The Protestant Allergy

The word theosis lands in many evangelical spaces like a grenade. The associations are immediate and not entirely irrational: anything that sounds like an image-bearer becoming God triggers the memory of the serpent's lie in Genesis 3 and the tower of Babel and every heretical tradition that has blurred the distinction between Creator and creation. The allergy is understandable.

But the allergy has cost the tradition something it cannot afford to lose. The careful distinction between theosis and apotheosis — participation by grace versus seizure by nature, the iron in the fire versus the iron claiming to be fire — is precisely the distinction the tradition needs to make, and the allergy has prevented it from being made. The result is that the evangelical church has a robust doctrine of the new birth and an underdeveloped doctrine of what the new birth is the beginning of. It can describe the entry condition in considerable detail. It struggles to describe the destination with anything approaching the precision the New Testament provides.

2 Peter 1:4 speaks of believers becoming partakers of the divine nature. That is not the language of moral improvement. It is ontological language — substance language, language about what is actually happening to the person in Christ at a level deeper than behavior. 2 Corinthians 3:18 describes being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. Romans 8:29 names the destination: conformed to the image of the Son. 1 John 3:2 says that when He appears we will be like Him, because we will see Him as He is.

The tradition has these texts. It has not lost them. What it has done is domesticate them into behavioral language — we become more Christ-like in our conduct — which is true as far as it goes and falls well short of what the texts are actually claiming. The behavioral domestication is the allergy producing its outcome: a smaller vision of the transformation than the New Testament warrants, transmitted to a congregation that therefore has a smaller vision of what it is and what it is becoming.