Modern Theology 37:4 October 2021
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)
ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
DOI:10.1111/moth.12700
HOW DEIFICATION BECAME EASTERN:
GERMAN IDEALISM, LIBERAL
PROTESTANTISM, AND THE MODERN
MISCONSTRUCTION OF THE DOCTRINE
MARK McINROY
Abstract
This article develops an original account of the rise of the modern misperception of deification as an
exclusively Eastern Christian doctrine antithetical to Western theology. The study argues that the origins of
the misconstruction lie in the distorting influence of German Idealism on the seminal treatment of the doctrine
advanced by Ferdinand Christian Baur. With Idealist categories shaping his retrieval, Baur inaccurately
portrays ancient Christian figures as advocating an automatic, mechanical deification of humanity as a whole
that leaves the individual no role to play in his or her salvation. Such a view of deification as a mechanical,
“physical” process is the precise basis on which Baur’s student Albrecht Ritschl and those in his school
influentially claim it has no place in Western theology. The antecedent condition for deification coming to be
characterized as Eastern, then, is it being understood as “physical,” and it is Baur who is ultimately responsible
for Ritschl so viewing the doctrine. Baur’s Idealist-inspired retrieval thus raises a mistaken understanding of
deification to prominence in the modern period, resulting in misunderstandings of the doctrine that persist
down to the present day.
1. Introduction
This study demonstrates that the Christian doctrine of deification (theōsis, theopoiēsis)1
has been particularly prone to misunderstanding in the modern period, and it accounts
for key misperceptions of the doctrine through a previously unidentified line of influence that begins in the early nineteenth century. Deification is often misjudged to be an
Mark McInroy
Department of Theology, University of St. Thomas, 2115 Summit Avenue, JRC 109, St. Paul, MN 55015, USA
Email: mark.mcinroy@stthomas.edu
1
Deification is often succinctly defined as “the attaining of likeness to God and union with him so far as
is possible” (Pseudo-Dionysius), yet the doctrine involves a broad constellation of biblical passages and theological concepts, including participation in God (cf. 2 Pet. 1:4), union with God, and becoming children of God
(cf. Psalm 82:6, John 10:34-35) by various means, including adoption as portrayed in Pauline literature, being
born anew from God as found in Johannine literature, and divine filiation as depicted in the synoptic gospels.
Additional aspects of the doctrine include the exchange formula (God became human so that human beings
might become divine) and the taking on of divine properties by the human being, especially immortality and
incorruptibility. For a discussion of contemporary efforts at defining the doctrine, see Daniel Keating,
“Typologies of Deification,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 17 (2015): 267-83.
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exclusively Eastern Christian doctrine that is antithetical to Western theology,2 yet a
number of studies have criticized this assessment, often by noting the presence of the
doctrine among Western theologians.3 What remains to be diagnosed adequately, however, are the reasons that the paradigm of deification as Eastern arose in the first place.
Only a few investigations of this question have been conducted to date, and they have
already arrived at some unexpected conclusions. Foremost is Carl Mosser’s provocative
claim that the initial characterization of deification as Eastern occurred not at the hands
of Eastern Orthodox figures, but instead the Liberal Protestant theologian Albrecht
Ritschl (1822-1889) and the Ritschlian “school” that followed him.
A question remains, however, concerning why Ritschl understands deification as he
does. This article maintains that Ritschl comes to view deification as Eastern as a direct
result of the portrayal of the doctrine advanced by his teacher, Ferdinand Christian
Baur (1792-1860), who mischaracterizes patristic figures as advocating an automatic,
mechanical deification of humanity as a whole that leaves the individual human being
no role to play in his or her salvation.4 It is precisely this aspect of Baur’s retrieval that
leads Ritschl to characterize deification as a “chemical process of nature,” which members of the Ritschlian school such as Adolf von Harnack popularize as a “physical”
doctrine of salvation.5 This view of deification as a “physical,” mechanical process has
2
Such a characterization can be found among both supporters and critics of the doctrine. For the former,
see Emil Bartos, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007), 7; Dumitru
Staniloae, The Experience of God, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, vol. 2, Creation and Deification (London: A&C
Black, 2002), 1; John Romanides, “Orthodox and Vatican Agreement,” Theologia (Athens, Greece) 6, no. 4
(1993): 570-80; John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York:
Fordham University Press, 1974), 186-88, 225-26; Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1959), 139-64. Among critics, additional mischaracterizations tend to accompany the
view of the doctrine as Eastern. Most prevalent is the perception of deification as an unchristian product of
the Hellenization of Christianity. See Benjamin Drewery, Origen and the Doctrine of Grace (London: Epworth
Press, 1960), 200-1. Also common is the notion that deification bridges the creator-creature distinction. See K.
Zwanenpol, “Luther en Theosis,” Luther Bulletin 2 (1993): 69–70. Other critics worry that deification endorses
an absorption of the human being into God that utterly dissolves that person’s individuality. See Andrew
McGowan, “Colossians 3: Deification, Theosis, Participation or Union with Christ?” in Theological Commentary:
Evangelical Perspectives, ed. R. Michael Allen (London: T & T Clark, 2011), 163. Most important for our purposes, many hold that deification proceeds according to a logic that fundamentally differs from that of justification, and these figures insist that the two doctrines cannot coexist in the same soteriological model. See
George Vandervelde, “Justification and Deification—Problematic Synthesis: A Response to Lucian Turcescu,”
Journal of Ecumenical Studies 37, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 74.
3
A partial list of the most recent studies includes the following: Jared Ortiz, ed. Deification in the Latin
Patristic Tradition (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019); John Arblaster and Rob
Faesen, eds., Theosis/Deification: Christian Doctrines of Divinization East and West (Leuven: Peeters, 2018); Fr.
David Meconi, S.J. and Carl E. Olson, eds., Called to be Children of God: The Catholic Theology of Human Deification
(San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2016); Daria Spezzano, The Glory of God’s Grace: Deification according to St.
Thomas Aquinas (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2015); Adam G. Cooper, Naturally Human, Supernaturally God:
Deification in Pre-Conciliar Catholicism (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014); Fr. David Meconi, S.J., The One
Christ: St. Augustine’s Theology of Deification (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013); J.
Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
4
The central text is Ferdinand Christian Baur, Die christliche Lehre von der Versöhnung in ihrer geschichtlichen
Entwicklung von der ältesten Zeit bis auf die neueste (Tübingen: C. F. Osiander, 1838). All translations are my own.
5
Harnack issues this assessment of deification as “physical” at several junctures throughout his highly
influential History of Dogma, trans. N. Buchanan, 7 vols. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1896-99); for instance, vol. III, 189-90. He puts more specificity to this criticism in his description of Irenaeus as advocating
“the deification of Adam’s children, viewed as a mechanical result of the incarnation” (II, 241, n. 2), and in
holding that Athanasius’s insistence on the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son “guaranteed the deification of human nature” (III, 141).
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Mark McInroy
exerted enormous influence on modern perceptions of the doctrine,6 and it is the basis
on which both Ritschl and Harnack claim that it has no place in Western theology. The
antecedent condition for deification coming to be characterized as Eastern, then, is it
being understood as “physical,” and it is Baur who is ultimately responsible for Ritschl
understanding the doctrine in such a manner.
Baur’s treatment of deification gives rise to yet another question, one that must be
addressed for an adequate account of how the doctrine came to be characterized as
Eastern: why does Baur so egregiously misread the patristic figures he examines? The
texts of Athanasius, Augustine, and others make abundantly clear that deification is no
automatic process, and that it instead includes a role for the individual human being.
