Credo Ut Intelligam

Apotheosis

In an earlier post I wrote about my enthusiasm for the Kevin's treatment of apotheosis. I am drawn to this topic, although it involves mysteries too deep for me. Yet I seek understaning even if it is only partial. Here I want to describe a theological puzzle that seems impossible to solve unless God's people will, in some sense, share in the very divinity of God, and I will point to some scriptural passages that seem to teach that. Finally, I will respond to the concern that this might underminine the creator-creature distinction.

To set up the theological puzzle, let me begin with a line of thought initiated by Tim Keller in a sermon. Hebrews 12:2 identifies Jesus' motive for enduring the cross: "the joy set before him." This joy, Keller said, is not fellowship with the Father: for he had that before the incarnation. It must be something that he gained as a result of his suffering. And this was us. His love and longing for his bride was what motivated him to endure the cross. Verse 2 continues, "...endured the cross, scorning its shame." Keller explained that the word for "scorn" means "take lightly", as if the shame he suffered was a small thing in comparison to what he gained.

Now, let me follow this line of thought a little further. It is quite an astounding claim to say that Christ regarded what he suffered on the cross as a small thing in comparison to the joy he finds in us. First of all, given Jesus' experience in the garden of Gethsemane, we know that he did not consider his suffering a small thing, absolutely speaking. On the contrary, he was terrified. If he considered it a small thing, in comparison with the joy he looked forward to, that joy must be immesurably, incomprehensibly great.

There is more. Jesus had good reason to be terrified. His suffering included the totality of eternal torment that we deserved; complete abandonment by God in every way except one: wrathful vengeance, the unmitigated fury of an angry God. According to Hebrews 12:2, Christ considered the joy of union with us to be so great that he thought of the agony of the cross as a small thing, a trifle, in comparison.

This is a shocking and frightening doctrine. It weighs down upon me with a massive heaviness that the English word, "glory", hardly fits. Better to call it kavod. It is also a lovely doctrine. Its unbearably harsh disonnance is the very reason for its beauty. It would not pierce and melt us so if it were not so horrifying.

Stepping back from the precipice a bit, we may notice something odd. Moral purity requires us to value things in proportion to the value they actually have, to take most delight in that which is most delightful, to love most that which is most lovely. Jonathan Edwards and John Piper both point out that this applies to all moral agents, even God, which is why God is highest in his own affections. It would be immoral for God to love any created being more than Himself. God's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Not only is God worth more than any created being, God is worth infinitely more than any created being. So it seems that it would be immoral for anyone to give up God, even for a short time, in order to gain a created good, even if one's joy in that created good goes on forever. But this seems to be precisely what Christ did. He chose to suffer temporary loss of God's pleasure, for the sake of a joy in created beings. In short: he chose us over God. And that seems wrong. Of course, God the Father was in on it too. Christ was obeying the Father's will when he went to the cross. But that doesn't solve the puzzle, it only exacerbates it. How could God command God-man to love men more than God?

Apotheosis may provide a solution to this puzzle. I cringe whenever I hear someone say, "God loves you just the way you are." That is false, or at least misleading. What is true is that God loves us not for any lovliness that is in us. But the tense of that verb, "is", makes all the difference. His love for us is predicated on the lovliness that will be in us, on account of what He alone will do in us and to us. According to Peter, that includes our participation in the divine nature. And according to Jesus, we will be one with each other and with Him just as he is one with God the Father. And he says, "I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me." (John17:20-23)

The Christian doctrine of perichoresis is based on this passage. It concerns the inner life of the Trinity. Not only is it true to say of each of the three distinct Persons, "he is the one true God". Their unity consists in more than that. It also involves a mutual indwelling: the Father is "in" the Son, and the Son is "in" the Father, and the Spirit indwells both of them, and is indwelt by both of them. Nobody knows exactly what this means, but it is supposed to refer to whatever it is that Jesus was talking about in John 17.

But the astounding thing is that Jesus applies this to us. He asks the Father to invite us into that perichoretic fellowship which is the holy Trinity. If this is our destiny, if our chief end involves beoming part of an uncreated family, and if Christ loved us for what we are to become--for what he will make us--then it was not immoral for Christ to love us as much as he did, for the depth of that love was fitly proportioned to the loveliness of its object. In the cross, we see Christ loving his bride as if she were a fourth member of the trinity. He thus demonstrated to us the nature of the love that was before the universe by making us an object of that intra-trinitarian love. This would be immoral if it were not for the fact that we will in truth become partakers of the divine nature. We will come to have the value, worth, and lovliness of the Uncreated. Note well: we will not be Uncreated (for we are creatures by nature) but we will have (by grace) the value, worth and loveliness of the Uncreated. If not, then Christ's sacrifice demonstrates nothing but disordered loves, or else delusion.

