Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and I want to talk today about a Christian doctrine that sounds heretical.

If I just go around saying, I believe that if I'm holy, when I die, I'll become a god, or I'll become God, many people's heresy alarmant is going off completely and understandably.

That sounds polytheistic.

That sounds like a repudiation of pretty core tenets of Christianity.

What if I were to tell you that this is the historic Christian understanding of what happens when you die?

And that if you understand this properly, it'll change how you understand a whole slew of Christian doctrines for the better.

But I want to start with a problem, and that problem is our view of heaven is too small, that I think one of the reasons that we don't strive for heaven as hard as we could, we don't strive for holiness as much as we could, is that we just don't desire it enough.

And we don't desire it enough in part because eye has not seen and ear has not heard what God has ready for those who love him, and it's hard to desire an unknown gift.

We know it's great, but our vision of it is often pretty limited.

Marge Simpson, welcome to Protestant Heaven.

Through in one.

Hoorah.

Where's Homer and Bart?

Even Billy Graham in his early days when he was trying to describe heaven said, We're gonna sit around the fireplace and have parties, and the angels will wait on us, and we'll drive down the golden streets in a yellow Cadillac convertible.

Now, leaving aside how tacky it is to drive on golden streets in a yellow convertible, they're gonna clash horribly, the point is that's obviously too small a vision of heaven.

And in Billy Graham's defense, like he evolved from that.

He developed as he matured as a Christian, and he stopped preaching that kind of idea.

But for many of us, I think our idea of heaven might be stuck sort of at that level.

It's gonna be really cool.

It's gonna be really fun.

We're gonna see people we like, and we're imagining basically us as we are now, maybe with a white robe, maybe with a harp, but not all that transformed, and that is too small a view of heaven.

But the second problem is that it's often too selfish a view of heaven, that it just becomes, okay, I'm not gonna selfishly enjoy a bunch of pleasures now so that I can selfishly enjoy a bunch of pleasures in heaven, and it won't count as a sin then.

And so a lot of times, even when, you know, Catholics and Protestants are talking about the saints praying for us, for instance, you'll sometimes hear the objection, Well, how do we know the saints are praying for us?

And it's a shocking question from a Christian perspective.

How do we know that the saints love their neighbors?

How do we know that they're, like, praying for their neighbors and are entreating them and not just, you know, watching the biggest screen TV we could possibly imagine?

Well, because that's at the heart of Christianity, that they are more in love with God and more in love with neighbor than we are here.

But I think that it exposes something that we just don't think about this stuff very deeply, and so it's a very easy trap that we can fall into.

There are some biblical cues that point us in the right direction.

For instance, in the Book of Revelation, in Revelation 7, we see the great multitude, and they're worshiping together.

It's not this radical individualism.

You see, you know, in the heavenly liturgy, which looks like a Catholic liturgy, you've got, like, the incense, which represents the prayers of the saints, being offered up by the angels.

And it's very clear that those in heaven are interceding for those on Earth, whether we're talking about the angels in this, uh, intermediate capacity presenting our prayers before the Father or the saints themselves who are in glory, like the saints under the altar, for instance, who are crying out for justice on Earth.

So there's much more to the heavenly story, but even still, even with everything I've just given you rooted in scripture, we haven't gone far enough.

We need to think bigger.

We need to think much bigger, unimaginably bigger.

And so for this, I would turn to the secret, hidden wisdom about glorification.

Now, that sounds maybe really Gnostic.

Oh, come on, Joe.

How could there be this secret, hidden wisdom?

Well, St. Paul in First Corinthians says that there is.

He says that among the mature, we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away.

We impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification.

So this is a message so radical that it seems like St. Paul was even a little cautious about advertising this because it's so prone to misunderstanding, but it's also so important to get right.

So he says, None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory, but as it is written, and then that line I quoted before, What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, but God has prepared for those who love Him.

Nevertheless, St. Paul says, God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

So we're given two things.

Number one, there is this hidden wisdom of God that is tied to our glorification.

We're gonna have to unpack what that means.

And it is somehow tied to the depths of God.

Now, I'm going to cut to the chase and present a thesis, and that thesis, you can find it in the Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraph 460, that the Word became flesh to make us partakers of the divine nature.

That is, that God's mission- in sending Jesus to Earth, is not just that He will save us from our sins, although it is certainly that.

But that He wants to do something more than just save us, 'cause saving us is, if you think about it in a negative term, it just says you're not going to hell.

You know, you get saved from falling off the side of a cliff.

That doesn't tell me anything about where you are.

Are you on the side of the road?

You just didn't fall off the cliff?

Well, when we're talking about being saved, the problem is this gives a clear sense of what we're avoiding, damnation, but not a clear sense of what is being offered to us.

What are we receiving?

And I would suggest that we lack a clear vision of heavenly glory, and, and I'm gonna leave this part for another time, we lack the clear nature, uh, of the role of the body in all of this, so that many Christians' idea, if they do think about heaven, is like, Well, now my soul be freed of my body forever.

I've talked about that somewhat before.

I'm gonna leave that to one side except to say that it's a problem, and that the actual Christian message is, as the catechism says, found in 2 Peter, when St. Peter says it, it's that we'll become partakers of the divine nature.

Now, that is wild that Jesus partakes of our nature in the incarnation, and that somehow through divinization or theosis or deification, these are the three terms used for this idea, that we somehow become adopted sons of God, not just in name, but we actually become partakers of the divine nature.

And the catechism goes on, and it basically just gives quotations.