Baur, however, entirely overlooks these features of the doctrine among its patristic exponents. Why? This study claims that Baur advances a mistaken interpretation of patristic versions of deification as a result of the distorting influence of German Idealism
on his retrieval of the doctrine. With Idealist models of reconciliation and divine-human
union palpably shaping his treatment of ancient Christian texts, Baur erroneously portrays patristic versions of deification as advocating an intrinsic union with God according to which human beings are divine by nature, not by grace. Furthermore, although
Idealists developed the subjective dimension of reconciliation in an effort at preventing
the immediate, fully realized extension of divinity to humanity in its entirety, patristic
figures (according to Baur’s Idealist model of history) advanced deification at a point
too early in the unfolding of the idea to possess an adequate account of subjectivity in
divine-human union. According to the Idealist categories that Baur imposes on patristic
texts, then, ancient Christian theologians could not sufficiently articulate the subjective
dimension of reconciliation, and as a consequence deification automatically extended
to humanity as a whole.
This crucial line of influence from German Idealism to Baur to Ritschl remains completely neglected in academic examinations of deification, and it demonstrates that the
origins of the modern misconstruction of the doctrine lie deeply recessed in the nineteenth century, a generation before Ritschl sunders Eastern and Western soteriologies.
Furthermore, although the roles of Harnack and, to a lesser extent, Ritschl have been
documented, what has not been noticed is that these figures unknowingly inherit from
Baur a version of the doctrine that stands in manifest tension with the actual positions
of its patristic exponents. Baur’s Idealist-inspired retrieval, then, raises a misleading understanding of deification to prominence in the modern period, and it leads directly—if
somewhat unexpectedly—to the misperception of the doctrine as Eastern.
6
Such a characterization can be found, often with overt reference to Harnack (and occasionally Ritschl), in
any number of histories of doctrine and dogmatic theologies of the last 150 years, many of which have been
influential in their own right. See, for instance, Friedrich Loofs, Leitfaden zum Studium der Dogmengeschichte
(Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1893), 94, 148-49, 366, 394; Jean Rivière, The Doctrine of the Atonement: A Historical Essay,
vol. 2, trans. Luigi Cappadelta (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trübner, 1909), 172-78; Hugh Ross
Mackintosh, The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), 198, 322-23;
Robert S. Franks, A History of the Doctrine of the Work of Christ (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), vol. 1,
70, 193; Hastings Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (London: Macmillan & Co., 1919), 240,
288, 297-99, 307; Joseph Tixeront, History of Dogmas, trans. H. L. B. (St. Louis: Herder, 1923), 149-50; Martin
Werner, The Formation of Christian Dogma: A Historical Study of its Problem, trans. S. G. F. Brandon (London: A
& C Black, 1957), 168; Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the
Atonement, trans. A. G. Herbert (London: Macmillan, 1969), 18; J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (San
Francisco, CA: Harper, 1978), 377-80.
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2. Albrecht Ritschl and the Expulsion of Deification from Western Theology
Although deification was a topic of some scholarly interest in the nineteenth century, it
is not until Albrecht Ritschl that one finds a sustained critique of the doctrine as a soteriological distortion advanced by Eastern Christian figures. In fact, Carl Mosser has
proposed that Ritschl and those in his school simply “invented the notion that deification is a distinctively Eastern idea incompatible with the Western theological tradition.”7 Before Ritschl, indeed, one looks in vain for figures who characterize deification
as an exclusively Eastern doctrine that is opposed to Western theology.8 Even more
surprisingly, given the doctrine’s current reputation, before Ritschl deification had yet
to become a topic of robust academic interest among Eastern Orthodox theologians.9
The first comprehensive examination of patristic treatments of the doctrine by an
Orthodox scholar was not published until 1906 by Ivan V. Popov,10 and Norman Russell
even maintains that deification remained marginal to Orthodoxy well into the twentieth century.11
Although deification is frequently portrayed as an unceasing refrain within Eastern
Christianity, then, its present centrality in Orthodoxy is in fact a product of theological
retrieval.12 That retrieval, moreover, is indelibly shaped by the Ritschlian school, partic7
Carl Mosser, “Recovering the Reformation’s Ecumenical Vision of Redemption as Deification and Beatific
Vision,” Perichoresis 18, no. 1 (2020): 18 (emphasis added). See also Carl Mosser, “Deification: A Truly
Ecumenical Concept,” Perspectives (July/August 2015): 11-12; and “An Exotic Flower? Calvin and the Patristic
Doctrine of Deification,” in Reformation Faith: Exegesis and Theology in the Protestant Reformations, ed. Michael
Parsons (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2014), 40-41.
8
The relatively few academic treatments of deification that precede Ritschl tend to mention both its
Eastern and Western exponents, and they do not insist on incompatibility between deification and Western
theology. For example, Baur himself does not characterize the doctrine as Eastern, and in fact he treats
Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers, and Leo the Great in his discussion of patristic versions of deification. See F. C.
Baur, Die christliche Lehre von der Versöhnung, 110-18. Similarly, John Henry Newman’s retrieval of deification
in his Lectures on Justification (1838) makes no mention of the doctrine as Eastern, and he also draws from patristic figures in both East and West for his understanding of the doctrine. See John Henry Newman, Lectures
on Justification (London: J. G. & F. Rivington, 1838); Mark McInroy, “Before Deification became Eastern:
Newman’s Ecumenical Retrieval,” International Journal for Systematic Theology 20 (2018): 253-68. Carl Ullmann
(1796-1865) locates figures in the East and West who espouse deification, and in one of his most significant
studies he even insists on the compatibility between the theological vision of the Reformers and the version
of the doctrine found in the Theologia Germanica. See Reformers before the Reformation, vol. 2, trans. Robert
Menzies (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1863), 213-33.
9
Paul Gavrilyuk observes that Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900) provided the initial impetus for modern
Orthodox retrievals of deification in the late nineteenth century. Paul Gavrilyuk, “The Retrieval of Deification:
How a Once-Despised Archaism became an Ecumenical Desideratum,” Modern Theology 25, no. 4 (October
2009): 648. Although his Lectures on Divine Humanity (1878-81) appears after Ritschl’s magnum opus, Soloviev
operates independently of Ritschl’s influence. Accordingly, his understanding of the doctrine is neither exclusively Eastern nor opposed to Western theology. Instead, he advances a sophiologically inflected version of
deification that draws from Jacob Boehme and German Idealists, among others. Soloviev’s understanding of
the doctrine is arguably as shaped by Western sources as by those of the East, and in later works he even insists that deification should serve as the central concept for uniting Eastern and Western Christianity.
Soloviev’s The Justification of the Good (1897), for instance, advances a view that, according to Jeremy Pilch,
“fully integrates theological approaches to deification of both east and west.” Jeremy Pilch,‘Breathing the Spirit
with Both Lungs’: Deification in the Work of Vladimir Solov’ev (Leuven: Peeters, 2018), 3.
10
Ivan Popov, “Ideia obozhenia v drevne-vostochnoi tserkvi,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 97 (1906): 165213. Translated in English as “The Idea of Deification in the Early Eastern Church,” trans. Boris Jakim, in
Theosis: Deification in Christian Theology, vol. 2, ed. Vladimir Kharlamov (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), 42-82.
11
According to Russell, before the 1960s, “The word [deification] hardly featured in the standard theological handbooks,” and he explains that “it was a technical term familiar only to monks and patristics scholars.”
Norman Russell, Fellow Workers with God: Orthodox Thinking on Theosis (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, 2009), 13.
12
In an indication that he is conducting a retrieval of deification, Popov begins his study with the claim
that the doctrine is “completely forgotten in contemporary theology.” Popov, “The Idea of Deification,” 42.
