Communicable Nature (2 of 2)

Paul's most explicit account of what the participation does to the human is in 2 Corinthians 3:18. But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. The verb for changed is metamorphoumetha — the same root as the word for the Transfiguration in Matthew 17. The human beholding the glory of the Lord is being transformed. The image being formed in him is the image of Christ. The agent of the transformation is the Spirit. The progression is glory to glory — partial now, fuller as the disciple proceeds, complete only at the end. This is not a metaphor. The change is real. The human is being made into something he was not. He is being made into Christ's image.

Three lines have to be held when this doctrine is taught. The first is the line against confusion of natures. The human does not become divine in essence. The human has one nature, human and created, and that nature is brought into participation with the divine without itself becoming divine. If the line is crossed, the result is the kind of mysticism that ends in the absorption of the human into the One — which is not Christianity but Plotinus.

The second line is the line against minimalism. The participation is real. The human is genuinely changed. To reduce the doctrine to a forensic declaration that leaves the human substantially what he was before — to say that justification is merely a legal status with no impact on the person — is to fall on the opposite side of the same error. The New Testament refuses this. The human is partaker of the divine nature. The human shall be like him. The change is real or the New Testament has been wildly overpromising.

The third line is the line against gnosticism. The participation is not the departure of the human from his materiality into pure spirit. The image-bearer remains an image-bearer through the participation; the resurrection body is the body the participation finally clothes; the new heavens and new earth will be the embodied dwelling of the humans whom the participation has made. Theosis does not dissolve the body. Theosis glorifies the body. The four properties of Aquinas are the bodily form the participation takes when it is complete.

What does the participation look like in the disciple's present life? It does not look like dramatic transfiguration. The disciple is not radiant in his kitchen at six in the morning. The participation is happening at a pace that is mostly invisible from inside it. The disciple is more like Christ this year than last year, more this decade than last decade, more at the end of his life than at the beginning, and the change is mostly recognizable in retrospect rather than in real time.

The participation is what the abiding of Chapter 11 produces over time. The branch that remains in the vine receives the sap. The sap, doing its work in the branch over seasons, makes the branch into what the branch was made to be. The branch does not become the vine. The branch becomes a fruitful branch — a branch that bears the fruit of the vine because the vine's life is in it. This is the parable of participation. The branch participates in the vine's life without becoming the vine. The fruit on the branch is the vine's fruit borne by the branch. The human participating in the divine nature is the branch bearing the fruit of the vine.

PART VI — New Creation