group's doctrine of salvation always brings together its most fundamental commitments.
Salvation requires us to say something about the nature of God, creation, and
the Fall as background to redemption itself. As such, a view of salvation tellingly
reveals the innermost heart of one's faith. Eastern Orthodoxy is no exception.
When Eastern Orthodoxy speaks of salvation, it speaks of deification, a notion drawn from a long development of Eastern/Hellenistic theological reflection. As one popular Eastern Orthodox thinker explains,
The aim of the Christian life, which Seraphim described as the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God, can equally well be defined in terms of deification. Basil described the human person as a creature who has received the order to become god; . . . Such, according to the teaching of the Orthodox Church, is the final goal at which every Christian must aim: to become god, to attain theosis, 'deification' or 'divinization.' For Orthodoxy our salvation and redemption mean our deification. [1]
Deification is not intended as some exaggerated metaphor. In Eastern understanding, deification is the process in which humans gradually become metaphysically (i.e., in their being) united, intermingled, permeated with the attributes, the non-essential being, the energies, of God.
Perhaps because of the initial distastefulness of such claims, the Eastern Orthodox are quick to qualify them. They tell us that deification is not pantheism, since we are not united with God's essential nature, only His attributes, the non-essential being radiating from His essence. For the same reason, they assure us that deification does not "humanize" God. They claim that deification is simply that which the apostle Peter spoke of when declaring that "you may be partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet. 1:4). [2]
Salvation by deification stands within a broader understanding of God, creation, and the Fall. Most prominently, it depends on a distinction in God between His essence and energies. We may only approach God in His essence by means of negative ("apophatic") theology, not by positive affirmations.
All knowledge has as its object that which is. Now God is beyond all that exists. In order to approach Him it is necessary to deny all that is inferior to Him. . . . It is by unknowing that one may know Him who is above every possible object of knowledge. Proceeding by negations one ascends from inferior degrees of being to the highest. [3]
Out of this unknowable essence, flow God's energies, "the outpourings of the divine nature which cannot set bounds to itself." [4] Such divine energies are "God's love, joy, and peace that radiate, as it were, from the nature of God, and in which through Christ we can participate." [5] Even more, these divine energies "penetrate the whole created universe, and are the cause of its existence." [6]
Initially, God created man to naturally develop toward full deification. [7] Nevertheless, we find that,
The divine plan was not fulfilled by Adam; instead of the straight line of ascent towards God, the will of the first man followed a path contrary to nature, and ending in death. God alone can endow men with the possibility of deification, by liberating him at one and the same time from death and from captivity to sin. [8]
After the Fall, "[w]hat man ought to have attained by raising himself up to God, God achieved by descending to man." [9]
In the incarnation, God could once again redivinize fallen humanity and set it back on its course:
God descends to the world and becomes man, and man is raised towards divine fullness and becomes god, because this union of the two natures, the divine and the human, has been determined in the eternal counsel of God, and because it is the final end for which the world has been created out of nothing. [10]
In fact, by "His incarnation to save fallen humanity," [11] Christ also made possible the deification of "the whole created universe." [12]
The incarnation lays the foundation for deification but it does not complete the process. To begin, we must become substantially, metaphysically united to Christ in His humanity through baptism. Then we must nurture ourselves, with the aid of God's grace, toward full deification:
If God has given us in the Church all the objective conditions, all the means that we need for the attainment of this end [deification], we, on our side, must produce the necessary subjective conditions; for it is this synergy, in this co-operation of man with God, that the union is fulfilled. [13]
As such, St. Maximus observed that in regard to its completion, "Our salvation depends on our will." [14]
Problems with Deification
Is deification part of the Christian gospel? Part of apostolic faith? At least three concerns suggest otherwise. First, it self-consciously incorporates pagan/Hellenistic philosophy into Christian theology. Second, it omits or minimizes a justifying Cross. And third, by denying any actual salvation by grace, human effort determines any actual salvation.
Self-Conscious Synthesis with Paganism: Eastern Orthodox historical discussions often praise the early church's opposition to Platonism as found in thinkers like Origen. But, in discussing deification, they seem to have little difficulty in embracing the pagan philosophy of Plotinus (205-270 A.D.), the primary systemizer of Neo-Platonism.
Eastern Orthodox theologian John Meyendorff explains that "Byzantine theology never escaped from the great problem of the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christian revelation" [15] and that it has had a "preoccupation to integrate within a Christian system the hierarchical world of neo-Platonism," [16] a task designed to "protect the Christian tradition and to make it acceptable to neo-Platonic intellectuals." [17] He concedes that elements of this neo-Platonic synthesis have "no foundation in Scripture." [18]
Keeping the Eastern notion of deification before us, consider a brief summary of Plotinus's philosophy:
(1) The One is the impersonal, immaterial, simple, unknowable "being" distinct from all created things yet present in them all. Since it is not created, it cannot be known by humans but can only be described by negations, by what it is not.