First, St. Irenaeus talking about how the Word became man and the Son of God became the Son of Man, so that man entered into communion with the Word, and thus receiving divine sonship might become a son of God.

That part, for some reason, doesn't sound maybe as shocking to us.

If we can say, We're children of God, and I don't think anyone bats an eye, if you say, You're a son of God, people might look at you strange, because that sounds like a divine claim, and rightly, so it is.

But if you say, well, as St. Athanasius says, The Son of God became man so that we might become God, or some translations are gonna say, So that we might become gods, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, that sounds shocking, and that sounds heretical.

So how do we distinguish this idea of theosis from, for example, the Greek pagan idea of apotheosis?

Uh, uh, this is the apotheosis of Heracles or Hercules, and he's going before Zeus and Hera, and it looks like, kinda like saints in glory.

So what's the difference between the Christian vision and the Greek pagan vision?

Or what's the difference between this and, like, the Mormon vision, where you become a god with your own universe or your own planet?

How do we make sense of all of this?

Because I can understand why people would be confused or scandalized or troubled.

To put the pieces in place, I wanna start with what the Bible has to say on the subject, and it turns out the Bible, beginning with Jesus Himself, has a lot to say on the subject.

We often just overlook it 'cause we don't know what to do with these passages when we come across them, I think.

So in John 10, Jesus' interlocutors are wanting to stone Him for being a blasphemer, because being a man, He makes himself God.

Now, there's a lot of things Jesus could do in this situation, because the blas- you know, the charge of blasphemy is wrong, but Jesus is, in fact, claiming to be God.

They have correctly identified this.

And so Jesus can't deny this divine claim, but if He just says, I'm the second person of the Trinity, they're not ready for that full truth.

So He does something really fascinating.

He quotes to them the Psalms.

He says, Is it not written in your law, I said you are gods?

So just pause on that.

Jesus says, You are gods.

Now, granted, He's quoting the Old Testament, but He's also the one speaking in the Old Testament.

So either way you cut it, Jesus says, You are gods.

And this is not contrary to the monotheism that is the hallmark of Judaism.

He is quoting the Old Testament here.

But Judaism is radically monotheistic.

There are no other true gods beside the one God, and yet we can also talk about these others as gods.

What is going on here?

Well, Jesus gives us a tantalizing bit of exegesis, but He's doing something, again, in response to the people trying to kill Him.

He just says to them in verse 35, If he called them gods to whom the word of God came, and Scripture cannot be broken, do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming,' because I said I'm the Son of God?

So okay.

Notice a couple things.

Number one, as I said before, the claim to be a son of God is a divine claim.

Now, Jesus is the Son of God by nature.

I'm a son of God by adoption in my baptism.

But this is still a participation in something divine, and without the proper warrant, that is a blasphemous claim, that there's a, a loose sense in which we could talk about being sons and daughters of God by being, you know, creatures of Him, the way you might talk about, you know, the, an animator's animations as kind of like his children.

But that's pretty metaphorical.

Something much deeper is going on, obviously with Jesus by nature, but also by us, as we're baptized into this community of God, this family of God.

And so Jesus is pointing out, this is a claim to have God as Father, but there's some sense in which God is talking about us sharing in Godhead in some way.

So let's unpack what that way is.

St. Paul says, The Lord is a spirit, and where the spirit of the Lord is, there's freedom, and we all with unveiled face He's just contrasted this with Moses beholding the face of God or beholding God.

Uh, We all with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory into another.Now, that's gonna be important for a couple reasons.

One, it's important to get that this process of theosis, divinization, deification, I'm gonna just call it theosis now because it's less Divinization, I usually don't use that term because it sounds too much like divination, which is an actual sin, and I don't want people's understanding to turn on whether they're getting a middle I-Z. Theosis is a weird enough word, it doesn't sound like anything else in English, but it still means the same thing.

So I'll say theosis, it's a great term, but if you prefer deification, glorification, divinization, all of those mean the same thing.

Glorification is good, but I actually think glorification is too generic sounding.

Like, okay, we're gonna get some glory.

Well, you can get glory in a lot of ways, but we're going to become God or Gods.

Okay, I, that's a bigger claim, that means something more distinct than just we're gonna get some glory.

So this theosis, it begins now.

It doesn't end now, but it begins now, and we're being changed into his likeness.

We are being changed into the likeness of God himself one degree at a time.

And this is somehow connected with our beholding the glory of the Lord, that by beholding God, we become more like him.

That's gonna be an important key to how all of this works, and we're gonna hear more of that, actually right now, this is, I put John 3, it's actually 1st John 3. John says, See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and so we are.

Okay.

Remember, this is the starting point.

Your sonship or daughtership, being a son or daughter of God is already this radical thing, and this is the foundation.

But John says this is only the beginning.

The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.

Beloved, we are God's children now.

But then he says, It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

So notice that same theme.

We are going to become like Jesus.

When Jesus and we encounter one another in eternity, it's gonna look like we're like him.

And why?

Because we're going to see him as he is.

That this process of beholding the Lord in his glory and being transformed will be brought to its fulfillment in heaven.

Now we see, you know, as in a mirror dimly, but then we're gonna see face to face.

And so this process begins now, but it's going to be radically completed in heaven, this process of being glorified and transformed, deified.

But then St. Peter has, again, maybe the strongest language on this.

It's hard to say.

I mean, John's language is pretty strong.

But Peter says that, His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence.

It's an easy thing to miss.

This kind of language is all over the New Testament.

That we're not just called to be great, but we're called to be great with God's own glory and excellence.

