Justification, Sanctification and Theosis

I was raised in fundamentalism/conservative Evangelicalism (i.e. by the time I got to college the more open wing of fundamentalism was already morphing into what would become conservative Evangelicalism). As far as salvation is concerned my tradition was of the Calvinistic bent—we believed in eternal security. But when it came to sanctification I was taught a system that said that every time I sinned, God broke fellowship with me because he was too holy to look upon sin. In short my day to day relationship/fellowship with God was based on my behavior i.e. on personal holiness/sinlessness. I was only in fellowship if I had confessed all my sins. If I sinned either consciously or unconsciously I was out of fellowship and devoid of any existential relationship with God and stripped of any power of the Spirit until confession was made. Once I confessed whatever sin I had done, I was again in fellowship and filled with the Spirit. (I later learned that this system is called Keswick which is a derivative of Weslyanism.) In other words fellowship and the presence of God in my life were conditional, conditioned upon my obedience and upon my repentance and confession when I did sin. At which time I would be restored to fellowship. The teaching that I had absorbed throughout my high school years was sharpened and solidified as I took a Spiritual Life course as a college freshman. The professor was a local pastor, articulate, convincing and smart (possessing a recently minted Th.D). In explaining the nature of the spiritual life he used the imagery of a tennis match. The ball was either on one side of the net (fellowship) or the other (out of fellowship/carnal). There were no degrees of spirituality; there were no degrees of fellowship. It was an all or nothing arrangement. To my idealistic 18-year-old mind the absolutism and the symmetry of his teaching made great sense. And it allowed me to know for sure whether I was “in fellowship” or “out of fellowship.” (Although how sins of ignorance were dealt with was never adequately explained.) This theological construct was supported by innumerable verses of Scripture, most prominent of which was 1 John 1:9. However these verses were wrenched out of their original contexts, cobbled together and twisted to communicate something that the apostle never envisioned. As taught, the great blessing was fellowship, but that fellowship was conditional. Unstated but clearly communicated was that God’s love was conditioned upon our performance/obedience.

The next year I fell into a dark time, several months of spiritual and emotional blackness. I did not experience the presence of God; although I continued to use the formulas I had been taught. This was my first crisis of faith crisis but this was not a crisis concerning the truth of Christianity or the existence of God. Rather my crisis was existential. I didn’t feel the presence of God, but I had done everything my theology said I was supposed to do and nothing changed. Did this mean I wasn’t really a Christian?

One part of me said that I needed to ask Jesus into my heart again. But my mind answered the existential doubt with the confident assertion that I did believe and I had experienced the presence of Jesus in the past. To ask Jesus in my heart again would not be faith but rather blatant unbelief that God had done what he said he was going to do.

That semester I had a new roommate and he understood the blackness and despair that I was going through. And he gave me a book to read, Love Is Now by Peter Gillquist. This was a book that was published by Zondervan and aimed at students who were college-age and young adults. The topic? A fresh examination of the love of God and how it operates.  It was considered so radical by the manager of the bookstore at Biola College where I was a student that he refused to let the bookstore carry it. (The fact that a book published by a major evangelical publisher was considered radical speaks volumes to the narrowness of fundamentalism at the time.) The very subversiveness of reading something that the college bookstore wouldn’t stock was, of course, enticing.

As I read I came face-to-face for the first time with the unconditional love of God. This in itself is a damning indictment of fundamentalism and much of evangelicalism as it existed in the early 1970s. (The situation today is perhaps a bit better than it was then, but the theological structure that supported the movement still continues pretty much unchanged. And, that in and of itself is a major problem.)

I came out of this crisis. It was as if the scales had fallen from my eyes. My heart came alive with excitement and joy. I recognized on a gut level that the theology I had grown up with and had been taught in my college classes was fundamentally flawed. By any name, be it Keswick, Higher Life, Deeper Life, Victorious Life or any of a dozen or so other titles by which the basic theology is known was a one-way ticket to spiritual defeat, bondage and dishonesty because it trafficked in perfectionism and bred spiritual pride, self-righteousness, moralism and judgmentalism. I knew now what I didn’t believe, but I did not have a handle on what I did believe.