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ularly Harnack, who heaped scorn on the doctrine as the most egregious instance of the
Hellenistic corruption of the gospel. Popov attended Harnack’s lectures in Berlin in
1901 and 1902, and the latter’s influence can be observed throughout Popov’s seminal
article.13 Even more significantly, Harnack’s derisive treatment of deification rouses the
ire of early twentieth-century Orthodox émigrés in Paris such as Sergius Bulgakov
(1871-1944), Vladimir Lossky (1903-1958), and Myrrha Lot-Borodine (1882-1957). These
figures, in direct response to Harnack and others, develop a widely disseminated
counter-narrative according to which deification in fact lies at the heart of authentic
Christian teaching, which has been preserved exclusively in Eastern Orthodoxy.14 And
yet, for all of the enthusiasm generated by this émigré Orthodox understanding of deification, it is seldom noticed that it actually accepts central features of Harnack’s position at the very same time that it attempts to reject his portrayal. That is, although
émigré treatments of deification resist the notion that the doctrine is a distortion of authentic Christianity, they nevertheless accept the more fundamental claims that the doctrine is Eastern and that it is antithetical to Western theology.15 According to Mosser,
“Their characterization of deification as the distinctive patrimony of the Eastern
Churches was appropriated directly from Ritschlians like Adolf von Harnack.”16
This revised genealogy demonstrates, however briefly, that the view of deification
as an Eastern doctrine opposed to the West is a relatively recent construction; it also
directs one to examine closely the forces that gave rise to Ritschl’s understanding of the
doctrine, as his judgment can be seen to set in motion a cascading set of misperceptions
that persist down to the present day. To Ritschl, then, why does deification not belong
in Western theology, and how does he arrive at his view?
13
Popov refers to Harnack by name in his study, and deification is tellingly portrayed as “physical” at
several junctures. Popov, “The Idea of Deification,” 44, 51, 52, n. 36, 81.
14
In a series of articles in Revue d’histoire des religions, Lot-Borodine develops a virulent anti-Western narrative that identifies Harnack as a root cause of the Western misunderstanding of deification. She insists that
“Harnack, who has never understood anything about the Greeks,” incorrectly regards deification as a “physical” doctrine. Myrrha Lot-Borodine, “La Doctrine de la ‘déification’ dans l’Église grecque jusqu’au XIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire des religions 105 (1932): 5-43; 106 (1932): 525-74; 107 (1933): 8-55, 245-46, at 105 (1932): 33,
n. 1. Along similar lines, Bulgakov in several works indicates awareness of Harnack’s significance for modern
histories of dogma, and he maintains that “deification is not a physical or magical act on a person.” Sergius
Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church, trans. Lydia Kesich (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), 107.
Bulgakov’s language precisely reproduces that of Harnack, who portrays deification as “physical and magical” in his History of Dogma (II, 223). Lossky casts Harnack as one of his principal foils at the outset of The
Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, and he arguably borrows from Harnack to advance his own position
concerning the centrality of deification for patristic doctrinal debates. Although deification does not receive
definition at any church council, nor is it the focus of any sustained treatise by a patristic theologian, Lossky
somewhat incredibly holds that the doctrine was the “constant preoccupation” of the church throughout the
debates with Arianism, Nestorianism, Apollinarianism, and Monothelitism, and he goes on to announce, “All
the history of Christian dogma unfolds itself around this mystical centre.” Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical
Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 10. Such an unrestrained
claim for the importance of deification tellingly echoes Harnack, who expanded greatly on Ritschl’s assessment of the doctrine’s significance by placing it in a newly central position in the history of Christian theology. Harnack views deification as the covert engine animating the central doctrinal formulations of the early
church, particularly in its anti-Arian impulse, and he holds that deification was “the ultimate and supreme
thought” among patristic figures. See Harnack, History of Dogma III, 31, 164, n. 2.
15
Lot-Borodine vigorously insists that deification cannot be present in the West because its soteriological
focus falls on justification, which in her treatment entirely precludes deification as a theological option. LotBorodine, “La Doctrine de la ‘déification’,” Revue d’histoire des religions 106 (1932): 547. Lossky, too, opposes
the “rationalism” of the West to the “mysticism” of the East, and he makes clear that deification fits in the
latter theological model. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 196-99.
16
Mosser, “Recovering the Reformation’s Ecumenical Vision,” 19. See also Mosser, “No Exotic Flower,” 43;
Mosser, “Deification,” 13.
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In the opening pages of A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and
Reconciliation (1870),17 Ritschl singles out deification as a primitive and misguided doctrine of the Christian East that must be eliminated for the proper understanding of justification and reconciliation.18 In this insistence, as Johannes Zachhuber has observed,
Ritschl seeks to distinguish his position from that of his mentor, the eminent Tübingen
historian of doctrine Ferdinand Christian Baur.19 Ritschl regards Baur’s Die christliche
Lehre von der Versöhnung (1838) as of “epoch-making importance,” yet he firmly holds
that Baur adopts too warm an attitude toward deification.20 Most importantly, Ritschl
contends that Baur misunderstands the place of deification in Christian theology.
According to Ritschl, Baur casts deification as a “mystical doctrine of reconciliation,”
but in so doing mistakenly includes deification within reconciliation.21 Baur thereby
“mars [the] orderly unity” of his study, on Ritschl’s reckoning.22 In a clear indication
that deification will need to be expelled from a proper treatment of reconciliation,
Ritschl explains, “The Christian notion of reconciliation can only be understood as a
removal of the one-sided or mutual contrariety between the Divine and human will.
Accordingly, the fancies of the Church Fathers . . . about the deification of the human
race as a natural unity, do not fall under that notion.”23 Ritschl derisively characterizes
deification as a “chemical process of nature.”24 As such, it has no place for the will, and
Ritschl even suggests that such a mystical model absorbs the human being into the divine, causing him or her to lose all individuality.25
Deification not only aims toward a fundamentally different goal than do justification
and reconciliation; to Ritschl the two approaches represent mutually exclusive understandings of the God-human relationship. Deification requires “the reduction of relations which pertain to the will,” and the doctrine elevates instead “the forms of a natural
process.”26 Whereas justification and reconciliation are “ethical,” deification instead is
“physical.”
17
Albrecht Ritschl, A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, trans. John S.
Black (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1872). Originally published in German as the first volume of a
three-part study, which in its entirety is titled Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung (Bonn:
Adolph Marcus, 1870-74). The third volume was published in English as The Christian Doctrine of Justification
and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the Doctrine, trans., ed. H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay
(Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1902). The second volume has not been translated into English.
18
Alister McGrath notes that Ritschl understands justification (Rechtfertigung) and reconciliation
(Versöhnung) as synonymous for the most part; the distinction is that, whereas justification refers to the divine
judgment independent of any appropriation by the Christian community or an individual, reconciliation has
to do with the subjective appropriation of that judgment. Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian
Doctrine of Justification, fourth edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 374-75.
19
Johannes Zachhuber, “Albrecht Ritschl and the Tübingen School: A Neglected Link in the History of 19th
Century Theology,” Journal of the History of Modern Theology 18 (2001): 51-70.
20
Ritschl, Critical History, 10.
21
Ibid., 7-8. In keeping with other treatments of deification throughout the history of Christian theology,
Ritschl uses a range of different terms for the doctrine. Broadly speaking, Ritschl understands deification as a
model of reconciliation that requires union with God for its fulfillment. In speaking of a “mystical doctrine of
reconciliation (Versöhnung),” Ritschl is referring to deification as he understands it.
22
Ibid., 11.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid., 8. The second edition of the Critical History removed this phrase. The Critical History later has
“chemico-physiological process” (524), and Ritschl inveighs against viewing reconciliation as “physical” at a
number of other junctures (e.g., 233, 363, 468-70, 533-34).
25
Ibid., 106.
26
Ibid., 8.