By which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and so he doesn't just tell us what we're gonna avoid, he also tells us what we're gonna become.

We're going to become, as he says, partakers of the divine nature.

It's huge.

I think it's an incredible promise, and I, I wish we talked about this more as Christians, particularly in the West.

This is an area where in modern times, I would say, Eastern Orthodoxy does a much better job of focusing on theosis, and Western Catholicism and Protestantism have under-emphasized this, I would argue.

So let me offer a few keys to making sense of this idea so that you don't come away with the wrong view.

Number one, Christ, the Son of God, is truly God and truly our brother.

He is the son of God by nature, he's the son of Joseph by adoption.

The adoption into the family of Joseph.

Now, he is truly and literally man.

He's not just man by adoption, he's, he's man by nature.

He has a divine nature and human nature, but he also experiences an adoptive sonship because Joseph is his foster father, he's Not his biological father.

And so Jesus is at one and the same time a son of David, presumably along Mary's line, by blood, by ethnicity, by nature, but actually more importantly for the legal context, he is the legal son of Joseph.

And so there's all kinds of, like, promises tied to the Davidic messianic line, and those promises aren't actually achieved along bloodline.

That's kind of a recurring theme lately, the mi- people misunderstanding how the promises to Israel were received.

But you could have what was called the Levirate marriage, where you raised, like, your dead brother's child, and it was That child was, okay, yours biologically, but your brother gets married to a woman, he dies before he can give her any children.

You then marry her and have a child with her, but that child stands to inherit the inheritance of the dead brother.

Eh, this is a, a strange thing from our perspective, but it is good for inheritance law and for making sure that the widow isn't, you know, deprived of, of being taken care of, and it meant that there was this distinction in two types of sonship within Judaism long before the time of Christ.

So Jesus is man both by nature and in this Levirate adoptive sort of way, not Levirate, but, you know, an adoptive sonship.

That's the first kind of key, that you have to recognize the way that God becomes man.

This is gonna be an important first step.

Second, through baptism, we have become the adoptive sons and daughters of God.

And third, this makes us heirs of God.

Remember everything I just said.

Like, the one of the reasons that there was this adoptive system in Judaism was for the distribution of inheritance, so sonship was closely tied to being an heir.

Like, one of the reasons it was important to know who the legitimate sons were was to know where the property and the finances and everything else went when dad died.

And so, we become heirs by being sons, and we're heirs of heaven but we're even heirs of God.

There, I didn't have this, uh, kind of pre-scripted, this part, but let me just add a point here.

If you pay attention to the parable, it's sometimes called the par- parable of the prodigal son, pay attention to the words that the father says to the older son, when he says, All that I have is yours.

Now imagine God saying that to you, and you understand what it is to be an heir of God, that you're not just asking for the crumbs from the master's table, you're being promised the whole house.

That's the promise of God, and that is an enormous promise.

All of heaven is yours.

You're an heir of God.

Not just all of heaven, God Himself is yours.

The second person of the Trinity is the bridegroom to the bride of the Church, and the two become one flesh, as St. Paul says in Ephesians 5. You don't get a more radical union of humanity and divinity than this.

It's not just the union of humanity and divinity that happens in the incarnation, you now have this other union of humanity and divinity in the union of Christ in the church and in the soul communing with God.

And there's gonna be some ways we're gonna look at how that works.

But if you get those things, and hopefully you get how we can talk about human beings who are not divine by nature nevertheless sharing in divinity.

I think St. Paul connects these themes really nicely.

He explains how all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

So you've got the theme of sonship.

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship.

Now, this, by the way, is the point of the parable of the prodigal son.

It's not really about a son being a prodigal s- I don't like that term.

It's about two men discovering that they're not just the slaves of their father, but they're true sons, and I would love to unpack that, but that's not the point of this episode.

When we cry, 'Abba, Father,' it is the Spirit Himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ.

And then he says, Provided we suffer with Him, we'll get into that later, in order that we may also be glorified with Him.

So notice he goes from sonship to heirs and thus, with suffering, to glory.

These ideas, we need to keep them closely tied together, because it's how we make sense of this pretty shocking but pretty amazing doctrine.

This is one that the early Christians, by the way, loved to talk about.

As a quick aside here, I talked about that whole idea of apotheosis, the pagan version of this idea.

If you go in, I believe it's the, uh, Capitol Rotunda, it has the apotheosis of George Washington, and it's just straight-up Roman paganism with George Washington along with some Roman goddesses in heaven in the place of, like, God the Father.

It's pretty wild stuff.

Um, but you might look at that and say, What's going on there?

And what's going on there is there is a pagan version of this idea where the emperors would become gods, and the Christians had some pretty fascinating things to say in response to it.

So St. Justin Martyr, writing in the mid 100s, maybe 160, writes And you remember, he's addressing this to the emperor, and it's gonna get him martyred.

He says, And one of the emperors who die among yourselves, whom you deem worthy of deification and in whose behalf you produce someone who swears he has seen the burning Caesar rise to heaven from the funeral pyre.

He's mocking this idea of imperial apotheosis, that emperors are going to just become gods.

M- but what's fascinating is, even though he mocks the pagan idea, he nevertheless concedes there is a Christian version of this that doesn't sound that different, only it's not gonna be for just random corrupt emperors.

Instead, he says, We have learned that those only are deified who have lived near to God in holiness and virtue, and we believe that those who live wickedly and do not repent are punished in everlasting fire.

So notice he doesn't say, Apotheosis is totally crazy.