It was also while I was in college that I was first introduced formally to the bedrock doctrine of the Reformation— justification by faith alone. This became for me, as it was for the reformers the foundation, the rock, assurance doctrine that kept me from sinking into the mud. As I became more theologically sophisticated I recognized that the theology I had grown up with was cobbled together from two different systems which like oil and water do not mix. Specifically, I was taught eternal security (which is built from Reformed/Calvinistic theological presuppositions) and the Keswick doctrine of sanctification (which is founded upon Wesleyan higher life theology). I became utterly convinced that the Reformed understanding of soteriology best fit the biblical teaching on salvation. But further study and experience showed me that while the Reformed (Calvinistic) understanding was far superior to that of Wesleyanism (which is tinged with anthropocentrism and perfectionism), it too contained glaringly significant problems: in practice it drove a wedge between the head and the heart, and saw justification as the entry point into salvation, i.e. the legal declaration of not guilty a verdict that is extrinsic to the one justified. In the popular articulation of justification was to “accept Jesus as your savior” which changed your legal standing before God from being a “sinner” to being “saved.” Sanctification, the ongoing Christian life, was usually a list of spiritual duties such as daily devotions, church attendance and the like coupled with moral self-improvement which was defined as abstinence from, alcohol, tobacco, dancing, movies etc. In short, sanctification became a denial of our physical creatureliness and an affirmation that reality was to be as “spiritual” as we could make it. Or to put it another way, salvation was presented as embracing a doctrine rather than encountering the person of Christ and involving vital ontological union with Him. What I mean is that as taught by most adherents, there is no necessary linking of justification and sanctification. In fact I have read those from the Reformed tradition who insist dogmatically that there is no experiential aspect to justification (not all reformed theologians assert this but a majority do). Justification is simply a legal declaration extrinsic to the being of the believer. There is no existential change that takes place.

Conservative American Presbyterianism in particular historically has given little place to the existential element in its theology. As I have written elsewhere:

Charles Hodge, as representative of the Princetonian (i.e. from Princeton Seminary) position, displayed a great antipathy for any emphasis on the subjective nature of Christianity. At one point he stated: “The idea that Christianity is a form of feeling, a life, and not a system of doctrines is con­trary to the faith of all Christians. Christianity always has a creed. A man who believes certain doctrines is a Christian.” (Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 29:693.) This stress on the objective nature of the Faith has led to the charge that Princeton was rational­istic in its approach to Christianity. Numerous historians and theologians have contended that the Princetonians compartmentalized faith and life. For example, C. R. Jeschke states of the Princetonians:

The strict compartmentalization of formal theology and the life of piety that came to prevail at Princeton reflected in part the growing irrelevance of traditional modes of thought and inherited statements of faith for the needs of the church in a rapidly changing world. The fact that Hodge and his colleagues, like most of their contempo­raries, were unaware of the sickness in the theological body, only permitted the condi­tion to worsen, and heightened the reaction of the patient to the cure, when its true condition was finally diagnosed. (“The Briggs Case,” p. 56.)

. . . Andrew Hoffecker has challenged this perception of the Princetonians, contend­ing that those who make such assertions ignore the wealth of devotional material left by [Archibald] Alexander, Charles Hodge and [B.B.] Warfield (Piety and the Princeton Theologians (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981). Despite Hoffecker’s defense of the Princetonians themselves, it is not too much to say that many even among the Old School read only the theological ma­terial of the Princetonians. This fact contributed to a cold creedal orthodoxy among a sig­nificant contingent of the Old School with its stress on pure doctrine. Even the great Greek grammarian Basil Gildersleeve, himself a Princeton graduate, decried the “baleful influence of Princeton” stating that there was from there “very little hope of a generous vivifying force” (Letter from Gildersleeve to Charles A. Briggs, The Briggs Transcripts. 5:470)¹

