THE FULLNESS OF HUMANITY: DIVINIZATION
As I reviewed Wesley’s case with my mentor Ron Dart, he reminded me of a fourth aspect of our Christian inheritance: “deification” (also known as “divinization” or “theosis”). What is included in the fullness of our inheritance? Exclusive to the Christian vision is our doctrine of the deification of humanity, which exceeds even the strongest claims of Judaism or Islam. Human nature divinized is part of our inheritance through participation in the divine nature. When you weaken your Christology, you weaken humanity by depriving it of divinization. This was Athanasius’ case against Arius. The lower one’s Christology, the lower the journey of humanity into its teleology into the divine nature.
What I hear Ron saying is that the Great Tradition of the early church saw Christ as the prototype of the new and true humanity. Human destiny is to become divine by grace as Christ is by nature. The original humanism of the Patristics (and its grand resurgence through Erasmus) saw far beyond the techno-evolution of Yuval Noah Harari’s materialist Homo Deus. We will be transformed into much more than data and algorithms! Our anthropology is rooted in, and as expansive as, our Christology. Only if Christ is alive and divine can we follow his Way through resurrection to our divinity. That aspect of our inheritance was neglected in Western Christianity, but it was there from the beginning (2 Cor. 3:18, 2 Pet. 1:4) and worthy of an entire book or two. I recommend Rowan Williams’ Being Human and John Behr’s Becoming Human.