At this point it is obligatory to fend off objections based on misunderstanding. It would take a perverse, deliberate effort at misinterpretation to confuse what I have said with something as crass as the Mormon doctrine that we will become gods, or with the pantheistic idea that everything is god already. But even without this kind of gross misunderstanding, someone might wory that the distinction between creator and creature is being threatened. I think the best way to respond to this is to turn again to Jonathan Edwards. Nevermind my objections to his theory of the will, Jonathan Edwards is my favorite theologian. And he is the only Reformed theologian I know of who has addressed the doctrine of apotheosis in a non-dismissive manner. He does this in his magnificent treatise, "The End for Which God Created the World." He writes,

"There are many reasons to think that what God has in view, in an increasing communication of himself through eternity, is an increasing knowledge of God, love to him, and joy in him. The more those divine communications increase in the creature, the more it becomes one with God; for so much the more is it united to God in love, the heart is drawn nearer and nearer to God, and the union with him becomes more firm and close, and at the same time, the creature becomes more and more conformed to God. The image is more and more perfect, and so the good that is in the creature comes forever nearer and nearer to an identity with that which is in God. In the view therefore of God, who has a comprehensive prospect of the increasing union and conformity through eternity, it must be an infinitely strict and perfect nearness, conformity, and oneness. For it will forever come nearer and nearer to that strictness and perfection of union which there is between the Father and the Son."
...
"As the creature's good was viewed when God made the world, with respect to its whole duration, and eternally progressive union to, and communion with him; so the creature must be viewed as in infinitely strict union with himself. In this view it appears that God's respect to the creature, in the whole, unites with his respect to himself. As to the good of the creature itself, in its whole duration and infinite progression, it must be viewed as infinite. The nearer anything comes to infinite, the nearer it comes to an identity with God. And if any good, as viewed by God, is beheld as infinite, it cannot be viewed as a distinct thing from God's own infinite glory."
...
"Let the most perfect union with God be represented by something at an infinite height above us; and the eternally increasing union of the saints with God, by something that is ascending constantly towards that infinite height, moving upwards with a given velocity; and that is to continue thus to move to all eternity. God, who views the whole of this eternally increasing height, views it as an infinite height. And if he has respect to it, and makes it his end, as in the whole of it, he has respect to it as an infinite height, though the time will never come when it can be said it has already arrived at this infinite height."

Edwards clearly says that we will never arrive at the infinite height that is strict union with God. He thus preserves the creator-creature distinction. But nevertheless apotheosis is understood as becoming strictly one with God. Because that process of becoming goes on forever, there is no time at which it can be said that the goal has been reached. At all times, there is an infinite distance between God and every creature, for no matter how much a finite quantity grows, its distance from infinity is always infinite. Nevertheless, from the perspective of eternity, God sees this eternally continuing increase in glory to be what it really is: infinitely glorious, and that infinite glory in the creature is nothing other than His own glory, fully communicated to the creature.

I'm not sure how much all of this makes sense, but at least it demonstrates Edwards's intentions to preserve the creator-creature distinction while maintaining a very strong doctrine of apotheosis.

Here is another analogy: creation reflects God like a mirror. But the analogy is imperfect because a mirror has a degree of independence from the thing it reflects. Even if it is reflecting its own maker, the glass has its own independent being, as a physical substance. So if you can imagine it, suppose a mirror is reflecting its maker, and then take away the glass but leave the reflection, or image. Now, the image in the mirror is not really different from the maker. If you look into the mirror, what you see is the maker. Perhaps you see him from a different angle, but the thing you see is really the same as what you see when you look directly at him. The mirror just provides you with another way of seeing him. Similarly, created things reflect the creator as a mirror, except that there is no mirror, there's just the reflection. I am claiming that, from the perspective of eternity, the bride of Christ is like that reflection: her whole being is nothing other than divinity, existing in a reflected mode.

Again, I'm not sure how much sense this makes. But I don't expect every truth to make sense to me. Perhaps angels understand it, or perhaps it doesn't make sense to anyone except God. I think the Bible teaches the doctrine of apotheosis, and it maintains a clear distinction between creator and creature. I want to understand this as much as possible, but at the end of the day, I must admit that I have no really adequate way of explaining this mystery. But neither do I have an adequate way of explaining how three distinct persons could each be the one true God. There are theological truths, revealed by God, that we cannot adequately explain; we can only inadequately express them.

ημεις δε παντες ανακεκαλυμμενω προσωπω την δοξαν κυριου κατοπτριζομενοι την αυτην εικονα μεταμορφουμεθα απο δοξης εις δοξαν καθαπερ απο κυριου πνευματος (2Cor3:18)

Posted by mccartney at February 1, 2006 12:20 AM | TrackBack