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Ritschl thus introduces an exceptionally influential paradigm, according to which
deification and justification compete with one another in a zero-sum soteriological
game. According to this interpretation of the doctrine, an emphasis on justification inexorably leads to the elimination of deification. In spite of the fact that Augustine and
other major theologians uphold both deification and justification, Ritschl flatly insists
that deification has diminished in those portions of the Christian tradition in which
justification and reconciliation have been upheld.27
Behind the phrase “natural process” lies considerable animosity; deification so characterized represents the bête noire of Ritschl’s entire theological project. Ritschl was
deeply concerned about the rise of a scientific worldview that reduces human beings to
mere products of nature, and his ever-present worry that “mind” (Geist) would be absorbed into naturalistic explanatory schemes serves as an illuminating hermeneutical
key to his oeuvre. It drives, for instance, his critique of the Hellenization of patristic
theology, as the central fault of Greek philosophy is precisely that it is “physical;” it
transposes a method appropriate for investigating the natural world onto the human
person (and the God-world relation), and in so doing fails to advance a properly “ethical” view of the human being as one who transcends nature. As Zachhuber explains
Ritschl’s worry, “[For Ritschl,] the use of effective causality in the construction of doctrine is always suspicious and, more often than not, evidence for borrowings from
philosophies that corresponded, historically, to nature religion and will therefore, by
default, be unsuitable for the elucidation of the Christian truth.”28
In opposition to such a view, Ritschl insists that human beings are spiritual (geistlich)
creatures who are free from the necessity of nature. Such rising above “the laws of mechanism” is the prerequisite for regarding the individual as an ethical being.29 Soteriologies
that rely on natural processes fail to transcend the mechanism of nature. There is no role
for the ethical, the will, or even for the personal in such schemes. According to Ritschl,
the patristic emphasis on deification betrays the fact that Christianity had not fully extricated itself from pre-Christian models of salvation. Deification, then, must be eliminated
for reasons that touch the very heart of Ritschl’s theological program.
These views of salvation are not only fundamentally different and mutually exclusive; according to Ritschl, they also fall along neatly demarcated geographical lines:
The history of the doctrines of justification and reconciliation has its sphere within
the Western Church alone. The theology of the Greek Church has not, as a whole,
set before itself the problem which is involved in these ideas . . . I take up only those
trains of thought which have been actually worked out in a methodical way, and
which strive after conclusions which are logically necessary. But such trains of
thought have been constructed only by the theologians of the West. The doctrines
of reconciliation and justification are precisely those which have found their development exclusively in this portion of the Church. Whereby we may discern—what
indeed is a conclusion warranted by everything else—that Western Christianity in
general stands on a different niveau from that of the East, and that the separation
of fellowship between the two groups has not its explanation in politics alone.30
27
Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, 33-50, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY:
New City Press, 2000), 381.
28
Zachhuber, “Albrecht Ritschl and the Tübingen School,” 55.
29
Ritschl, Critical History, 455.
30
Ibid., 19, 21.
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According to this sweeping and novel characterization, the division between Eastern
and Western Christianity has as its substantive theological ground their mutually exclusive understandings of salvation. Justification and reconciliation are entirely absent from
the East, and Ritschl later explains that deification is opposed to the theology of the West:
“The Greek Catholic formula, that God became man in order that man might become
God . . . has remained on the whole unproductive for the Western Church.”31 Ritschl thus
assigns two distinct soteriologies to East and West, and he develops a narrative according
to which the proper, Western understanding of salvation has been progressively liberated
from the distortions it has endured throughout the history of the church. On his reading,
Eastern patristic figures have the most inadequate and immature soteriology precisely because they endorse deification and do not possess an understanding of justification and
reconciliation. Roman Catholicism progressed past the “Greek Church” by adopting the
correct soteriological categories, yet its view of salvation remains muddled in that deification lingers among various influential figures, especially the “mystics.”32
It took Luther to make a decisive step toward justification; in Ritschl’s narrative he
pushed the church to a third stage of development through an approach that fundamentally contrasts with the “mystical” model of deification described above. Against
contemporaries such as Carl Ullmann (1796-1865), who had insisted on continuity between Luther and the late-medieval German mystics who preceded him, Ritschl maintains that the Reformer dramatically broke from them concerning the human being’s
approach to God:
The problem how to get rid of one’s personal individuality, as created, in order to
attain to union with God, and absorption in His Being, is quite distinct from the
problem how to renounce one’s own merit in order to gain by confidence in Christ’s
merit a standing before God, and peace of conscience in spite of the sense of sin. .
. . The religious task of the mystic is based upon a comparison between the Creator
and the creature, metaphysically considered, and is designed to do away with the
distance that the fact of creation establishes between the two. The religious task of
the Reformer proceeds upon the moral contrast between the man who, while actually in the state of grace, is yet imperfect and sinful, on the one hand, and the lawgiver, on the other . . . .In the one case it is sought to extirpate the individuality of
man altogether; in the other case, what is desired is the maintenance of his ethical
personality in the strictest sense.33
Ritschl later claims that, when it came to deification, “Luther had no such idea in his
mind” because such a “mystical view is out of harmony with the doctrine of justification.”34 Luther had no interest whatsoever in a mystical doctrine of deification according
to which the human being is absorbed into God. To Ritschl, deification not only eliminates
the individual personality; it even more problematically seeks to overcome the distance
between creator and creation. Luther’s soteriology, by contrast, centers around retaining
one’s ethical personality and the contrast between God and the human. Even after Luther,
however, deification is not eliminated from Protestant theology. Instead, major portions of
31
Ritschl, Positive Development, 389.
Ibid., 99, 389.
33
Ritschl, Critical History, 106.
34
Ritschl, Positive Development, 99.
32
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Protestantism descend into mystical ways of thinking with Pietism, in which deification
and justification once again intermingle.
Ritschl sees his own work, then, as marking yet another, fourth stage in the history of
Christian theology (one that is vigorously opposed to Pietism). Whereas previous theologians throughout the history of the church have simply juxtaposed different soteriologies in collages of various sorts, Ritschl views himself as, for the first time, placing these
models of salvation in the necessary, logical relationship with one another.35 Ritschl famously viewed the Reformation as unfinished. He thought that the Reformers themselves did not follow through on the principles they articulated in the sixteenth century,
and he even went so far as to describe Protestantism as a “stunted growth”
(Verkümmerung) and “deformation” (Missbildung).36 Ritschl’s theological project, then,
can be understood as his attempt to finish what Luther began. The central critical goal
of this effort is the comprehensive expulsion of deification from Protestant theology.
Crucially, however, although Ritschl criticizes Baur for not seeing clearly that deification has no place in a treatment of justification and reconciliation, he nevertheless
takes from Baur what deification is in the first place. For all his effort at surmounting
Baur, then, Ritschl nevertheless remains within Baur’s definitional constraints for the
doctrine even as he attempts to surpass his former teacher. Baur’s view of deification,
furthermore, is not without its own idiosyncrasies. Specifically, I maintain that Baur’s
retrieval is itself extensively shaped by German Idealism, which leads him to mischaracterize the very aspects of the doctrine to which Ritschl objects.
This claim must be advanced with care so as to avoid falling into some well-charted
pitfalls in interpreting Baur. In the first place, although Baur was seen early in his career
as having been excessively influenced by Hegel, this assessment has been vigorously
contested in recent scholarship. A number of figures have noted that Baur arrived at
positions that happen to bear affinities with those of Hegel before he actually encountered Hegel’s works in 1831 or 1832, and they suggest that Schelling exerted more influence than previously recognized, perhaps as early as 1812.37 Some recommend viewing
Baur as broadly Idealist in his outlook rather than specifically Hegelian. Most significantly for our purposes, scholars such as Martin Wendte maintain that Baur does not in
his inquiries into the history of Christianity simply deploy an a priori concept into
which he shoehorns his findings, as he has often been accused of doing.38 Wendte instead insists that Baur, especially beginning in 1852 or 1853, pioneered a distinctive
version of Idealism that was historically informed, not overly dictated by philosophical
or theological presuppositions. And yet, although this is certainly the case for Baur’s
later work, many acknowledge that, in the period in which he composed his Versöhnung,
Hegel’s influence was at its height.39 I demonstrate below that Baur’s interpretation of
patristic figures in this work does indeed fall prey to the characterization often leveled
35
36
338.
