Being Gods: Christian Deification as Restoration of the Divine Nature

The ancient Christian doctrine of deification has been a major topic of research for the past century, and it is rapidly increasing in popularity, with many books and articles proclaiming its prevalence in ancient Christian theology, medieval theology, and even Western Reformed theology. Every major Christian theologian wrote about how the intended purpose of God was to make us gods, from Irenaeus, Clement, and Origen in the Second Century CE to Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Athanasius, and even St. Augustine. It was a fundamental teaching around which all other Christian doctrine was based. It continued to be a major Christian teaching through the influential Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, the Western scholastics Anselm and Aquinas, Gregory Palamas, and even into the Reformers Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards as late as the 1700s.

For most of these patristics, deification stood at the end of our human journey as the culmination of Christian salvation. It was the entire reason for many Christian rituals (such as baptism and the Eucharist) and it stood behind many of the most hotly debated council decrees, even though deification itself was always presupposed as God’s true purpose for human existence: to make us gods.

Being Gods presents a complete Christian scriptural theology based on a full restoration of the divine nature, whereby human beings are saved by returning to the godhood they were graced with at creation. A full restoration of the divine nature does, as modern commentators stress, render humans more human (i.e., more humane, more compassionate, tolerant, and understanding), but Roden reminds that all of this is on the way toward increasing transcendence so that human beings can learn personally what it means to relate truly and intimately with an utterly transcendent God. Our advancement and evolution toward godhood is at the same time a return to an original, permanent, and irrevocable state of being that we were graced with from "before the foundation (or creation) of the world."

Along the way, Being Gods tackles and helps to integrate the controversial issues of the preexistence of the soul and the universal restoration (or apokatastasis) as they relate to deification teaching in the Bible. Each subject area addressed--the scriptural foundations, immortality, sonship/daughterhood to God, the nature of God, cosmology and God's creation of gods, the fall from godhood, the Holy Spirit and natural theology, soteriology and a reinterpretation of the misnamed "original sin," a realized eschatology, and a reinterpretation of heaven, hell, and humanity itself--presents the scriptural and patristic foundations behind each of them. At each stage of his argument, Roden explicates the provenance from the Hebrew scriptures through intertestamental teaching and the New Testament teaching of Jesus, Paul, and John. This is helpful in distinguishing which ideas from the patristics have biblical and logical support and which were reactions to theological opponents they were debating in their time.

Being Gods presents a unique vision of Christian deification as an actual realization of godhood by reexamining the Bible and the great themes of both Eastern and Western theologians. Origen of Alexandria plays a great part in the argument, as do Augustine, Nazianzus, Nyssa, Maximus, Hilary, Anselm, and Aquinas, but each and every creation of God has something essential to contribute to the overall restoration of the divine nature.