Since one of my readers/FB friends guilted me into taking responsibility for the fact that theosis is a huge them of Michael Gorman‘s Inhabiting the Cruciform God, I will deal with it in this final post on the book. I was intending to not deal with it because the other two issues (justification and non-violence) are more in my everyday world of wrestling with Paul. And it’s my blog. But, it’s Mike’s book, and the subtitle is “Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology,” after all, so here we go.
I’ll start with what I think is the strongest element of Gorman’s discussion of theosis. The emphasis on theosis (becoming like God) is derivative of Paul’s insistence that we are saved by participation in the death and resurrection of Christ. The Christian call to be “Christ-like” is the call to become conformed to the narrative that moves through the cross to the resurrection. So when Gorman speaks of “theoformity” or “theosis,” he is talking about a God who is made known in the death and resurrection of Jesus, not a vision of God detached from this world, whose identity is expressed in transhistorical categories. He is painting a picture of conformity to what I would call the story-bound God of the Bible.
Gorman argues that Paul understands theosis like this: “Theosis is transformative participation in the kenotic, cruciform character of God through Spirit-enabled cruciformity to the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected/glorified Christ” (7). I resonate deeply with the notions that God is known most fully in the Christ-event (kenotic = emptying, as in Christ’s self-emptying in Phil 2; cruciform = cross shaped), and that our lives are to be conformed to the image of the crucified Christ.
There’s one point at which I’m more cautious about theosis as Gorman describes it, and it has to do with the concern that Jesus as God is performing a function that in Paul is more often played by Jesus as quintessential human: second and last Adam. On pp. 6-7, Gorman lists a number of passages that are often associated with theosis, none of which in my estimation are speaking of becoming Christlike in the sense of Christ’s divinity, but Christlike in the sense of Jesus’ inauguration of a new humanity.
- Romans 8:29 speaks of being conformed to the image of the son. This is the sonship that Jesus has as a result of his resurrection (Romans 1:4), the sonship that makes Jesus Davidic king / true Adam: his enthronement to the right hand of God. Yes, to be truly human is to be God-like, renewed after the image of God in which we were created, but is this what is meant by “theosis”?
- 1 Corinthians 15:42-49 is to the same effect: we’ve born the image of the earthly man, we’ll also bear the image of the heavenly. This is about Jesus as last Adam. Again, humans were created in God’s image, but this seems to be more about anthroposis than theosis.
- 2 Corinthians 3:18 speaks of being transformed into the image of God from glory to glory. The idea of “new creation” is in view here as well: it’s God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness who has shone in our hearts…” the new image comes as part of new creation.
- 2 Corinthians 5:17, 21: “If anyone is in Christ–new creation!” Again, being creation is about being truly human once again. To be truly human is to be in God’s image and therefore revelatory of God’s image. But is this what Gorman means by theosis?
Throughout, I felt that the idea of theosis leaned most heavily on Jesus being divine, whereas such passages as these gain their traction from the resurrected Jesus being the firstborn of a new/renewed humanity. I agree that Jesus reveals God, and that the cross is the revelation of God for Paul, but I’m not sure that Paul means it with all of the same ontological identification that Gorman seems to lean on. Put more simply: I found Gorman more ready to bring the church’s understanding of Jesus as fully divine to bear on his Pauline exegesis than I am, and I wonder if this hasn’t caused some of the “humanness” of Jesus to be downplayed or even replaced by the divinity? I like much of what he’s saying, but I’m cautious about going whole hog on this as a reading of Paul.
And there’s one point at which I disagree. In the last chapter, Gorman states almost against his will that theosis is the center of Paul’s theol
ogy. I say “against his will” because he isn’t entirely happy with the idea of a “center” (171). Though I agree that, as Gorman defines it, theosis might rightly be trumpeted as the center of Paul’s soteriology, this is not the same as to say that it is the center of Paul’s theology in general. I think this is an important distinction. Though such narrative participation is certainly at the heart of what it means to be joined to Christ, it is that Christ event itself rather than a model of how we participate in it, that is the center of Paul’s theology.
The Christ event itself, not our participation in it, determines how Paul reads scripture, how he identifies the one true and living God, how God will act not only in the lives of Christians but even in the life of Israel–in addition to what our lives should look like. I don’t think participation is “big enough” to cover all that Paul says, but the surprising event itself not only covers how Paul understands the participatory and transformative nature of the event but also the broader contours of the story within which we who are jointed to it live and move and have our being.
So in general, I like where Gorman is going and think that his focus on theosis has drawn a number of important dynamics of Paul’s narrative soteriology to light. But I’m not quite ready to jump on the theosis train yet. Of course, Mike has plenty of time to teach me why I’m wrong…
(Dislaimer: I received a gratis copy of Inhabiting the Cruciform God from the good folks at Eerdmans publishing company)