He just is like, Yeah, but your emperors are wicked guys, so let's not naively assume that they're all being glorified in heaven and becoming gods.

You would think that this would be the fault line, that he would say, Hey, you believe the emperors become gods.

We don't believe humans become gods.

But he actually says something a lot more shocking, which is, only those who live near to God and in holiness and virtue become gods when they die.

Only they are deified.

I don't know, that just seems like a pretty shocking thing to read amongst the earliest Christians, and he's not alone.

St. Irenaeus says, um, that one of the, th- the Christ through His transcendent love became what we are, that is He became man, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.

That is, He became man so that we could become divine.

Elsewhere in the same work, he This is a little bit of a longer quotation, but it, it lets him unpack this idea at a much bigger level.And he's writing about those who assert that Jesus is merely a man, and he says that they're in a state of death.

Having been not as yet joined to the Word of God, the Father, nor receiving liberty through the Son as He does Himself declare, 'If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.' So that's who he's talking about.

He's talking about those who think Jesus is just a man born of St. Joseph.

But being ignorant of Him whom from the virgin is Emmanuel, they are d- deprived of His gift which is eternal life, and not receiving the incorruptible Word, they remain in mortal flesh and are debtors to death, not obtaining the antidote of life.

To whom the Word says Again, this is actually to the wicked, not to the just.

To whom the Word says, mentioning His own gifts of grace, 'I said you were all the sons of the Highest and gods, but you shall die like men.' That's a quotation from Psalm 82.

And Irenaeus says, He speaks undoubtedly these words to those who have not received the gift of adoption.

In other words, these are people who were offered the gift of becoming gods, but are gonna die like men because they've rejected this gift.

In Irenaeus' words, They despise the incarnation of the pure generation of the Word of God, and thus de- defraud human nature of promotion into God, and prove themselves ungrateful to the Word of God who became flesh for them.

For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of Man, that man having been taken into the Word and receiving the adoption might become the Son of God.

This is how we become promoted into God, is you start by becoming a son of God.

And Irenaeus explains, For by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality.

That's an obvious point, but let's make sure we get that really clearly.

We want eternal life.

Nothing in our nature gives us eternal life.

Our nature is destined for mortality, death, and corruption.

You're going to die and rot in the grave left to your own devices.

And so if there's going to be a remedy for that, if you're going to be given immortality and incorruption, it's not gonna come from within.

It's gonna come from without.

And Irenaeus explains, okay, well, that ha- that means first, incorruptibility and immortality had become that which also we are.

In other words, before we can become like God, God has to become like us.

And that's exactly what happens in the incarnation, so that the corruptible might be swallowed up by incorruptibility and the mortal by immortality, so that we might receive the adoption of sons.

So he's just going into, you know, pretty great depth about, how does this work?

Well, it works because we can't give ourselves any of that.

We have to receive it from God.

God gives it to us by first joining humanity and divinity in the incarnation.

We couldn't make that union happen.

God can make it happen.

He did make it happen in the incarnation, and then He continues to make it happen, as we're gonna see, through the Eucharist and through these other ways in which we participate in the divinity.

This is a point that Christians often return to when describing the incarnation, even that paragraph from the Catechism in 460 that's describing why Christ came into the world.

And so you often find this amazing theme unpacked in, like, Christmas homilies.

For instance, Saint Augustine in Sermon 186, one of his Christmas homilies, just kind of throws out, Would any Christian deny after all that the Son of Man was born of that woman, but that all the same God became man, and only in this way did man become God?

But hold on.

He's just said that through the incarnation God became man, and in this way, man becomes God.

Just sort of throws it out there as if we're gonna just recognize that, and then he, he moves on.

And Augustine isn't alone.

This kind of formulation, that God became man so that man might become God, we find it in both the East and the West in almost verbatim the same format.

As for instance, Saint Athanasius says, For He was made man that we might be made God, and He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father, and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality.

Notice this connection between receiving immortality and becoming God are closely linked in Athanasius' mind because immortality is a divine trait, not a human trait.

And so when you are living on in eternal glory, that's not because of your just natural human attributes.

This is because something has happened to you to make you like God.

So at this point, it might be helpful to pause and ask, okay, well how is this not heresy?

How is this not polytheism?

How is this not denying that there is one and only God?

Because we want to say on the one hand, yeah, we believe everything in the Bible that says you becoming God or becoming gods, and on the other hand, there's actually only one God.

So how do we square that circle?

And the same Athanasius who I just quoted gave what I think is the most helpful he, uh, kind of explanation.

He's actually giving this in the context of, uh, another passage where we're told to be merciful as our Father in heaven is merciful, and he says, Although there be one Son by nature truly only begotten, we too become sons.

Right?

Like God sent His only begotten son, and so we can talk about Jesus as the only son of the Father, or we can talk about all of us as sons of God .

and sons of the Father.

And every time you pray the Our Father, you are standing in that status as a son or a daughter of God, without denying that there's another sense in which there's only one Son, Jesus, the second person of the Trinity.

We don't say that there's, you know, the Father, a bunch of sons, and then the Holy Spirit.

No, it's Father, Son, and Spirit.

So at the level of nature, there's only one.

But by participation in grace, through adoption, there's more than one.

So similarly, Athanasius says, And though we are men from the earth, we're yet called God, not as the true God or His word, but as please God who's given us that grace.

And then he says, So also, as God do we become merciful, not by being made equal to God nor becoming in nature and truth benefactors, for it's not our gift of benefit, but belongs to God, but in order that what has accrued to us from God Himself by grace, these things we may impart to others.

