I have to say, I have enjoyed my conversation with Carl Mosser about theosis as an account of what it ultimately means to be redeemed. I still don’t really get it. That may have something to do with language—an “allergic reaction” on my part to the “deification terminology”—but it clearly has a lot to do, too, with different understandings of New Testament eschatology.

In a comment, Carl briefly set out the eschatological frame for an understanding of redemption that might be restated in terms of theosis or deification.

A comment by Chris Jones in response to something I said about the difference between the coming of the kingdom and the (supposed) redemption of the cosmos has had me looking at the sequence of events at the end of Revelation again.

My view hitherto was that after judgment on Rome we have a thousand year period when Christ reigns with the martyrs, followed by a final judgment of all the dead, and the appearance of a new heaven and new earth. John then has two visions of the holy city, the new Jerusalem, descending from heaven to be at the centre of this new creation (Rev. 21:2-4, 21:9-22:5).

Some recent conversations around the theme of theosis have directed me to Michael Gorman’s book Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology. Gorman’s thesis about theosis runs something like this: i) Jesus is a crucified or cruciform Lord; ii) to be Lord is to be God; ii) therefore, God is also cruciform; iv) believers participate in the crucified Lord; v) therefore, believers participate in God; vi) which is theosis. Here’s his definition: “Theosis is transformative participation in the kenotic, cruciform character of God through Spirit-enabled conformity to the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected/glorified Christ” (Kindle loc. 82).

The first chapter is an analysis of the “Christ-hymn” of Philippians 2:6-11 as a foundation for the model. I’ve highlighted here three stages in the argument and have suggested why I don’t think it works very well.

Someone got in touch recently asking about how we square the circle of justification by faith and judgment according to works in the New Testament. We are told all the time that we’re saved by faith and not by works—don’t you dare lift a finger to try and save yourself! But there’s no shortage of biblical texts warning that if we misbehave, we’ll get our comeuppance. Ephesians 5:5, for example: “For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.”

John Piper addresses the problem head-on:

One of the questions raised about death is whether Christians face a divine judgment and if so why and what kind. It is a good question because on the one hand we believe that our acceptance with God is based on free grace purchased by the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ and that this acceptance is attained through faith not earned through meritorious works. But on the other hand the New Testament frequently teaches that believers will be judged by God along with all men and that both our eternal life and our varied rewards will be “according to works.”

Michael Bird’s Euangelion blog is a constant source of intriguing biblical studies, etc., miscellanea. Yesterday it was Byzantine Star Wars iconography, today it’s Carl Mosser explicating the biblical basis for the supposed doctrine of theosis—roughly the idea that believers, if they stick with the process, eventually become divine. It’s mainly associated with Eastern Orthodoxy, but C.S. Lewis appears to have held the view: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.”

On the Gospel Coalition site Gavin Ortlund has summarily restated J.I. Packer’s response to annihilationist arguments. Here I restate my arguments against the arguments against annihilationism, while noting at the same time that annihilationism as a reading of New Testament eschatology is itself largely misconceived. For the most part, the texts under discussion refer not to what happens to individuals after they die—whether eternal conscious torment or annihilation—but to what happens to peoples and nations when they are judged by the living God in the course of history.

Packer maintains that the question boils down to whether, when Jesus spoke of some people departing “into eternal punishment” at the “final judgment” (Matt. 25:46), he “envisaged a state of penal pain that is endless, or an ending of conscious existence that is irrevocable: that is…, a punishment that is eternal in its length or in its effect”.

Christian soteriology works on the assumption that Jesus’ death was a unique saving event. The only real antecedent considered is the suffering of Isaiah’s servant, upon whom the Lord has laid “the iniquity of us all”, understood not as referring to a historical figure or community in Isaiah’s world but as a prophecy about Jesus. But the easy presumption of uniqueness is maintained only by suppressing the historical context. Broadly, Jesus’ death can be located in a tradition of righteous suffering under pagan oppression. In particular, Jews at the time—presumably including Jesus himself—would have been familiar with the stories of the Maccabean martyrs.

In 2 Maccabees, which is generally dated to the late second century BC, we are given the story of the gruesome torture and killing of the old man Eleazar, seven brothers, and their mother by the tyrant Antiochus, for refusing to perform an “unlawful sacrifice” and eat the meat of a pig. This is happening because Israel has been unfaithful to the covenant and is being punished by God—sooner rather than later, “in order that he may not take vengeance on us afterward, when our sins have reached their height” (2 Macc. 6:15).