In my last post in this series on the subject of Salvation, I covered quite a lot about the faith/works paradigm. I wrote quite a fair bit about how faith and works go hand in hand with our salvation. Even from an Evangelical point of view, works are needed for salvation - thus destroying one of the Solas.
Saying "one of the Solas" seems odd to me, since the word sola implies just the one, but having read Luther, and many of the other Reformers and knowing that the Five Solae work together, it isn't as odd. It just seems odd to write out.But, I digressed again.
As I was saying, even within the frame work of "Faith Alone" or Sola Fide, for one to be saved requires work. "What must I do to be saved?" a certain Ethiopian asks. He is answered, "Believe and be baptized." Two things laid out specifically in this conversation, 1) believing, and 2) being baptized. Both of these things require the saved to first do things before being saved. It is only after the person has done these things that the grace of God is poured out on them (the grace of God, not our own merit).
We see plenty of examples of God requiring His faithful to do things before He pours out His grace on them. The Israelites had a land promised to them, but God did not just give them the land. God commanded them to go and clean out the land of certain peoples. I won't go into the why God commanded the Israelites to go and get rid of these certain peoples, because it is covered quite nicely in the Lord of Spirits podcast over on Ancient Faith Radio.
Even when Jesus healed people, some of those people had to do something for that healing, whether it was just asking, or having friends lower them down from a roof, reaching out and touching the hem of His garment, or struggling to get into the pool when an angel touched it.
This is not to say that God cannot just pour out His grace upon us. He is God, He can do whatever He wants. God can also save whoever He wants.
The thief on the cross is mentioned often when one discusses a works or faith salvation (it's both, by the way). However, the penitent thief asks Jesus to remember him when He came into His kingdom. So, the thief did something; he requested to be remembered. And even if that is not counted as a "work" it is still up to God if He chooses to save someone.
If I continue on, then this post will just be a rehash of others that I have done, so let us move on to the actual subject of this post - theosis.
What is Theosis?
Theosis is also called deification which on it's face looks like we are saying to become a god. I want to say right now that this is NOT what we Orthodox believe.
"Theosis ("deification," "divinization") is the process of a worshiper becoming free of hamartía ("missing the mark"), being united with God, beginning in this life and later consummated in bodily resurrection. For Orthodox Christians, Théōsis (see 2 Pet. 1:4) is salvation. Théōsis assumes that humans from the beginning are made to share in the Life or Nature of the all-Holy Trinity. Therefore, an infant or an adult worshiper is saved from the state of unholiness (hamartía — which is not to be confused with hamártēma “sin”) for participation in the Life (zōé, not simply bíos) of the Trinity — which is everlasting.
This is not to be confused with the heretical (apothéōsis) - "Deification in God’s Essence", which is imparticipable."(OrthodoxWiki - Theosis)
We can see here that Theosis is a uniting of ourselves to God. 2 Peter 1:3-4 says,
"3 His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to[a] his own glory and excellence,[b] 4 by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire." (ESV)
We see that this idea of theosis is present in the New Testament - that we might become partakers of the divine nature. To us, theosis is salvation.
St. Athanasius said that, "The Son of God became man, that man might become god." This does not mean that we become gods - we will not become a pantheon sat on top of some mountain with attributes such as hurling lightning. We will instead be partakers of the divine nature.
But it is a constant struggle for us to accomplish this. Our human nature is fallen, we are used to sinning. Through the grace of God are we made perfect, but it is hard work on our parts, and often that work is not finished when we die.
The icon I posted above is a wonderful example of this struggle. On this ladder (the icon is the Ladder of Divine Ascent) we see people climbing up towards heaven, but we also see people falling off of this ladder - or being pulled off by demons. This is not to show that we can "lose" our salvation, but rather that we can be lost on our journey to salvation.
Perhaps we have become too prideful in the works that we do. We attend church every day that they have services. We volunteer to serve in some capacity at church. We volunteer to help at homeless shelters. We give money to charities.
All of these things are good things to do, but if we are doing them for the wrong reason they can be our folly.
So, we see that our salvation is not entirely "works based". In fact, as I am pretty sure that I have stated before, the works we do are an outpouring of God's grace. But if we are performing the works for the wrong reasons, then they are devoid of grace, and are not a benefit to our salvation.
And it is not by our own power that we get to Heaven. We do not make ourselves saved.
God became man so that man might become god. We are not becoming gods, we are not joining a pantheon, we most assuredly are not usurping God. We are joining Him in unity. We are becoming one with God.
Through God's grace we become what God is by nature. It is His grace that changes us. It is through His grace that we become fully human.
"Through theoria, the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ, human beings come to know and experience what it means to be fully human (the created image of God); through their communion with Jesus Christ God shares Himself with the human race, in order to conform them to all that God is in knowledge, righteousness and holiness. Theosis also asserts the complete restoration of all people (and of the entire creation), in principle. This is built upon the understanding of the atonement put forward by Irenaeus of Lyons, called "recapitulation.""(OrthodoxWiki - Theosis)
We see that it is through communion that God shares Himself with us. Through this communion with Jesus Christ we can become completely restored to our original human nature from before the Fall. We become fully human.
This is possible for us because Jesus was fully man and fully God. "All of humanity is fully restored to the full potential of humanity because the Son of God took to Himself a human nature to be born of a woman, and takes to Himself also the sufferings due to sin (yet is not Himself a sinful man, and is God unchanged in His being)."(OrthodoxWiki - Theosis).