And then he even says, you know, Only in this way can we anyhow become imitators and in no other when we minister to others what comes from Him.

So, you know, think about when Jesus encounters rich young man, and he says, Why do you call me good?

No one is good but God alone, that's true, and yet we can still talk about people as good, not as a separate goodness apart from God, but as imitators and participators in God's own goodness.

This is a really important point to make sure that we get right.

We are told to be merciful as our Heavenly Father is merciful.

And in fact, Jesus says, Love your enemies and do good and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great and you will be sons of the Most High.

That Jesus connects acting in a godlike way, in a godly way, to sonship.

And, at least for me, that was kind of a light bulb moment.

Like, oh, okay, I get that.

Like, I get how in one sense, the only merciful one is God.

He is infinitely merciful, and I am not, and no one I've ever met is.

No offense.

I mean, I haven't met some of you.

Either way, I don't think you're infinitely merciful.

But you hopefully participate in God's mercy.

And so, that isn't coming from some other source besides God.

It isn't as if there's God's mercy over here and then you have your own storehouse of mercy that's not a participation.

No, all the good you're doing is a participation in God's own goodness, whether it's mercy or goodness of any kind, whatever it is.

And so in this way, by cooperating with grace, by acting in a godly way, you become more godlike.

And again, at least for me, that was, like, a, a light bulb where it was like, oh, okay, I get that.

Like, we kind of squirm in calling people gods but don't squirm in calling people godly.

And I think if we thought about that more deeply to say anyone who's godly would, apart from grace, be actually blasphemous, because God is so infinitely other than humans.

So only by participating in, in this divine life are we able to become holy or godly or any of these things that are properly these attributes of God alone.

And so if we're ready to go that far, then it doesn't seem like a major burden or major hurdle to go one step further and say with Saint Paul, I have been crucified with Christ.

It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

So if you want more of the kind of technical aspect of that, Saint Thomas Aquinas talks about how with things like charity or wisdom or goodness, these are all participations in something that is properly found in the divine essence itself, that we are somehow connected to, uh, God's own love, His own wisdom, His own goodness when we are cooperating with those things, that we're not creating, you know, charity in our own hearts, but God is giving us a share by grace in the order of charity.

And that gets really theologically complicated in some ways.

But again, this is what it looks like to become godlike, that you're allowing God to transform you to becoming more like Him.

So, how do we let this doctrine transform us?

I wanna suggest several different ways.

The first of them I'm going to give not nearly the attention that it deserves, with the anticipation that I may come back and do a separate episode just on this topic, which is, I want you to let this idea change how you understand the Eucharist.

I think we should just change our understanding of the Eucharist based on this.

And this is something that the prayers of the Church emphasize that we often overlook.

It's amazing to me how many time the prayers at mass, and some of them it's, uh, like, the particular prayers of the day called the propers, uh, mention something about this theme of theosis.

And yet we don't tune into it and, and think about, like, wait a second, that's a really big thing that was just said.

And then there's this prayer that the priest prays silently when he's pouring a little bit of water into the wine at the offertory, and he prays, By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.

And I hope by this point it's clear that is a solidly Christian prayer, and it's an ancient Christian prayer.

Some version of that prayer has been prayed for a very long time during our liturgy.

And so this idea is that, like, the Eucharist is somehow important in this process of sharing in the divine life.

Saint Gregory of Nyssa puts it like this.

He says, Since the God who is manifested infused Himself into perishable humanity for this purpose, namely, that by this communion with deity, mankind might at the same time be deified Okay, so again, God becomes man so man can become God .

for this end, he also disseminates Himself in every believer through that flesh, whose substance comes from bread and wine, blending Himself with the bodies of believers to secure by this union with the immortal, man too may be a sharer in incorruption.

Okay.

What does that mean?

He's just said, and, you know, Gregory of Nyssa has an incredible Eucharistic theology.

I spoke about this a couple years ago at the Catholic Answers Conference, and I thought I had an episode on this.

I cannot find it, and if I don't have one, I'm really looking forward to just doing an episode on how Gregory of Nyssa shows the Eucharist is connected to bodily resurrection and glorification, uh, because it's incredible.

But there's this theme that you'll find throughout the early Christians where they regularly connect this idea of the Eucharist and bodily resurrection, and Jesus actually talks about this in John 6, that if you eat His flesh and drink His blood, He'll raise you up on the last day.

That's a reference to bodily resurrection.

So those two themes, bodily resurrection and glorification are connected with the Eucharist in ways that the early Christians took for granted and that are opaque to most Christians, including most Catholics today.

Those seem like totally different topics to us.

Gregory does an incredible job spelling out the different steps, so if I can find that episode, I will link to it below.

If I can't find that episode because it doesn't exist, only in my mind, I will make it because it's a great episode, if it exists.

I mean, it's just like, Gregory is just like, incredible.

I'm not saying, like, my work was that good, but like, Gregory's very e- e- eye-opening.

It was very helpful understanding the steps that he kind of walks through.

So, that's the idea.

Christ wants union with us.

That's why the incarnation happens and it's why the Eucharist happens, and He wants to be united with us in our humanity, and our humanity is bodily as well as spiritual, and so the Eucharist makes sense as a way that He unites Himself to us in our full humanity, bodily as well as spiritual.

Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, for his part, likewise tells us, With full assurance let us partake as of the body and blood of Christ.

For in the figure of bread is given to you His body, and in the figure of wine, His blood.

Now, I'm a little cautious in using this line, 'cause like I thought people might misunderstand what he was saying there.

