Communicable Nature (1 of 2)

Chapter 14 ended with a human whose will has been kept — restored, freed, brought back to itself by grace, and choosing the Father from inside its own freedom. The other half of Part V is what the rest of the human undergoes once the will is in the right disposition. And the New Testament has a phrase for what the operation finally produces. It comes from 2 Peter 1:4. Partakers of the divine nature.

The text reads, in the King James: whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. The Greek for partakers is koinōnoi — sharers, communicants, those who hold something in common with another. The Greek for divine nature is theias physēs — divine nature, the very physis of God. Peter is saying, in plain Greek, that the human is being made into a sharer of the very nature of God. The claim is enormous and the claim is real.

The line that has to be held is the line between participation and absorption. The human is being made a sharer of the divine nature without being made into the divine nature himself. Communion without confusion. Real change in the human, by which he becomes the kind of being who shares God's life — and yet a permanent and unbreakable distinction between Creator and created, by which the human never becomes God. This is the line Eastern Christianity has called theosis. It is the line Western Christianity has more often called union with Christ or sanctification or glorification.

And the substance of the participation is what the two Johannine anchors together have been preparing the volume to name. The divine nature being partaken of is the nature that John identifies as light and as love. Partaking of the divine nature is partaking of the essence that is luminous in its self-disclosing presence and self-giving in its motion toward us. The human does not partake of the divine substance as such. The human partakes, by the Spirit's indwelling, of the love that the divine substance essentially is. This is the precise content of the koinōnia. Participation is participation in love-as-essence, communicated by the Person who is that love personally, received by an image-bearer who has been spanned by the descent that crossed the asymptote from the divine side.

Athanasius gave the most famous formulation in De Incarnatione, written around 318 AD. He says that the Son of God became man that we might become God. Read in context, the sentence is doing something careful. The Athanasius who wrote it was the same Athanasius who would lead the Nicene party against the Arians, defending the full divinity of the Son and the irreducible distinction between Creator and created. He did not mean that the human becomes God in the same sense that the Son is God. He meant that the human is brought, by adoption and by the Spirit's indwelling, into a participation in the divine life that no human has by nature. The participation is real. The category distinction is preserved. The Son is God by nature. The image-bearer participates by adoption, by grace.

Irenaeus said something similar in Against Heresies, finished around 180 AD. He spoke of the Word of God becoming what we are that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself. The structure of the sentence is the same, the theological move is the same, and the limit is the same. Irenaeus is not saying that the human absorbs into the divine essence. He is saying that the human is brought, by the Incarnation and by the Spirit's work, into the kind of life that only the Son has by nature. The human receives by grace what the Son has by being.

Calvin in the sixteenth century did not use the vocabulary of theosis, but the doctrine he developed under the name of union with Christ does very similar work. In the Institutes, Book 3, Chapter 1, Calvin writes that as long as Christ remains outside of us and we are separated from Him, all that He has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us. To partake of His benefits, He must become ours and dwell in us. The whole of the redemption Christ accomplished becomes the human's possession only through union — a real, Spirit-effected joining of the human to Christ such that what is Christ's becomes the human's by the joining itself.