(2) All created being emanates from The One downward in degrees along a continuous scale of being with no sharp breaks. Immaterial being such as soul is closer up the scale of being than material items that make up the bottom.
(3) Man originally was created a soul, but desiring independence, he descended into the world of material objects and separated himself farther from divine being.
(4) To return to The One, the human soul must devote itself not only to a process of ascetic intellectual practices but ultimately to direct union with The One through ecstatic contact, which only the most disciplined attain.
Eastern Orthodox thinkers at times insist that they have purged neo-Platonism from their thinking by slight changes in Plotinus's system. For example, they reject simplicity as a basis for God's unknowability and Plotinus's exclusive concern with the intellect. By claiming that such trifling adjustments remove Hellenism from their theology, these thinkers show how deeply ingrained their neo-Platonism truly is. They almost can't imagine any non-Hellenistic alternatives. [19]
Most significantly, by making neo-Platonism central to their doctrine of salvation, they come into direct conflict with apostolic warnings against mixing pagan and Christian thought (Col. 2:8). They thus encourage us to embrace a theology that drinks deeply of "Greek foolishness" (cf. 1 Cor. 1:20ff.), from which Paul commanded the Athenians to repent (Acts 17). From the very beginning of the church, God has instructed His people to separate themselves from pagan thinking, not to be "ensnared to follow them . . . saying, 'How do these nations serve their gods, that I also may do likewise?'" (Deut. 12:30). The same requirement holds for deification.
Salvation without a Justifying Cross: In Plotinus's system, one can be redeemed/deified without any need of sacrificial atonement. Similarly, in the Eastern synthesis, the incarnation and sacraments could do the trick alone. Christ's substitutionary sacrifice, the hallmark of Christian faith, plays no central role. Though some Eastern Orthodox texts on salvation give lip-service to the atonement, one searches in vain for serious Eastern explanations of justification, atonement, propitiation, etc.
In those places that say something minimal, the cross is important because it lays a beginning for the forgiveness of sins. It cannot accomplish anything definitively, because redemption/deification is a process. Salvation "can never be achieved fully in this life." [20] Thus, Christ's sacrifice becomes either unnecessary or incomplete.
Apostolic faith, though, reveals a definitive, Hebraic, not Hellenistic cross. Drawing from Old Covenant truths of substitutionary sacrifice, imputation, and covenant headship, the New Covenant reveals that (1) God is angry with sinners (Rom. 1:18; 3:10-18) and that (2) those whom God calls He definitively pardons, declaring them righteous (Rom. 5:6-11; 8:30), (3) by imputing their sin to Christ (Rom. 3:21-27; 2 Cor. 5:19-21; Gal. 3:13), (4) and by imputing Christ's perfect righteousness to them (Rom. 5:18ff; Phil. 3:8,9). The gospel declares that "having now been justified by His blood" (Rom. 5:9), we are now guiltless (not sinless) so that Christ's people can gloriously confess "there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus" (Rom. 8:1). Eastern deification cannot permit New Covenant justification into its Hellenistic scheme, so it has to remain shamefully and inexcusably silent on the central truths of the apostolic gospel.
Salvation by Human Effort: Since deification can only be completed when a person, by his own effort, has finally acquired enough grace, how do the Eastern Orthodox attempt to explain that salvation is "not of yourselves"? They point to the incarnation and a sacramental church as grace that humans could never earn or merit or bring about on their own efforts. So the beginning of salvation is purely by grace but the completion of the process is by human effort.
But this answer misses the challenge. This tells us only that we may be "prepared by grace" or "provided for by grace," but it has no place for the apostolic "salvation by grace" (Eph. 2:8; Rom. 11:6; 4:4). Since God's part was only to establish the possibility of salvation, any actual success in deification is purely the result of human effort. Deification is not even a fifty-fifty cooperation. Since possibilities don't do anything on their own, actual salvation is entirely the result of human effort, human work. In the end, despite all God does, if no one moved, no one would be saved.
In apostolic faith, however, we learn that we are actually saved "not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (Jn. 1:13; 5:21). In a reversal of Eastern Othodoxy, Scripture presents humans as passive and dead (Eph. 2:1; Col. 2:13), with God taking the actualizing initiative (Acts 5:31; 11:18; 16:14; Phil. 1:29). Salvation is "not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy" (Rom. 9:16).
A little compromise with unbelief can be deadly. For Eastern Orthodoxy, the
compromise with Plotinus has all but pushed apostolic faith out of the picture.
Now they may chide us for being Western and Augustinian, but their real dispute
is not with Protestants but with the apostolic traditions they have betrayed
(2 Thess. 2:15).