Ritschl, Critical History, 1.
David Lotz, “Albrecht Ritschl and the Unfinished Reformation,” Harvard Theological Review 73 (1980):
37
See, for instance, Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 67-72. Schleiermacher is also a significant influence on Baur.
38
Martin Wendte, “Ferdinand Christian Baur: A Historically Informed Idealist of a Distinctive Kind,” in
Ferdinand Christian Baur and the History of Early Christianity, eds. Martin Bauspiess, Christof Landmesser, and
David Lincicum, trans. Robert F. Brown and Peter Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 67-79.
39
See Peter Hodgson, The Formation of Historical Theology: A Study of Ferdinand Christian Baur (New York:
Harper and Row, 1966), 26.
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on him as one who allows Idealist categories to determine his interpretation of those
whom he examines.
Before discussing Baur’s retrieval, however, we require an understanding of the lens
through which he views patristic versions of deification, namely, the notion of reconciliation as divine-human union developed in German Idealism.
3. Divine by Nature: Deified Humanity in German Idealism
German Idealists advance a set of ideas that, when seen in the right light, suggestively
parallel central elements of the Christian doctrine of deification,40 and in fact Idealism
appears to have sparked much modern interest in the doctrine in both Eastern and
Western Christianity.41 Although deification is most evident in Hegel’s works, the theme
is by no means absent from Schelling’s writings, and some see Fichte as also espousing
the idea.42 We begin with Hegel and then proceed to Schelling, as these two exert the
clearest and most well-documented influence on Baur.
A major theme in Hegel’s system concerns the reconciliation (Versöhnung) of finite, estranged humanity with the infinite Absolute.43 In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion,
Hegel characterizes reconciliation as the “coming to consciousness” of divine-human
union. He even depicts this union in terms that can be viewed as a philosophically reconstructed version of the exchange formula (i.e., God became human so that human beings
might become divine). As Hegel intriguingly rearticulates this idea, “The substantiality of
the unity of divine and human nature comes to consciousness for humanity in such a way
that a human being appears to consciousness as God, and God appears to it as a human being.”44
The expression “comes to consciousness” gestures toward an extraordinarily high
anthropology. To Hegel, the union of divine and human nature need only come to explicit conscious awareness because humanity and divinity have always shared the same
substantial nature, even if only implicitly at first. Hegel is not shy about his soaring
view of humanity. His 1821 lecture manuscript reads, “Humanity implicitly bears
within itself the divine idea, not bearing it within itself like something from somewhere
else but as its own substantial nature,”45 and in his 1824 lectures he holds that “divine and
human nature are not intrinsically different.”46
40
Although Vergottung, Vergöttlichung, and Gottwerdung (i.e., deification) are not typically the terms of
choice among Idealists, those figures do in remarkably bold tones speak of a divine-human union according
to which human nature is in fact divine. Most importantly for our examination, Baur sees Idealist accounts of
reconciliation and patristic versions of deification as both speaking of the same reality, namely, a union between divinity and humanity according to which human nature is in fact divine.
41
Idealism’s role in provoking Eastern retrievals of deification has been charted, as a number of studies
have outlined Schelling’s influence (and, behind him, Jacob Boehme) on Russian Orthodox figures such as
Vladimir Soloviev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Sergius Bulgakov. Curiously, however, the influence of Idealism
on interpretations of deification among modern Western figures remains untreated. For the former, Eastern
route of Idealism’s influence, see Ruth Coates, Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions,
1905-1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 77-80, 145-52.
42
Cyril O’Regan, “Reception of Eckhart in the 19th Century,” in A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed.
Jeremiah Hackett (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 654.
43
For a particularly lucid description of Hegel’s account of reconciliation, see Peter C. Hodgson, Hegel and
Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005), esp. 155-76.
44
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vols. I–III, ed. Peter C. Hodgson,
trans. R. F. Brown et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984-85), III, 312, emphasis added.
45
Ibid., 109, emphasis added.
46
Ibid., 214.
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The 1827 lectures offer a more complex formulation, but the underlying claim remains the same. Hegel begins with reflection on the antithesis between divinity and
humanity, and he explains, “That the antithesis is implicitly sublated constitutes the condition, the presupposition, the possibility that the subject should also sublate this antithesis explicitly.”47 In other words, an implicit, preexisting unity is required for the
possibility of an explicit awareness of that unity. Hegel continues, “Implicitly this antithesis is not present. Put more precisely, the antithesis arises eternally and just as eternally sublates itself; there is at the same time eternal reconciliation. That this is the truth
may be seen in the eternal, divine idea: God is the one who as living spirit distinguishes
himself from himself, posits an other and in this other remains identical with himself,
has in this other his identity with himself. This is the truth.”48 To Hegel, humanity and
divinity are united at a deep level; in fact, human nature cannot be separated from divine nature. The antithesis between the two is eternally sublated. There simply is no
mere humanity, no humanity without divinity. After all, humanity is God’s “other”
that, in spite of being other, ultimately remains identical with God. To put the point in
terms most helpful for our inquiry, to Hegel humanity has always been deified. The
only question is whether that deification is implicit or explicit.
Before describing the transition to explicit awareness, we must emphasize just how
radical is Hegel’s view of human nature. To this end, it is helpful to note that his lofty
anthropology is shaped by a range of influences, among whom Meister Eckhart and
Jacob Boehme stand out as especially significant.49 In the 1824 lectures Hegel quotes
Eckhart with approval as follows: “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with
which I see him; my eye and his eye are one and the same. . . . If God did not exist nor
would I; if I did not exist nor would he.” 50 Cyril O’Regan holds that this formulation
(and Hegel’s endorsement of it) “goes beyond anything actually sanctioned or sanctionable by the Christian mystical tradition even in its most exaggerated deification
thrust.”51 As important as Eckhart is for Hegel, a more proximate influence from the
Christian mystical tradition is Jacob Boehme, whose anthropology draws from Eckhart
and in a similar fashion transgresses the creator-creature distinction.52 With Eckhart and
47
Ibid., 310.
48
Ibid., 311. The latter portion of the quotation gestures toward the centrality of deification to Hegel’s
system, as it constitutes the resolution of God’s self-diremption into finite being. That is, God externalizes
God’s self as not-God, which ultimately returns to God and in so doing completes the process through which
God arrives at full self-understanding.
49
Cyril O’Regan ventures the following: “It could be argued that much of Hegel’s enthusiasm for Eckhart
is based upon his perception that in Eckhart one finds a religious thinker brave enough to announce not
merely commensurability between the divine and human but actual ontological identity.” Cyril O’Regan, The
Heterodox Hegel (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 254.
50
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, I, 347-48.
51
Cyril O’Regan, “Hegelian Philosophy of Religion and Eckhartian Mysticism,” in New Perspectives on
Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, ed. David Kolb (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 112.
Similarly, in The Heterodox Hegel, O’Regan maintains, “For Hegel, mystical union and mystical vision point to
a divinization so radical that the ontological difference between finite and infinite can be thought to be overcome” (254).