And again, it is a constant struggle for us - humans - to try to reconcile ourselves to God. We have to work for it. And God helps us by pouring out His grace upon us as we do these works. I keep stressing that because it is important. We try to conform ourselves to the image of Christ, and it is hard work.
"This reconciliation is made actual through the struggle (podvig in Russian) to conform to the image of Christ. Without the struggle, the praxis, there is no real faith; faith leads to action, without which it is dead. One must unite will, thought and action to God's will, His thoughts and His actions. A person must fashion his life to be a mirror, a true likeness of God. More than that, since God and humanity are more than a similarity in Christ but rather a true union, Christians' lives are more than mere imitation and are rather a union with the life of God Himself: so that, the one who is working out salvation, is united with God working within the penitent both to will and to do that which pleases God. Gregory Palamas affirmed the possibility of humanity's union with God in His energies, while also affirming that because of God's transcendence and utter otherness, it is impossible for any person or other creature to know or to be united with God's essence. Yet through faith we can attain phronema, an understanding of the faith of the Church."(OrthodoxWiki - Theosis)
Through our struggle - through our praxis - we show our faith. Faith begets action, and if it does not then it is a dead faith, as we are told in the Epistle of St. James. Through our struggle we are brought closer, and closer to being united to God. But again, we must make sure that our motives are right - that we are actually doing these things because of our faith and to bring ourselves closer to God, and not because of our pride to make ourselves look better.
And again, it is through our work that we experience the grace of God.
"A brief and clumsy summary of the energy-essence distinction is as follows: God may be understood as both energy and essence. God’s “substance” i.e. what He is “made of” if we may conjure such a thing, is His essence. God’s essence’s effects are His energies so that they may be categorized, but not separated from, one another in that we are not dividing God into different kinds of gods.
A rough analogy would be equating God’s essence with a flame and His energy with the effects of the flame. One cannot divorce a flame’s heat and light from the flame itself. Yet, the heat and light are not the flame. Hence, men cannot share God’s essence as we cannot become a flame while still being men–we would be destroyed for “God is a consuming fire” (Heb 12:29). But, we can participate in the energies of the flame. The closer we walk to it, the brighter and warmer we get.
The Orthodox view of salvation, therefore, is that the works being “fruits in themselves” are literally us participating in God’s energy, as it is God who works in us to will and to act (Phil 2:13). This acting in a Godlike manner and being conformed to Him is salvation. Hence, the working of God’s will is an experience His “energy,” which literally effects salvation itself.
God has saved us by atoning for our sins on the cross, as He has paid our penalty and we no longer have a debt. Getting out of jail is far short of living in Paradise. God continues to save us by not only forgiving debt, but by increasing our sanctification, provided we work out our salvation in fear and trembling (Phil 2:12). This fear and trembling is simply us drawing closer to the flame, and as a result getting brighter and warmer." (Theosis, Merits, and Orthodoxy)
We experience God's grace through our work. Our work conforms us to God. This is theosis - becoming so much like God that we are united fully to Him. This is salvation.
We Orthodox do not merely say a quick prayer such as, "Lord Jesus Christ, I acknowledge that you are God. I acknowledge that I am a sinner. I am sorry. I accept you as my savior." and then just sit back on our laurels, patting ourselves on our backs, and just ride along with the current. This is only a part of the process.
If we have true faith, then that faith will bear works. Those works, through the grace of God, will bring us closer to salvation.
If I went out, without faith, and built churches, gave to charity, fed and clothed the homeless, gave eight billion dollars to the Church, etc. it would not be counted towards my salvation. It is faith that makes the difference. Are those good things to do? Absolutely. But what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but lose his soul?
We also shouldn't see these works as atoning for our sins, or paying back our debt to God. The atonement was made, and the debt paid. It is not an "Oops, I sinned. I should do x action to pay my debt." It is an, "I want to be united fully to God and to become fully human, so I will do x."
"While there is a sense that certain actions Christians perform effect the forgiveness of sins (i.e. confession in James 5:15-16, almsgiving in Luke 11:41, Tob 12:9) we must not understand these things as adding on top of the “perfect satisfaction” and “infinite merit” that Christ provides us. Rather, they are actions in which the heavenly reality becomes available to us within our material existence by virtue of our metaphysical union with Christ and our conforming ourselves to Him (Phil 3:10).
As Saint Augustine asserts, “passages of Holy Scripture…teach us that no man can obtain eternal life without that union with Christ which is effected in Him and with Him, when we are imbued with His sacraments and incorporated with the members of His body” (On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins, and the Baptism of Infants, Book III, Chap 19).
This is why when Orthodoxy teaches we are saved through faith and not works, the teaching is that faith includes not only the intellect, but also the body and soul living out the faith and making it real. As Jeremias II of Constantinople wrote, “good works are not separate from, but necessary for, true faith.” (See also what the early church fathers wrote about faith here.)"(Theosis, Merits, and Orthodoxy)
It is through faith that we are saved, and that faith will bear fruit. That fruit will bring us to Theosis. And theosis is salvation.
We are partakers in the divine nature, and through this partaking we are receiving God's grace. Through God's grace we are saved - not by our own merit.
Pray for me, a sinner.
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