The Divinity Project—Part VI

There is at least one branch of western Christianity (the Orthodox Churches) who understood an essential revelation made to early Christianity. As old as this teaching is, as venerable and bedrock to early Patristic understanding, it still comes as a shock to most modern Christian ears—“God became human in order that humans might become God”. This phrase or something like it was repeated over and over in the early teaching of Christianity. It was called by another term that survives from that period of Christian history —theosis, meaning, divinization or deification. Let us be clear, what this originally meant is exactly as is stated here—literally. Human beings are meant to be (or become) divine beings, possessing all the same qualities, nature, and consciousness of God in full and without restraint.

This seems, perhaps, unbelievable to us now. How could this be? Aren’t we meant simply to be “like” God (or godly), but certainly NOT God? So in our later western dogmatic formulations we practice a form of theological reductionism, that diminishes the full blaze of this teaching down to something manageable and tame, instead of the robust, almost incomprehensible meaning that the early visionaries of Christianity saw.

In a blaze of light, they looked into the face of the Ascended One and saw that humanity is also being raised into the same light, the same place, the same reality as was Yeshua himself. He was paradigmatic for us—the model of what we are to become—fully God and fully human at the same time, abiding in such unity without confusion or contradiction.

This is the Divinity Project of early Christianity—to make this happen, to empower the process of such becoming, and to be the community of beings in which such a transformation is possible. Instead, we became an organization protecting our diminished theology of trying to being “like” Christ, but certainly not God or divine, and keeping that restriction severely under control by naming, later, such a doctrine a “heresy.” Yet it remained and remains to this day, the truth of early Christianity.

As Olivier Clement has said in his remarkable study of early Christianity (The Roots of Christian Mysticism):

”The human vocation is to fulfill one’s humanity by becoming God through grace, that is to say by living to the full. It is to make of human nature a glorious temple. ‘Do not forget that to live is glory,’ said Rilke on his deathbed. And it is a glory that overturns death, or rather, reverses it.” (and then quoting the early writers):

“The human being is an animal who has received the vocation to become God.” (Basil of Caesarea and quoted by Gregory of Nazianzen). “Every spiritual being is, by nature, a temple of God, created to receive into itself the glory of God. (Origen).

As intense and radical as this early teaching was, what we have received of it is not all there is to it. We must explore further.