52
Jacob Boehme, The Way to Christ (Canterbury: G. Moreton, 1894), 55-56. O’Regan explains, “The Eckhartian
symbol of ‘spark’ (Fünklein or spinter) plays an important role in Boehme’s anthropology. It suggests that there
is an element in human being that is not ‘created,’ and that it belongs properly to the eternal rather than temporal dimension of reality.” Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 2002), 97. Hegel does signal some reservations about Boehme’s “wild and fanciful” manner of expression. Nevertheless, Hegel endorses much of the content of Boehme’s thought, including
his notion that the Trinity “must be born in the hearts of human beings,” a formulation seen as derived from
Eckhart’s Gottesgeburt, or the divine birth in the soul. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion III, 289.
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Boehme as inspirations of sorts, then, Hegel far exceeds the Christian doctrine of deification, which in its orthodox forms upholds the distinction between God and humanity.
With an understanding of Hegel’s anthropology in place, let us return to the movement from implicit to explicit divine-human union. To Hegel, the unity of divine and
human nature “comes to consciousness” through Christ, who demonstrates not just
that such a union is possible, but that it has become actual. In Hegel’s way of thinking
humanity requires certainty about the divine-human union, and this certainty cannot
be achieved through “philosophical speculation.”53 Instead, as he puts it in the 1827
lectures, “This content—the unity of divine and human nature—achieves certainty, obtaining the form of immediate sensible intuition and external existence for humankind,
so that it appears as something that has been seen in the world, something that has been
experienced . . . In order for it to become a certainty for humanity, God had to appear in
the world in the flesh.”54 The divine idea is realized concretely in Christ, who is the intuitive exhibition of divine-human unity. Hegel sums up this feature of his thought as
follows: “What has thereby [i.e., through Christ] been brought into human consciousness and made a certainty for it is the unity of divine and human nature.”55
How important is Christ, ultimately? The question pushes us into exceptionally subtle interpretive terrain, and the divergence of Hegelianism into left, right, and middle
trajectories testifies to the complexity of the issue. On the one hand, it must be said that
Christ to Hegel does not so much effect the divine-human union as exhibit it. That is,
the union of divinity and humanity is already established ontologically, as we saw
above; Christ could be said to instantiate it, but he does not bring the union about.56
Instead, Christ is a “concrete verification” of divine-human unity.57 Such verification is
required for humanity’s consciousness of its redemption, yet in the end Christ seems
simply to provoke humanity’s self-understanding such that it perceives its own true
nature. After all, the divine and human are always united, not in Christ alone, but in
humanity as a whole. David Friedrich Strauss notoriously took this line of thinking and
pressed it to the point that Christ is regarded as superfluous and even contradictory to
the idea of a union of between divinity and humanity.58
With that said, the new self-understanding should not be minimized, nor should
Christ’s role in bringing it about. To Hegel, the unity of divinity and humanity must be
exhibited in a single individual, for “in several, divinity becomes an abstraction.”59 That
is, if the coming to consciousness of the divine-human union depends on the concrete
manifestation of that union, then to Hegel’s mind it must be exhibited in a single divinehuman, since “humanity as a whole” is an abstraction that cannot be concretely presented. To Hegel, at least (if not to some of his followers), Christ is both unique and
essential.
Additionally, the “coming to consciousness” of divine-human union should by no
means be characterized as a trivial afterthought to the only thing that is actually important, namely, the implicit unity that underlies explicit awareness. Reconciliation only
53
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, III, 312.
Ibid., 313.
55
Ibid., 315.
56
Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology, 163.
57
Ibid., 159.
58
David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. George Eliot
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1972), 780.
59
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, III, 112.
54
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occurs when humanity comes to understand that it shares the same substantial nature
as divinity. Explicit awareness of divine-human union therefore constitutes the indispensable subjective component of reconciliation in Hegel’s thought. This subjective understanding is a necessary step in reconciliation becoming fully actualized.60
Many features of Hegel’s thought are anticipated by Schelling, yet key differences can
be observed, especially concerning the role of Christ and the place of the individual
human being. Before describing these points of distinction, however, we should note
that Schelling, like Hegel, reserves a central place for reconciliation, which Schelling
also sees as effected through union between God and finite being. In his On University
Studies (1803), which Baur read with great interest,61 Schelling explains, “The reconciliation of the finite which had seceded from God, a reconciliation effected by God’s birth
in the finite world, is the basic idea of Christianity.”62 Unlike Hegel, however, Schelling
explicitly holds that this birth of God is not confined to a single exemplar, but instead
occurs repeatedly, as expressed for instance in South Asian religious thought.63 In fact,
Schelling controversially contends, “The process of God’s becoming man has been
going on from all eternity. The culmination of this process is Christ’s assuming visible
human form, and for this reason it is also its beginning; starting with Christ, it has been
going on ever since—all His successors are members of one and the same body of which
He is the head.”64 Here Schelling reinterprets the “body of Christ” as the expression of
a perpetual incarnation of sorts according to which individual Christians are the deified
products of God ceaselessly becoming human.
If the individual human being appears rather grandiose in the above understanding,
such an impression is mitigated by what follows. Whereas Hegel goes to great lengths
to develop the relation of the particular vis-à-vis the universal, Schelling does not exert
comparable effort on the problem, and instead one finds a number of instances in which
the individual is simply dissolved into the Absolute. For instance, Schelling explains
that as reality is transformed into ideality through the return of the finite to the infinite,
what takes place is “an absorption of the particular in the universal.”65 Even more
strongly, in Philosophy and Religion (1804) Schelling remarks, “The ultimate goal of the
universe and its history is nothing other than the complete reconciliation with and reabsorption into the Absolute.”66 On the basis of passages such as these, scholars such as
Norbert Guterman maintain that Schelling “sacrificed . . . the concrete individual to the
world spirit.”67 Such an outcome is the cost of reconciliation.
60
It is required, moreover, not only for humanity, but also for God, as it is only in the divine-human unity
becoming actual that “God fully becomes God,” in Hodgson’s formulation. Hegel and Christian Theology, 156.
61
Baur, Versöhnung, 709.
62
F. W. J. Schelling, On University Studies, trans. E. S. Morgan (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1966),
91.
63
Ibid., 95.
64
Ibid., 94, emphasis added.
65
E. S. Morgan’s translation reads, “the particular is conceived of as absorbed in the universal.” Schelling,
On University Studies, 13. Schelling’s original German has “eine Aufnahme der Besonderheit in die
Allgemeinheit.” F. W. J. Schelling, Vorlesungen über die Methode des academischen Studium (Tübingen: J. G.
Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1803), 21.
66
F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophy and Religion (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2010), 31.
67
Norbert Guterman, “Introduction,” in On University Studies, ix-xxii, at xix.
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4. An Idealist-Inspired Retrieval: Deification According to Ferdinand Christian Baur
The deification motif in German Idealism was not lost on Baur.68 In fact, he views
Schelling and especially Hegel as working out with greater precision the understanding
of divine-human union that was inaugurated in the early church. To Baur, these issues
have “never been conceived of from a higher and more comprehensive point of view
than in the most recent time, in which philosophy and theology unite with the result
that the Christian doctrine of reconciliation . . . receives its necessary destiny.”69
Accordingly, the Versöhnung culminates in a treatment of Hegel and the critical engagement with his thought that had taken place up to 1838. For Baur the great advantage of
Hegel over Schleiermacher is that, whereas the latter limits his inquiry to the subjective
and is therefore unable to establish an objective state of affairs, Hegel offers an account
of what is objectively the case in the relationship between God and humanity.
Additionally, Hegel progresses past previous understandings of reconciliation—among
which are patristic versions of deification—in that he offers an account of subjectivity
not previously achieved. To a great extent, then, Baur views the entire history of
Christianity as a seamless garment that works out the doctrine of reconciliation with
greater and greater success. This Idealist model of a unified history that progressively
unfolds leads Baur to regard patristic figures as proto-Idealists in many respects.