 During the late 1980’s and the early 90’s there was a sizable movement of evangelicals leaving the fold and converting to Eastern Orthodoxy, the most prominent of those to make the trek to Orthodoxy was Franky (Frank) Schaeffer. Among this exodus were several of my former students. This compelled me to undertake a study of Eastern Orthodoxy. I found in Orthodoxy the most ancient form of Christianity that is still in existence. An Orthodox service today is in a very real sense a travel in time. The service as it is conducted is most often the liturgy of John Chrysostom written in the early 5^th century. In my Introduction to Theology class I began including a unit of Orthodoxy. What struck me most as I examined orthodoxy was its personalistic, Christocentric, and  Trinitarian focus as well as its holistic vision of the goodness of the created order.

The great Athanasius figured prominently in this survey. Athanasius was the great theological hero of the fourth century who fought tirelessly to defend the Nicene Creed against those who sought to overthrow it. The greatest champion in history of the Trinity and the reality of the incarnation of the Logos, Athananius was added to my small handful of theological heroes.

As I have taught on the incarnation over the years I always include Athanasius’ famous dictum: “God became man so that men might become gods.” As I have shared this, students’ hands always shoot up: “Were these guys Mormon?” The answer is, “of course not!” Rather Athanasius and his fellow bishop-theologians were referencing what is today often referred to in the West as deification or divinization, but is more properly called Theosis, i.e. participation in the divine life. This phraseology comes directly from 2 Peter 1:4 you have “become participants of the divine nature.” We in the West have never conceptualized salvation in the ontological categories, but instead have used legal categories like justification.

In the history of Protestant theology we see the topic addressed by John Calvin who incorporated the concept in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Likewise Luther addresses the topic, but it was ignored by confessional Lutheranism.  Nor was this biblical concept incorporated into later Calvinism or into other forms of Protestant theological reflection, with the exception of some of the theological reflection of John Wesley. However in recent decades we have seen some movement in this direction. Finnish theologian, Veli-Mati Kärkkäinen has surveyed these developments in his One with God: Salvation as Deification and Justification. Likewise Thomas Torrance, the greatest English speaking Reformed Theologian of the late 20^th century and a premier Athanasius scholar incorporated the concept of Theosis into his theological reflection. New Zealand Theologian Myk Haberts has produced a magisterial study of Torrance’s use of the topic in his Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance.

Luther for example held that justification was not merely forensic, a mere declaration (i.e. Christ’s righteousness is credited on God’s ledger book as belonging to us in a formal and external way), rather his understanding of justification included participation in the life of Christ by the believer which was to be a participation in the very life of God himself. In this Luther follows Athanasius insisting that we participate in the very being of God. Some contemporary Lutheran scholars contend that there is a convergence of Luther’s doctrine of justification with the Orthodox understanding of theosis.² Luther himself states explicitly:

for it is true that a man helped by grace is more than a man; indeed, the grace of God gives him the form of God and deifies him, so that even the Scriptures call him “God” and “God’s son”.

Following Athanasius and Irenaeus, Luther endorses the idea that deification or theosis is a union of Logos and flesh, or word and man, yet in such a way as the distinction between the human and the divine is not blurred and is “a community of being between God and man.”³ Similarly Luther in common with Orthodoxy, contends that what is given to us in salvation is not merely a gift of God, but God himself in whose life we now participate. To describe the nature of salvation Luther interchanges several synonyms including “presence of Christ in faith,” “participation in God,” “union with God,” as well as the term perichoresis (mutual indwelling).⁴ The motivation and power behind this union of God and man is love, “the person thus partakes of God and thereby undergoes a thoroughgoing transformation. Love is a unifying power that tends to change the loving person into what is love.”

The core of Luther’s understanding of justification has been described thus:

Through faith the Christian and Christ are one, the union of which is pictured in the union between a bride and bridegroom. On the basis of this union [literally: being one] the Christian possesses all that Christ has in the same way the bride has everything that belongs to her bridegroom. Similarly, the sins of the human being become Christ’s possession. It is the unio which makes possible this participation. The whole of Christ is donated to the believer. This donation takes place through faith in Christ. “Happy exchange” is related to the essence of faith and is a natural consequence of union with Christ.⁵

 What strikes me as I read Haberts’, Kärkkäinen’s and Torrance’s works (Torrance never devotes a single volume to this subject directly but instead weaves the implications through many of his volumes), is that they embrace the ontology of salvation, particularly as participation in the very life of God as opposed to simply being legal standing extrinsic to our being.