He's saying that this looks like bread, and looks like wine, but is actually the body and blood.

In fact, he goes on to say that explicitly.

He says, Consider therefore the bread and the wine not as bare elements, for they are, according to the Lord's declaration, the body and blood of Christ.

And he tells you to ignore your senses which would have them be bread and wine, and instead trust your faith, because the body and blood of Christ have been vouchsafed to you.

So it's very clear Cyril is saying this isn't bread and wine, this is the body and blood of Christ.

It's a figure of bread, it's a figure of wine, that it's not that the, uh, bread and wine are just like symbols of body and blood, it's that it's not, it's only a symbolic bread or symbolic wine in the sense that it's not really bread, it's not really wine anymore, it is now the body and blood of Christ.

So just be aware that he's using that language in somewhat the opposite way that you might at first hear it.

He then makes that very clear, I think, in the next part where he explains how this is gonna actually divinize us.

He says that by partaking of the body and blood of Christ, we may be made of the same body and the same blood with Him.

For, in, in this, by the way, solidly biblical idea that we are one body of Christ because we partake of the one Eucharistic loaf.

Saint Paul says this explicitly in 1 Corinthians 10: For thus we come to bear Christ in us, because his body and blood are distributed through our members.

Thus it is that according to the Blessed Peter, we become partakers of the divine nature.

Now, we already heard that quote, but Cyril is just unpacking that this plays out eucharistically.

All of this, I think can be summarized by the catechism in paragraph 1402, quoting an ancient prayer of the church which it says about the mystery of the Eucharist, A sacred banquet in which Christ is received as food, the memory of His passion is renewed, the soul is filled with grace, and a pledge of the life to come is given to us.

So, the Eucharist is, as the catechism goes on to say, an anticipation of the heavenly glory.

Something in theosis is both anticipated and promised, and even in some ways brought about through the Eucharist that should change how we view the Eucharist.

Second thing I think it should change is how we view justification, 'cause a lot of times justification can be, at least in my experience, this dry topic where Christians just debate whether we are declared righteous or made righteous, when the reality is so much bigger than it sounds like either side is saying.

Now, to be clear, when we talk about being made righteous, we actually mean theosis, but I think to many ears, being made righteous just means like being made morally upstanding or something.

And so a lot of the debate people are just not getting, like the Christian promise is not that you're just gonna be declared righteous.

It's not even just that you're gonna be made righteous in the ordinary way we might imagine righteousness.

It's that you're going to be made godlike.

So, I thought this pastor did a good job from a Protestant perspective of explaining like the two sides, and then I wanna kind of unpack that a little bit here.

Hi, this is Jon, and I'm answering the question, what is the difference between being declared righteous and made righteous?

This is really at the heart of the Reformation.

The Roman Catholic theology teaches that through works and the sacraments you are made righteous, you actually become righteous as part of your nature.

And then as, as far as the Reformation goes, we hold that, for instance, Romans 5:1 says that, We are justified by faith, meaning that one is declared to be right with God by faith, not by their actions, but by faith.

So-We did not actually gain forgiveness of our sins, and we are not by nature righteous, so when God looks at us, He does not say, You are righteous.

He's saying, You have been declared to be righteous.

It has been pronounced over you.

It has been given to you.

It's not part of who you are.

Now to be clear, I don't think Pastor Jon does a great job of describing the Catholic view.

I think he that sounds more Pelagian than it does Catholic, and I know many people think that those are the same thing.

They're not.

M- but I think what he does a good job of is expressing the Protestant view, at least in the ways I've often heard it, which is that you are declared righteous, but you don't actually become righteous.

It is not part of your nature when, we would agree, it's not part of your nature in the sense it's part of God's nature, but you're not even really partaking of the divine nature.

You are instead just being declared that you're partaking of the divine nature.

And so you have the kind of famous reformation image of a snow-covered pile of dung.

It's still a pile of dung.

It's still horrible and smelly and wretched, but it's been covered over without actually being transformed.

Now, I want to be very clear about a couple things.

Number one, Pastor Jon doesn't think that's where this stops.

But number two, many ordinary Christians seem to, meaning that there's often this idea, like, I've been made right with God because he's declared me right, but he hasn't actually made me holy, and so it's not clear how to connect the dots between the declaration of holiness on the Protestant side and then the actual work of sanctification or of theosis.

Because if I'm already guaranteed salvation, what is this other project about being like God all about?

Now, I'm gonna let Pastor Jon kind of speak into that because I think it's important for us as Catholics if, if this isn't a theology you're familiar with to hear, like, no, there is a place for this, but I still think it, certainly in people's lived experience, that one of the reasons theosis gets kind of forgotten is in the Protestant worldview, it is harder to see how it organically fits into everything if you're not actually being made righteous and the whole point of theosis is that you're being made righteous and God-like.

Now, once we are justified, once we have been declared righteous, then God begins to sanctify us, to actually transform us into the image of Jesus Christ, and we won't be made righteous until we are glorified.

That's in heaven when we are finally transformed into the f- the actual image of Jesus Christ, that's when we will be made righteous.

But he's just said that God is going to make us righteous.

He doesn't think that has anything to do with our salvation because he's afraid that'll make it, like, our thing, but if God is making us righteous, it's God's thing.

Whether he's declaring someone righteous who isn't really righteous or whether he's actually making the unrighteous become righteous, that's still God's thing, not ours.

Like, that's not gonna give me the credit for God making me a certain way, and if it did, then you'd have to say, Well, the saints in heaven can't be made righteous either because that would cause these same problems.