In his direct engagement with Hegel, Baur emphasizes both the objective and subjective dimensions of reconciliation. To Baur, Hegel establishes in the first place that “objectively it [i.e., reconciliation] comes about by the fact that God, as God-man, enters the
world, and already thereby shows himself reconciled with the world.”70 With reconciliation already accomplished from an objective standpoint, Baur hastens to add, “But the
main thing is that it is also subjectively realized . . . religion in general, whose center is
the doctrine of reconciliation, by its nature is nothing else than the coming to consciousness of the unity of God and man.”71
As Baur moves into critical engagement with Hegel’s thought, he suggests that even
Hegel’s account of the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity can be further
refined.72 At the objective pole, Baur expresses what is an essentially Hegelian anthropology in a yet more arresting form than it takes in Hegel himself. For instance, Baur
advances a sweeping characterization of Christian thought in which he contends, “It is
an essential truth of Christian faith that the human being is divine in nature or one with
God,”73 and he later concisely adds, “In themselves all human beings are divine.”74
What follows from this understanding, according to Baur, is a relationship between
God and the individual human being that is necessarily mediated through the “species”
(Gattung). That is, the intrinsic union of God and humanity means that “the mediator
between the individual and the Absolute can only be the species to which the
68
Baur sums up a key portion of Schelling’s writings with a version of the exchange formula. He holds
that, for Schelling, “God must become human so that the human can return to God.” Baur, Versöhnung, 711.
Baur also conveys that, for Schelling, “Christ is identified as the summit of the becoming of humanity, but not
as the sole God-man; here God becoming man is eternal, Christ is regarded as an eternal Idea” (710). Baur,
then, understands that for Schelling humanity as a whole is joined to God.
69
Baur, Versöhnung, 742-43.
70
Ibid., 718.
71
Ibid.
72
Ibid., 736.
73
Ibid., 734, emphasis added.
74
Ibid., 736.
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individual belongs, the universal, under which, according to its concept, the particular
and individual must be placed.”75 God relates to humanity as a whole, and the individual is subsumed under this category. This viewpoint leads Baur to a universalized
Christology according to which what is true for Christ automatically applies to all of
humanity: “The God-man in this sense is the universal, original, archetypal man, created in the image of God.”76
Such is the objective state of affairs; what is troubling to Baur is that, if God relates to
humanity as a whole, then the human being does not experience reconciliation as an
individual, and the subjective dimension of reconciliation therefore remains incomplete.
Baur takes the issue up in the lengthy penultimate footnote of the Versöhnung, in which
he states the problem as follows: “But let us say that the species of humanity is Godhumanity (Gottmenschheit), then we have really only indicated the place where the idea
of God-humanity is to be realized. . . . The participation of the individual in the species
is not a personal, but only substantial, participation, and . . . man does not know himself
as subject in union with God.”77 If the requirement for the actualization of reconciliation
is conscious awareness of union with God, then substantial union alone does not suffice. What is needed is “the certainty on the part of human consciousness, that even the
atomic individuality of subjectivity does not absolutely separate man from God, but
that, on the contrary, this highest peak of finitude is recognized and preserved in divine
life. Only personal unity has an absolutely reconciling power.”78 For the remainder of
the footnote, Baur explores further the model of personal unity required for reconciliation, often oscillating between a treatment of individuality and a discussion of universal
human nature (or, more precisely, “God-humanity”). Throughout his treatment, however, one detects an inexorable pull on the individual exerted by the species, and Baur
ends his study on the surprisingly unresolved note that the solution to the problem he
has so painstakingly outlined remains to be satisfactorily achieved.
If even Hegel and those in his wake have not fully met the challenge of successfully
relating objective and subjective dimensions of reconciliation, then it will come as no
surprise that Baur views the early church as not achieving resolution on these intricate
soteriological problems. Although Baur assesses patristic versions of deification positively, he ultimately views as incomplete those efforts at articulating divine-human
union. They do have value in that they move understanding forward (in this regard
Baur differs from Ritschl), but they stop well short of a satisfactory treatment. And yet,
the Idealist lens through which Baur views deification leads him to distort central features of its patristic expressions.
The shaping presence of Idealism on Baur’s retrieval can be observed at a formal
level through his pervasive use of its terminology. For instance, he describes patristic
views of deification as the joining of “the finite with the Absolute,” he explains that the
doctrine of deification requires a “dialectical process,” “dialectical movement,” and “dialectical development,” and he even portrays divine and human nature as existing in a
“sublated union.”79 Idealist categories are constantly at work in Baur’s interpretation of
75
Ibid., 734.
Ibid. In this regard Baur aligns with Strauss, and in fact Baur is typically seen as having inspired
Strauss’s more widely known expression of this view. See Zachhuber, “Albrecht Ritschl and the Tübingen
School,” 64.
77
Ibid., 737-38, n. 1.
78
Ibid., 738, n. 1.
79
Ibid., 107-11.
76
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ancient church figures. One recalls the remark of Baur’s student Otto Pfleiderer: “We
are not told what the real meaning of the Fathers was—for their opinions are always
translated into the language of Hegel.”80
More substantively, underlying the terminology of Idealism is an interpretation of
patristic figures that displays unmistakable signs of Hegel’s influence, and Schelling’s
presence can also be detected. One sees Hegel at work in Baur’s description of Irenaeus’s
view of reconciliation. Baur explains that, for Irenaeus, “Humanity is thus, as it were,
the God-man himself, and the idea of the God-man realized in Christ through the
Incarnation of God is actually only the unity of the divine and the human that has come
to consciousness through Christ and is in itself present.”81 In close keeping with Hegel’s
model of reconciliation, Baur suggests that the central development in deification for
Irenaeus is not in fact reuniting that which was separated (i.e., the divine and the
human). Instead, according to Baur’s reinterpretation, humanity and divinity have always been united, and the idea of the Incarnation is simply that fact “coming to consciousness” and achieving explicit expression.
The influence of Hegel becomes even clearer as Baur moves to fourth- and fifthcentury versions of deification. In this portion of his study Baur depicts both the objective unity of divine and human nature and the subjective “coming to consciousness”
that reconciliation requires. He periodically steps back from treating particular figures
such as Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa,
Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, and Leo the Great in order to characterize the period’s
soteriology in broad brushstrokes. According to Baur, in the fourth and fifth centuries
there is a “general point of view” that claims “that the human being is already reconciled with God through the Incarnation of God in Christ and the unity of the divine and
human that has thereby come to consciousness.”82 As in Baur’s treatment of Irenaeus,
the primary work of Christ appears to be merely bringing divine-human unity to consciousness, not actually joining separate divine and human natures.
The pre-existent unity of divine and human nature becomes yet more apparent in
Baur’s use of Augustine, and the phrase “comes to consciousness” once again figures
prominently in Baur’s portrayal. After quoting a passage in De vera religione that describes Christ, Baur remarks, “In him the dignity of human nature, i.e. the unity of humanity with God, came to consciousness in a concrete way.” 83 Baur subtly suggests that
the divine and the human are already joined through his interpretive decision to elevate
the “dignity” of human nature such that it is equivalent to humanity being united with
God. Simply to be human is to be divine-human. Christ only concretizes this idea and
brings it into explicit awareness.84
Baur most overtly declares that humanity and divinity share the same nature when
describing the “mystical” character of the period’s models of deification. He conveys
the central features of such an understanding as follows: “The essence of the mystical
consists in the fact that the unity of the divine and the human . . . is conceived as an
80
Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant and Its Progress in Great Britain since
1825 (London: S. Sonnenschein & Co.; New York: Macmillan & Co., 1890), 286.
