Deification and the Shrunken Gospel
Khaled Anatolios’s expansive account of deification seeks to unify the various models of salvation under the banner of the Christian’s union with God.
Review by Caleb Knox
The scriptures permit us to speak of salvation in various ways. Some verses describe it as a legal act, where the sinner is taken from guilt to innocence; others, a medical operation, where our nature is brought from death to life. Theologians understand these as distinct “models” of salvation, which (we are often told) have little in common and are often in conflict. But in Fr. Khaled Anatolios’s Deification Through the Cross, he brings them together without diluting them. He explains their differences without overstating them. There is an ecumenical spirit that finds common ground by reducing beliefs; Anatolios takes the opposite route. He sets out to show that these models share a central affirmation about the end of salvation—deification.
What is deification? And how does it reconcile the various models of salvation? Deification is our becoming unified to God. As Anatolios explains in greater detail, deification is “a state of human existence enjoying [such] a degree of unity with God that renders it so assimilated to the divine way of being that the description of this state of human existence can avail itself of the same language used to describe the being of God.” This is not our becoming God. We rather partake in His nature and are fashioned in His likeness—a likeness that is more than us following Christ from a distance. The union is far deeper: the Christian is joined to Christ in an actual and meaningful sense. (Hence all the verses that speak to our being “in” and “with Christ.”) St. Paul points to marriage as the earthy image of this union. Marriage is a unity of both body and soul—“the two shall become one flesh,” or, as Adam says, “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.” The two become one, and the oneness is not a fiction, but their oneness does not obliterate their individual personhood. That is the “mystery” that St. Paul declares of both marriage and the gospel, and it is a window into what it means to be “partakers of the divine nature.”
Partakers of the divine nature—the words are from St. Peter, yet they seem excessively bold. But perhaps that is the point. I think we are right to be struck by this claim. It seems too grand to be true. That is why understanding salvation will require that we become like children again, accepting gifts from a living father. Only then will we see that our destiny as “sons of God” is far greater than we imagined. I suspect this is why Anatolios introduces his work with a simple question: Where is the joy we have lost in being saved? Have we forgotten where we are headed as the sons of God and the bride of Christ?
Carefully considered, this is not papering over important differences; this is catholicity.
After the introduction, Anatolios starts with three “foundational sources”—the Byzantine Liturgy, Scriptures, and the Ecumenical Councils. The reader is then whisked along his four pillars of “systematic theology”—the Trinity, Human nature, sin, and salvation. Along the way, we meet so many thinkers that have little opportunity to get to know any one of them. The final product is vast in scope, and perhaps to a fault. But even the ambition helps advance his argument. Anatolios locates nearly every one of his claims in both Eastern and Western theologians, and when that is not possible, he tells us why.
Though many sources are used throughout, not all are given equal time. For Anatolios, the expositor par excellence of deification is St. Athanasius—specifically, in what Anatolios elsewhere calls the Athanasian exchange: “the Son of God became man so that Man can be like God.” Anatolios is a student of Athanasius (indeed, his first work was an anthology of the Alexandrian’s orations and letters), and the student does well by his master. Unwilling to abstract Athanasius from his historical context, Anatolios shows deification to be lurking in the background of the early Christological controversies. For instance, both sides of the Arian debate took for granted that salvation amounts to deification. The question between them was, how could Christ deify men? And on this point Athanasius was clear: nothing apart from the Deity can deify. “He [Christ] who is the deifying and enlightening power of the Father… is not foreign in essence from the Father but coessential.” We can participate in the divine nature only because God first participated in ours. The incarnation itself is thus essential to human salvation. We may ascend only because God first descended. This is why Athanasius stood against the world: the whole account of Christian salvation was on the line.
Aside from expanding our view of salvation, there is real “ecumical potency” in patristic soteriology (or at least Anatolios’s reading of it). Polemicists will insist that the great Christian traditions are hopelessly divided by the models of salvation that we begin with. But that is not necessarily so, according to Anatolios. In his words, “underlying all these various ways of picturing the contents of Christ’s salvific work… is a clear and foundational affirmation that… salvation consists in the joining together of humanity and divinity.” The models are not in conflict: properly understood (and with certain amendments) they are incomplete parts of the whole, each expressing different ways of bringing us back to union with God. The West may focus on the cross; the East, the resurrection, and that is okay. The operative fact is where we end: union with God. Christ’s sacrificial death removes the sin that separated us from the Father. His resurrection bestows upon us the spoils of His victory over death. In the former we lose our sin; in the latter we join His life. In both we participate in Trinitarian glory through Jesus Christ. Carefully considered, this is not papering over important differences; this is catholicity.
We are divinized not in obscure or grand acts, but on our knees, in worship and repentance.
But what does this mean for us now? Anatolios affirms the importance of this question, stating early on that most teaching on salvation is without “experiential access to this doctrine.” He therefore takes us to the place of worship—for him, the Byzantine liturgy—and makes clear that the Church is where our salvation is “actualized” and “experienced.” That liturgy is the primary setting of salvation may seem dubious. In an age that is increasingly hostile to forms, liturgy reeks of rigid ritualism. But the work of Anatolios, and any other work of liturgical theology, is based upon the simple premise of lex orandi, lex credendi: the law of prayer is the law of belief. We may never simply read our way into truth, but we could worship our way in, because humans are above all else worshipers (not philosophers). Salvation is not merely a mental assent to propositional facts; it is the reorientation of our whole being, actualized in repentance and praise. Therefore, a praise like the Gloria Patria is not simply a liturgical invention, but the natural voice of man.
The link between our worship and our deification is central to his argument. Anatolios shows how the Byzantine liturgy moves from repentance to doxology (praise) in a two-act play he calls “doxological contrition.” The Christian is brought from sin and guilt to a position where he can again glorify God. That is our end, our destination, and it is a large part of what our union with God actually involves: a perpetual praise of Him. Anatolios quotes the Westminster Confession, which affirms that “the chief end of man” is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever,” and he adds the following analysis: “Human beings exist in order to glorify God by knowing, loving and serving him, and therein lies the true value of human existence.”
This work may find its most value not with the scholar, but with the rushed Christian (if he makes it through the book with its many detours); the man who thinks his faith is just another philosophy in the marketplace ideas. The good man, whose faith is largely reduced to ethics. This work will remind him of his destiny: union with God. It will show a union that is no abstraction; something not reserved for monks in mountains. Deification, properly understood, is far closer to home. We are divinized not in obscure or grand acts, but on our knees, in worship and repentance.
Caleb Knox is studying Political Theory at Patrick Henry College, where he competes on his college’s Mock Trial program. After graduation he hopes to teach at a Classical School and then pursue studies in Theology.
Deification Through the Cross was published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. on November 3, 2020. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
