox theological view, is One in a Trinity and a Trinity in One. As St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Dionysius the Areopagite, and other holy Fathers repeatedly say, God is filled with a divine eros, a divine love for His creatures. Because of this infinite and ecstatic love of His, He comes out of Himself and seeks to unite with them. This is expressed and realised as His energy, or better, His energies. With these, His uncreated energies, God created the world and continues to preserve it. He gives essence and substance to our world through His essence-creating energies; He illuminates man with His illuminating energies; He sanctifies him with His sanctifying energies. Finally, He deifies him with His deifying energies. Thus, through His uncreated energies holy God enters nature, the world, history, and human life.

According to the teachings of the Holy Bible and the Fathers of the Church, man is able to achieve Theosis because within the Orthodox Church of Christ the Grace of God is uncreated. God is not only essence, as the West thinks; He is also energy. If God was only essence, we could not unite with Him, could not commune with Him, because the essence of God is awesome and unapproachable for man, as was written: "Never will man see My face and live" (Exodus 33:20). Let us give a relevant example from things human. If we grasp a bare electric wire, we will die. However, if we connect a lamp to the same wire, we are illuminated. We see, enjoy, and are assisted by, the energy of electric current, but we are not able to grasp its essence. Let us say that something similar happens with the uncreated energy of God. If we were able to unite with the essence of God, we would become gods in essence. Then everything would become a god, and there would be confusion so that, essentially, nothing would be a god. In a few words, this is what they believe in the Oriental religions, e.g. in Hinduism, where the god is not a personal existence but an indistinct power dispersed through all the world, in men, in animals, and in objects (Pantheism).

That is, a communion of divine persons who have one will and one knowledge because each is in the other, interpenetrated and inter-animated without loss of identity, who can, by grace, draw human persons into that communion without loss of identity as humans and persons. This theosis more closely reflects what the New Testament envisions.

The goal of theosis is not to remove humanity but to make humans more human, like the one human for the many, the man Christ Jesus. This anticipates what human persons will become in the eternal future in heaven, or heaven-come-to-earth, which we will revisit shortly.

To this Augustine responded with the doctrines of original sin and of predestination. The image of God, impaired by human sin and weakness, could not—as Clement, Origen, and other Greek theologians had taught—be restored by means of a drawn-out, upward pedagogical process culminating in theosis; rather, the terrible reality of total human depravity demanded a radical conversion experience and an encounter with the irresistible grace of God in Christ.

For Gorman, cruciformity is not limited to conformity to Christ but includes also conformity to God and the Spirit. Cruciformity means theosis, or “theoformity,”45 which is “transformative participation in the kenotic, cruciform character of God through Spirit-enabled conformity to the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected/glorified Christ.

St. Maximus continues the theme of foolishness by referring to sensorial pleasure as “irrational.” Regarding this aspect he again contrasts the sensorial, and therefore sub-rational, bodily, or corporeal orientation of pleasure, which is to say the pleasure of the senses, with the “divine pleasure of the mind.

conversion is, therefore, not the production of faith where there was none, but the turning of faith from one object to another, from the world to heaven, from changing phenomena to eternity, from fact to truth, from creation to Creator.

repentance really means a transformation of mind (metanoia) by the taking up of an entirely new object of faith, which is to say one takes up a mode of seeing and framing self and reality in terms of God.

Watchfulness therefore necessarily includes attention to this pre-rational psychosomatic activity, usually discernable as some kind of fleeting or chronic tension, either subtle or conspicuous. Together with the soul, the body is thus bound up with the fallenness of man,

the question: “Who am I?” Or, “To whom do these thoughts occur?

Man’s soul eventually loses its ability to move in any direction but towards matter. Since there is no life in matter, man functionally weds himself to that which is dead.

faith is the principle factor determining one’s mode of viewing reality, which in turn determines his mode of action. In short, faith frames reality.

other words, the “working out” of this salvation is from theosis, in theosis, and to theosis. The working out of salvation is thus the thorough transformation of perspective from the fallen mode to the Christian mode.

​God is the cause of one’s being saved. Self-will is not casual of salvation;

Orthodoxy affirms the sacred and positive role of the human body as essential to the totality of human nature.

St. Gregory Palamas asks: Why should anybody who is endowed with a nous think it improper to bring their nous into a body whose very nature it is to be the dwelling place of God?[78]

By systematic is meant the orderly, symmetrical progression of attention through the body. By inclusiveness is meant from the surface of the body to the inside.

Oftentimes an inflamed imagination is mistaken for spiritual warmth of heart. Therefore, if one notices such warmth, simply return to the body, the breath, and the mind, and give it no undue significance.

we can become only what we are.14 And so, if we do possess a natural desire for the supernatural, it cannot be a mere contingency of providence, superadded to our nature; the potential of theosis must always already be the very structure of our nature in any possible order of reality. And, as it happens, we do possess such a desire, and could not fail to do so without entirely ceasing to be rational agents.

for all intents and purposes, unknowable? The question is critical for any discussion of deification, and rests on the ever-elusive goal of achieving some kind of theological balance in conveying both God’s infinite transcendence and finite immanence, each of which is a sine qua non regarding the other, as manifested in the very person of Christ, God incarnate.

The disciples’ love is witness-bearing; it is missional communal theosis. It is how “everyone”—literally “all” (pantes)—will come to know that the disciples are disciples of Jesus (13:35; cf. 17:21–23). This could sound like a rather minimalist goal, conveying knowledge of identity. But far more is at stake. The disciples’ mutual love is necessary for an effective witness that ultimately points not to themselves, but to Jesus the Son and to God the Father, that is, to the One whose own love is the means and mode of the world’s salvation (cf. 17:20–26). The goal is for others to enter the eternal life that consists, not in knowing facts, but in knowing the Father and the Son (17:3).

one's faith liberates their mind and heart from the tyranny of circumstances, for where the Spirit is there is freedom. Therefore, instead of seeking restlessly and relentlessly for unmitigated and constant sensory fulfillment in sensorial phenomena, the center of pleasure is restored to God-centeredness.

The connection, for those on the path of theosis, is love. The most telling of spiritual disciplines is how we relate to other people. It's a marvelously handy spiritual discipline, too, because other people are just about everywhere you look. God puts others in our lives not only for our joy and comfort but also to irritate and provoke us, so that our flaws rise to the surface where we can recognize and deal with them. Love is not easy. If you think you love everybody, you're probably not letting them get close enough. * In Orthodox usage, a "theologian" is not a person who writes about theology, but a person who has experienced God's presence directly in prayer, perhaps even seen his Light, the Uncreated Light that existed before the world was made. "If you pray truly, you are a theologian," said Evagrius Ponticus, aD 345-399 (Treatise on Prayer, 61).

In particular, the rich tradition of intentional Christian community that is also inherently missional needs to be more fully celebrated, imitated, and reimagined for its relevance to more standard forms of being the church.

Holiness is not a supplement to justification but the actualization of justification,

The most-holy temple of the Comforter And the beloved of the All-Pure Theotokos, Let us praise Porphyrios from our heart, For he loves and heals all, he protects And intercedes that we be granted theosis. Therefore, we cry out: Rejoice, O Father Porphyrios! (Kontakion of the Saint)