And so this attempt to divorce theosis and the whole process of being holy from the process of being just pits justice and holiness against one another in, in a way that I don't think stands very well.

There's a lot more kind of reformation theology that, that could go on there.

I would just say for now, this notion that theosis is just something that happens later on is clearly not the biblical teaching.

We are right now being transformed from one degree of glory to another as we behold God in the ways that we behold him.

That's the promise of Second Corinthians, that Paul is not saying we are completely unrighteous now and later on are going to be transformed into becoming righteous.

It's, no, no.

We already aren't we're not just declared righteous, we're actually made righteous, and that being made righteous is an ongoing process.

There's plenty of passages that actually speak to this.

There's a sense in which we've already been justified, we're being justified, we will be justified.

We've already been sanctified, we are being sanctified, we will be sanctified, and the same as truth glorification.

And so, I think this matters because I think sometimes, we treat the spiritual life particularly without the seriousness that it deserves.

I'm gonna return to that in a little bit here.

And d- I think one of the reasons for that is that certain theologies, like once saved, always saved, perseverance of the saints, et cetera, can lead people to one of two extremes.

Either this incredible anxiety where they are never sure if they're true Christians or truly saved, or a kind of complacency.

I'm not saying it always does, but I've met enough people, and I'm betting you've met enough people who fall into one of those two camps because of how they've received those doctrines that I don't think you can say, Oh, there's, there's no connection, there's no correlation at all.

On the other hand, if you would say the project is to become a God by participating in God's own divine nature, now the spiritual life makes sense in a whole new way, and now the debates about justification starts to seem pretty trivial.

I'm not saying there aren't important differences still, but now this question of being made righteous, it's essential.

You have to be made righteous.

That's the whole plan.

That's the program.

And so the question about whether your initial justification happens with a declaration or a, uh, actual transformation, it does- it matters, but it, it matters a lot less when you realize, well, both sides have to recognize that you do have to actually become righteous and that it's not Pelagian to say that it's just Christian.All right.

The third thing I think it should change is how we view suffering, because one of the things that really struck me in reading about theosis in Scripture in particular, is how often it's connected to the theme of suffering.

And I think it, again, should go into how we experience, like, the spiritual life and our, our just journey as Christians.

So for instance, I've already quoted from St. Paul in Romans 8, but I promised to get back to this, that we are sons, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

Paul kind of just plugs that in without ever really explaining, like, why do we have those two things connected?

And I would just say, you don't get to Easter Sunday without going through the cross, and so what it is to be united with Christ is going to involve being united with his suffering.

And here again, I think there are some theologies that can push against this in a way that obscures it, where you'll have some theological systems where Christ has to cross so that you don't have to, or at least that's how it can sound.

In reality, Christ says, Take up your cross and follow me.

He is not just your penal substitute.

He's not your, you know, the divine whipping boy that, that bears the divine wrath so that you don't have to deal with the cross.

No, you still have to deal with the cross, but now your cross has meaning, and now united with Christ as a fellow heir with Christ, your cross is the Good Friday that gets to Easter Sunday.

I know, that, that probably is not the way you're used to hearing about that, but I think if you read Romans 8, it's like, th- that's what St. Paul's taking for granted, and he's not alone.

Or maybe he is, depending on who wrote Hebrews.

Hebrews 2, uh, talks about how Jesus was made lower for a little while than the angels, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death.

So notice Christ's own glory and honor is subsequent to the humiliation of the cross, that he has to go through the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering.

Notice the model there.

He's not the replacement.

He's the pioneer.

He's traveling this road, Calvary to the grave to the glory, not so that you don't have to, but to chart the course for you.

For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified have all one origin.

That is why he is not ashamed to call them brethren.

So he ties in all these themes of sonship, brotherhood, uh, glorification.

It's all tied up there with suffering, that when we are united with Christ, we're not just united with Christ in glory, we're united with the man of sorrows.

We are united with the suffering Christ.

Hebrews returns to this theme 10 chapters later, in which the author writes to these struggling Christians, saying, In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

And have you forgotten the exhortation which addresses you as sons?

And he quotes from the Old Testament.

My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor lose courage when you are punished by him, for the Lord disciplines him whom he loves and chastises every son whom he receives.

The author of Hebrews then continues, It is for discipline that you have to endure.

God is treating you as sons.

For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?

If you're left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you're illegitimate children and not sons.

Like, you are not a son in the sense of being an heir if you're not a son that's going through the cross.

That's what the Bible says.

Like, if you're on easy street and you've just rejected the cross in your own life because you don't think it applies to you, then you're not living as a son.

You're living as an illegitimate son, and illegitimate sons don't inherit.

They are not heirs.

That's the point that he's making here in Hebrews 12.

He goes on in verse 9, Besides this, we've had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them.

Shall we not have much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live?

For they disciplined us for a short time at their pleasure, but he disciplines us for our good, we may share his holiness.

We may share his holiness.

There it is again, that theme of theosis just snuck in there in a way that you can overlook so easily.

For the moment, all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant.

Later, it yields a peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

So according to him, we're not just declared righteous.

We are, throughout this life, living what it is to be righteous so that we can receive the peaceful fruit of righteousness by being trained in these sufferings.

The next area I think that should change is how we view the saints and, by extension, how we view our neighbors.

Now, those are really two different kind of categories, but I'm using the same quote for both.

One of the objections that, as I said before, you'll often hear is like, Oh, don't ask the saints to help you, because the saints in heaven can't hear you.