Thomas Torrance expounds his doctrine of salvation under the rubric of reconciliation, which he expresses in terms of a theology of union with Christ. Torrance understands this union with Christ as being undergirded by Theosis of which he says it is:

the sustaining inner cohesion of our cognitive union with Christ through faith and the very substance of our personal and corporate union with Christ through the Word [by Word here he is speaking of the Logos in its various forms as opposed to specifically the written Scriptures] and the sacraments, for in Christ are human relations with God, far from being allowed to remain on a merely external basis, are embraced within the Trinitarian relations of God’s own being as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.⁶

 This union with Christ began in eternity past in God’s purpose of the election of humanity into adoption as his sons, it finds its application in history in the incarnate life and death of Jesus as well as the work of the Spirit, and will reach its ultimate completion eschatological in glorification.

Torrance also insists that theosis involves an epistemological union of humanity and God, i.e. true knowledge of God must come through the incarnate person of Jesus Christ for as it states in Matthew 11:27 “no man knows the Son except the Father and no man knows the Father except the Son.” In other words any knowledge of God is mediated through the incarnate God, Jesus Christ, who himself declared “whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (Jn 14:9) Knowledge of God is not fundamentally cognitive (although it is also cognitive) it is relational; it is a personal knowing that comes only by personal participation.⁷ Or as Baxter Kruger has stated ‘our knowledge of God arises through the sharing in the incarnate Son’s communion with the Father in the Spirit. This can be stated in other words either as “sharing the Son’s knowledge of the Father in the Spirit” “or as partaking of” God’s own self-knowledge.”⁸

Unlike many, Torrance does draw a distinction between the terms theosis and “divinization” declaring that the term theosis

refers to the utterly staggering act of God in which he gives himself to us and adopts us into the communion of his divine life and love through Jesus Christ and in his one spirit, yet in such a way that we are not made divine but are preserved in our humanity. That is what constitutes the sustaining inner cohesion of our cognitive union with Christ through faith and the very substance of our personal and corporate union with Christ through the Word and Sacraments, for in Christ our human relations with God, far from being allowed to remain on a merely external basis are embraced within the Trinitarian relations of God’s own being as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.⁹

To look at this from another direction, theosis is a virtual synonym for the Pauline concept of en Xristō, in Christ, or union with Christ. Many theologians view the concept of union with Christ as the most fundamental idea in the theology of John Calvin.¹⁰ Torrance agrees with this assessment.

Repeatedly throughout his writings Torrance utterly rejects the concept that the incarnation and the work of Christ occur outside of the very being of God. Among Protestants this is a very common explanation.On numerous occasions he points out that in the incarnation humanity has been drawn into the being of God himself, as opposed to externally joined to the second person of the Trinity. As such he insists that in the incarnation we see God as man, not God in man. The latter would imply that Christ’s humanity was something with which he closed himself during his time on earth, but laid aside after the resurrection when he ascended back to the Father.

With reference to union with Christ Torrance follows Calvin conceptually, although he does not use exactly the same terms. Haberts observes:

Calvin specifically cuts out any ‘extrinsecist’ notions of justification or reconciliation by positing justification as a benefit of union with Christ through participation in Christ we receive all the benefits of salvation, including Christ’s righteousness; which equates to the filial life. Calvin insists on the forensic nature of justification but is equally adamant that we are justified as a result of our union with Christ.¹¹

As Calvin himself says, “you see that our righteousness is not in us but in Christ that we possess it only because we are partakers in Christ; indeed with him we possess all its riches.¹²

Torrance admits that the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is not wrong per se, rather it is reductionistic, and hence insufficient when it becomes a full-going representation of salvation. When this happens our theology ceases to be evangelical, it falls into what Torrance has labeled “The Latin Heresy.”¹³ 

