#church

Igreja São José, Belo Horizonte

Here’s what the Catholic/Protestant argument leaves out entirely, and it’s not a minor omission to make. There’s a third major branch of the historic church that predates the entire Western argument and never joined either side of it. Eastern Orthodoxy split from Rome in 1054, a full five centuries before Luther, and has spent the intervening thousand years developing an understanding of salvation that looks almost nothing like the transactional model both Catholics and Protestants have spent their energy arguing over.

Kallistos Ware’s writing is probably the clearest English-language entry point into this understanding, and the central concept is theosis. Rather than salvation as a legal verdict, guilty or acquitted, the Eastern tradition frames it as participation, the process of a human being progressively taking on the divine nature, becoming by grace what God is by nature. The instinct runs deeper than the New Testament. The Wisdom of Solomon, writing a century or so before Christ, already insists that “God created us for incorruption” (Wisdom 2:23, NRSVue).7 Second Peter picks up the same thread, promising believers that they “may become participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4, NRSVue).5 Most scholarship treats the letter as pseudepigraphical, written in Peter’s name a generation or two after his death, which places the phrase in the wider stream of early Christian reflection rather than in an eyewitness’s own hand. The theological claim carries the same weight either way. The West mostly read past both texts on its way to arguing about justification. The East built an entire soteriology around them. Ware puts the whole doctrine in a single line, that Christ “became what we are, so as to make us what he is.”6

I’ve written before about Macrina the Younger and her brother Gregory of Nyssa, two of the sharpest minds the fourth century produced, and theosis is the very water they swam in. Gregory imagined the Christian life as an endless ascent, a soul continually moving deeper into a God whose depths never run out, a strange and beautiful image to build a theology around, and one almost nobody in the American religious argument has heard of.