Deification: Consensual and Cogent

Abstract

Many traditional Protestants are rereading their heritages through the Church catholic. That includes reading them through Eastern Orthodoxy. To bring forward the best of any particular Christian heritage for the whole Church or to enrich such a heritage by drawing from the whole Church, we need to be keen students of church history, scripture and contemporary situations. Every effort to restate the gospel for the next century must recognize that people see through their participation in communities. All Christians worship together in some kinds of congregations. We may try to get distance from what we believe and how we act, but if we move outside the circle, we take up a stance within another community. As Christians we read and understand from within the Church.

New Directions in Western Soteriology

“…Orthodox theologians keep deification away from Gnostic or Manichaean speculation, or what we might recognise as the worst aspects of Far Eastern mysticism and now so-called New Age musings. 51 While these presuppositions have been addressed in this study, David Litwa argued that the problem is simply that 'most modern Western theologians normally suspect, or even excoriate deification as something frightful', 52 with the term appearing 'unnatural to post-Enlightenment, empirically-minded thinkers'. 53 Yet regardless of these concerns, deification, despite its provocative overtonesnamely, its over positive anthropology -has provoked Western interest.…”