Much Christian writing on the idea of God as Teacher grows from the prologue of St. John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1, 14). The Greek for “Word” is logos, from which we derive our word “logic.” The coherence, discernibility, teachability of the entire universe flows from the Divine Logic at the center of all things. This is why Clement could write, “Ours is the great Teacher of all wisdom, and the whole world, including Athens and Greece, belongs to Him.” Christians have always confessed that that Logic which gives the cosmos its very intelligibility took on our humanity so that he could make us one with him in his divinity. Theologians refer to this process of humans growing up into godlikeness as theosis. As St. Athanasius wrote, Christ “became Man that we might be made God.”

Historically, Christian theology has not viewed theosis as an immediate divine act, as if God waved a divinizing wand over sinful humans to transform them into models of holy perfection all in one go (“poof!”). Of course, there is nothing preventing our all-powerful Creator from doing so. He can do it. But, as G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.” Put a different way, he can do, but, in his supreme power, he chooses not to. Rather than do to his beloved image bearers, he prefers to teach us. Theosis, the process of humans achieving their destiny in becoming one with God, is, at least in part, an educational activity.

Counterintuitively, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in the late 2nd century, believed that God did not even “force” perfection on Adam and Eve when he had first created human beings. Rather, he pictured us in the Garden of Eden, not as the prototypes of human perfection, but as “infants” who were not yet ready for the solid food of union with the divine. In order to give us what we need, God feeds us “from the breast of his flesh” so we could “become accustomed to eat and drink the Word of God” and so “contain in ourselves the Bread of immortality.” The goal of humans’ education in divine things is to develop the ability to see God, for “the beholding of God is productive of immortality.” After all, “the glory of God is a human being fully alive, and human life consists in beholding God.” For Irenaeus, the vision of God is the source of our very life. In order to enable us to receive this vision of Ultimate Reality in the person of the Son, God teaches us, trains us, develops us into mature image bearers capable of beholding his glory.

This intuition about the way in which God grows human beings to become partakers of his divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) has led the church, from its earliest days, to focus significant effort on catechesis. The word “catechesis” comes from the Greek katēcheō, which simply means “to teach.” The word occurs eight times in the New Testament, and it was taken up by the early church as a way to school new believers in a life of following Christ. This makes sense. If even Adam and Eve in the Garden had to grow up into maturity in their life with God, then a person raised in a culture with values opposed to Christian faith needs a rigorous path to being de-formed from the ways of the world and re-formed unto Christ. This was the goal of catechesis in the first centuries of the church. It was the way the church participated in the divine act of education.