Walking with Christ: The Road to Theosis and Sanctification

Everything this book has walked through so far has been building toward a question that sits underneath all of it: what, exactly, are you being changed into? Not merely rescued from — every honest gospel presentation gets that far, the wrath escaped, the penalty paid. But rescued for what? Positioned toward what destination, walking what road, becoming what, by the time the story this book has been describing finally reaches its conclusion?

Protestant vocabulary has a good word for part of this: sanctification, the progressive process by which the Spirit conforms a believer more and more to the likeness of Christ over the course of an entire lifetime, and beyond it. It is a word you have probably heard a hundred times, and it is not wrong. But there is an older word, used less often in most Protestant churches, that names the same road with a boldness sanctification's familiar, domesticated usage has sometimes worn away: theosis. Deification. The astonishing, almost dangerous-sounding claim that the destination of the Christian life is not merely moral improvement but genuine participation in the divine nature itself — a claim you might expect to find only among mystics or heretics, until you notice that it is Scripture's own language, stated as plainly as anything else in the New Testament.