Instead Torrance insists that imputation belongs within the larger frame of participation. In this context imputation is not understood to stand alone but “viewed through the lens of participation in the righteousness of Christ which is transferred to us though union with him.”¹⁴

While the discussion of participation and ontology relating to the doctrine of salvation may sound a bit on the abstract side, it is, I am convinced, vitally necessary to interact with these issues. We as Western Christians, and I am speaking as one raised in conservative American Protestantism, have inculcated perspectives on the gospel and salvation that at best obscure and warp the biblical presentation and have produced a theological stew that when ingested produces spiritual sickness and worse. The internal contradictions, the demand for perfection, the teaching that the love of God is conditional, the concept (held by many) that every time we sin we lose our salvation or at least lose our fellowship (to name just a few of these ingredients), has been shown to be crazy making. In fact, there have been several studies that have shown that conservative Christians are subject to mental illness rates significantly higher than that of the non-Christian population.

(I understand that this correlation is not proof of causality but it at the very least  the correlation should cause us to take a cold hard look to determine whether our preaching and teaching is indeed a contributing cause to mental illness.  I suspect it is. Studies have shown that children who grow up with conditional love from parents suffer significant psychological issues. Conditional love from parents has been identified as emotional abuse.

We have made the gospel about us, about what we must do to get to God. We have inverted the message. The gospel as presented in the New Testament is not about us, it is the good news about what God the Father has done in Christ and continues to do today in the Spirit. The love of God as Father, Son and Spirit is not conditional! We are not accepted conditionally, on the basis of behavior. We are accepted because God loves us. Period.

1. M. James Sawyer, Charles Augustus Briggs and Tensions in Late Niineteenth Centuryt American Theology (Lewiston NY: Mellon University Press, 1994), 58. [↩]
2. Veli-Mati Kärkkäinen, One with God (Collegeville, Minnesota: liturgical press, 2004), 46–47. [↩]
3. Ibid., 47. [↩]
4. Ibid., 48. [↩]
5. Arto Seppänen, Unio Christi, 37. Cited in ibid., 49–50. [↩]
6. Thomas F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 2nd ed. (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard, 1992), 64. [↩]
7. Myk Haberts, Theosis In The Theology Of Thomas Torrance, Kindle edition, 2797. [↩]
8. C. Baxter Kruger, “The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God in the Theology of T. F. Torrance,” 368. Cf. T. F Torrance, God and Rationality (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997), 171 –172. [↩]
9. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 64. [↩]
10. This evaluation is opposed to the position that is today labeled Calvinism, which in fact reflects a rearranging of Calvin’s theological priorities and squeezing Calvin’s life-giving insights through the rationalistic grid of scholasticism, and which divorced theology from life and erected detailed and elaborate systems which had little to no relationship to the life of the average believer. [↩]
11. Haberts, Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance, Loc 2834. [↩]
12. Calvin, Institutes, 3. 11. 23. Tan summarizes Calvin’s position:

    Through the unitive operation of the Holy Spirit, Christ and the elect are brought into reciprocal relationship the one is the human trajectory —Christ participation in us — where “he had to become ours and to dwell within us”; the other is the Christward movement – our participation in Christ — where we are said to be “engrafted into him” [Rom 11.17], and “to put on Christ”

    http://www.quodlibet.net/articles/tan-union.shtml

    See also Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.10. [↩]

13. See T.F. Torrance “Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy,” Scottish Journal of Theology 39 (1986), 461-82.

    There “. . . were bound up with the Western habit of thinking in abstractive formal relations, which was greatly reinforced by Descartes in his critico-analytical method, and of thinking in external relations which was accentuated by Kant in his denial of the possibility of knowing things in their internal relations. This is what I have called the Latin heresy, for in theology at any rate its roots go back to a form of linguistic and conceptual dualism that prevailed in Patristic and Mediaeval Latin theology.” (463) [↩]

14. Haberts, Loc 2881 citing Torrance, “The Distinctive Character of the Reformed Tradition,” 6. [↩]