They're dead and therefore they're cut off.

And there's plenty of Scripture that seems to point to the opposite.

I mean, we just got out of Hebrews 12 a second ago where it describes, after listing all throughout Hebrews 11 all the great saints of old, it then says that we're surrounded by so great a crell- a cloud of witnesses.

Well, the obvious implication there is that you're in, like, a, an arena.

You're running a race, and these are the people in the stands rooting you on.

It makes no sense to imagine that image and say, And none of them are aware you're running the race.

Then why are they surrounding us as a cloud of witnesses?

Like, it just doesn't make sense of the image.

But fine.The deeper problem, as I said before, is that it has too small a view of what the saints are currently enjoying in heaven, and if you have this view, a lot of opposition to asking for their help is gonna melt away.

Like the objections just become kind of laughable in the sense that you say like, Well, of course.

And again, there's this very strange phenomenon where many Christians believe, okay, if I say to the devil I want to make a deal with the devil, he can hear me.

But if I ask the saints in heaven if they will protect me, they can't hear me.

So the devil is more a part of my life than the saints in glory, the great cloud of witness.

And the devil is more powerful, he's able to hear things rather than the saints in glory, and it's a very strange vision of the spiritual life.

And I would suggest that vision doesn't hold up well when one reads what scripture actually says.

For instance, do you not know we'll be judging angels?

Christ was made lower than the angels for a little while.

All that suggests that the glorified saints are above even the angels.

And if they're above the angels, they are certainly above the demons, the fallen angels.

And so they're not these irrelevant and impotent spiritual forces the way that many Christians for some reason think they are.

They're incredibly powerful intercessors for our behalf, because this is what it is to be a good Christian.

And they're not just like us here on Earth, a little bit better.

They're radically transformed into godlikeness, which is then gonna lead to the C.S. Lewis quote from Weight of Glory, but as we get there, I want you to think not only of what this says about the saints, but also how it changes maybe how we view our neighbors here on Earth today.

Lewis has one of the most incredible, uh, sermons on divinization, and he's coming as an Anglican to this and does a tremendous job with this doctrine.

He says, It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you'd be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.

Like the most boring person you know, the Trent Horn whatever.

I'm just joking.

I think I can safely do Trent there.

We'll see.

This person is destined to, like they're meant for eternal glory, to become godlike in such a way that if you saw Saint Trent Horn of wherever, Texas or Phoenix I guess is where he's from, then you'd want to worship him.

Or if something terrible happens and Trent goes in a pretty different direction, he would be such an abomination that you would shudder at the sight of him.

I'm just picking on Trent there, but I could pick on myself or any of you.

That's the idea.

Now, that tells us two things.

Number one, it tells us, okay, the saints are powerful spiritual forces.

But two, it changes how we treat our neighbors, because that makes me want to be a little nicer to Trent, both to hopefully help him along on his journey and also like I don't want a future godlike creature, uh, threatening me.

So I want to get in good graces with him.

But in, in all seriousness, there's this, this sense in which it should change how we view our neighbor ultimately, and this is where I think all of this is leading to.

It should change how we view holiness itself.

So Lewis goes on to say, All day long, we are in some degree helping each other to one or other of these destinations.

It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.

There are no ordinary people.

You've never talked to a mere mortal.

Nations, cultures, arts, civilization, these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.

But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.

Immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

Now, you might hear that.

I think those are ominous words in many ways, but incredibly encouraging words in others.

And, and you might say, Okay, if that's true, maybe don't make jokes about Trent.

And in fairness, Trent's not boring at all.

Trent's a fascinating guy.

But there's a sense in which, as Lewis says, This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn.

We must play, but our merriment must be of that kind, and in fact, the merriest kind, which exists between people who have from the outset taken each other seriously.

No flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

We want to revel in one another and play in that sense.

And our charity must be a deep and costly love with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner.

No mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.

Let's focus on this passage, so that's a line that's very easy to miss.

One of the things, uh, that flows from taking your neighbor seriously as someone who's also destined for theosis is that you have to take their sin seriously.

You can't just say, Eh, that's their problem, that you might actually be in a situation where a kind word from you, a word of correction perhaps, is the difference between them becoming an eternal horror or glory.

And that is a serious challenge.And this is the way in which all of our life's decisions should be approached, with an eye towards the eternal destiny of myself and other people can hang in the balance.

And so, there's a certain way with which I should approach other people.

We shouldn't, again, not in a way where you're not having fun, but a way in which you're not trivializing the other person, a way in which you're not, like, demeaning and minimizing the other person.

That can be a difficult thing, especially in a, in a world where you have so many people, and it's hard to, you know, what Martin Buber calls the I-thou as opposed to I-it relationships.

Y- it's hard to realize the humanity of every person who comes into your life, from the person next to you in traffic, to the waiter, to whomever.

But realizing that small actions may help them get to heaven, may help you get to heaven, should change how you view, like, every day of your life.

Lewis concludes, and I think this is a good place to wrap up, Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.

If he's a Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also, Christ very ɴ ɑ ʲɪtɑ t, the glorifier and the glorified, glory himself is truly hidden.

Love your neighbor, recognize God in your neighbor, and strive to become godlike.

And don't settle for any form of Christianity offering you anything less than theosis, than divinization, than deification, because you're not just made to avoid hell.

You're not just made to sit on a harp, sit in light robes, play music somewhere.

You are made to become a partaker of the divine nature, to become an heir of God Himself, and to share in all of the divine glory that God Himself has.

For Shameless Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.