81
Baur, Versöhnung, 42-43, emphasis added.
82
Ibid., 109-10. Baur later adds that the death of Christ performs an important function in uniting humanity to God.
83
Ibid., 110, n. 1.
84
He continues, “Therefore, the more one became aware of this oneness of humanity with God in Christ
. . . the more one became aware of the reality of reconciliation.” Ibid., 110, n. 1.
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inner and essential (wesentlich) one, already determined in itself before every temporal
appearance.”85 According to this view, there is in fact no opposition between divinity
and humanity; they exist in an essential union that has already been determined prior
to being worked out in time. Baur expounds on this unity in a passage thick with
Hegelian categories. He explains that the mystical view of reconciliation can be found
among those “who seek to place the two natures in the person of Christ in as inner and
organic a relationship as possible, so that they regard the two natures as two related
principles that, although they constitute an antithesis, it is only one that also includes
the unity that sublates the antithesis.”86 This passage closely follows Hegel’s conception
of the eternal sublation of antitheses in the union of divine and human nature, as examined above. Baur takes this interpretive grid and imposes it on the thought of the early
church, in which he claims that divine and human nature are conceived as standing
from eternity in a union that sublates the antitheses between humanity and divinity.
Although Christ brings the essential union of divinity and humanity to consciousness, Baur views the process as unfinished in the patristic period because its theologians could not sufficiently develop the subjective dimension of reconciliation. To Baur,
the entire age was “not yet able . . . to follow the dialectical movement of the selfcommunicating concept.”87 Patristic figures were aware of “the fact of reconciliation as
an objective truth given by Christianity,” but they were limited in that they could only
“think again and again of the particular . . . as the universal.”88 Because of the unresolved and undeveloped model of the particular in relation to the universal, patristic
theologians could not help but “regard the doctrine of reconciliation as already contained in the doctrine of the person of Christ and identical with it.”89 On this reading,
when patristic theologians claimed that Christ’s humanity is deified, their insufficient
model of the particular led them to claim that all human beings are automatically deified as well.
Instructive on this point is the portion of Baur’s treatment that immediately precedes
his reprise of Athanasius’s exchange formula. Baur explains, “The relationship in which
the human stands to the divine in the person of Christ extends to humanity as a whole,
and humanity as a whole asserts the same (dieselbe) relation to the divine.”90 Remarkably,
Baur here claims that for Athanasius humanity as a whole has “the same” relation to
divinity as does Christ’s humanity. Along similar lines, in describing the view of
Gregory of Nyssa, Baur claims, “What is true for one [i.e., Christ] must also be true for
all others.”91 It is curious, to say the least, that in his reading of patristic figures Baur
does not describe any difference at all between the humanity of Christ and the rest of
85
Ibid., 111.
Ibid.
87
Ibid. The organization of the Versöhnung reflects this characterization: Baur divides the Christian teaching on reconciliation into three stages, and patristic versions of deification fall within the first period, which
he describes as the “Standpoint of Unmediated Objectivity” (ix). It is not until the Reformation that the church
enters the “Transition from the Standpoint of Unmediated Objectivity to the Standpoint of Subjectivity” (xiii),
after which Kant begins the “Standpoint of Objectivity Mediated through Subjectivity” (xvii). The patristic
doctrine of deification, on this (highly schematized) model, falls firmly within the “objective” period of
Christian teaching on reconciliation.
88
Ibid., 109.
89
Ibid. Similarly, in a later summary of patristic teaching on deification, Baur makes clear that, “In Jesus,
the Logos has united himself not simply with individual human beings, but instead with the substance of
human nature, with humankind itself, in the most intimate and inseparable way” (118).
90
Ibid., 111.
91
Ibid., 113.
86
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humanity. Baur’s account does not include, for instance, a distinction often made in
discussions of deification, namely, that although Christ is divine by nature, human beings participate in divinity by grace. Instead, Baur’s reading of patristic figures strongly
suggests that there is no meaningful distinction between Christ’s humanity and ours.
Both are deified on the basis of their nature. The fact that Christ’s humanity and ours
share the same nature guarantees that divinity will be mediated to all of humankind.
According to Baur, then, patristic figures did not have adequate resources to think of
the role of the individual human being in the process of deification, and as a result they
simply claimed that the union that occurs in Christ extends mechanically to humanity
as a whole, with no role for the individual human being to play. I suggest that it is precisely in this interpretation of patristic figures that one finds the origins of Ritschl’s
charge that deification is a “chemical process of nature,” which itself influences
Harnack’s view that deification is a “physical” doctrine of salvation.92
Baur’s further remarks in this section of the Versöhnung indicate that the place of the
individual human being is even more tenuous than described thus far. In his treatment
of Gregory of Nyssa, he explains, “Through the incarnation of the Word a higher spiritual principle has been conveyed to humanity, and through it humanity has been absorbed into the divine.”93 Later he suggests that individuality itself disappears as union
between the divine and human occurs. He claims that, in Christ, “every individual is
absorbed into the unity of the divine and the human.”94 Baur also holds that, as the
human being is “penetrated by the divine principle of life . . . the mortal is swallowed
up by the immortal.”95 Baur’s formulations are reminiscent of Schelling’s model in
which the particular is absorbed into the universal, and one cannot help but wonder if
the individual human being persists at all as he or she is deified.96 Given Baur’s insistence that patristic thought in general has great difficulty in conceiving of the particular
in relation to the universal, it is highly plausible that he envisions a patristic model of
deification in which the individual human being simply dissolves into divinity.97
Under the palpable influence of German Idealism, then, Baur portrays patristic versions of deification in a number of curious and ultimately misleading ways. First, Baur
claims that patristic figures view divine and human nature as standing in an eternal, essential union with one another. According to this interpretation, the divine and human
92
Somewhat strangely, and in ostensible tension with his claim that patristic figures view reconciliation as
mechanically accomplished through Christ’s deification of humanity as a whole, Baur indicates that an emphasis on subjective awareness was developed to some extent within patristic models. And yet, his depiction
of the patristic understanding of this subjective dimension is profoundly limited. He holds that, for patristic
figures, “Man is reconciled with God when he is penetrated by the divine principle of life, which was communicated to humanity by Christ, when he knows that the mortal is swallowed up by the immortal in himself, or when the sensual, the God-resisting in him is subjected to the divine” (115). Ultimately, Baur’s treatment only furthers the concern that the individual human being does not actually have much of a role at all
in the process of deification.
93
Baur, Versöhnung, 113.
94
Ibid., 115.
95
Ibid.
96
Baur’s preferred term for the relation of the human to the divine throughout his patristic treatment of
deification is aufnehmen, which admits of a wide range of English translations. Possible renderings include to
“take up” or “take in;” in the present context “absorb” is warranted. On this terminological point, it is significant that Schelling uses the very same term in his description of the absorption of the particular in the universal. Cf. ibid., n.65.
97
Both Hodgson and Zachhuber maintain that Baur does not sufficiently preserve the place of the particular in relation to the whole. See Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology, 139; Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as
Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 66.
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do not exist as two distinct natures, but as a single “God-humanity.” Second, a direct
consequence of the claim of substantial union between the divine and human is the
view that deification entails an automatic extension of divinity to humanity as a whole,
with no role for the individual or the will in deification. Third, Baur’s tendency toward
mechanical inclusion of humanity in divinity reaches its most extreme expression in his
interpretation of patristic figures as holding that the individual human being is simply
absorbed into God.
5. Correcting Baur: The Patristic Evidence
How else might Baur have portrayed deification? Why, indeed, does this study depict
him as mischaracterizing the doctrine? It could be the case that German Idealism simply
alerted Baur to certain tendencies in patristic versions of deification that can be found
in the texts of those figures themselves.
Such is in fact not the case. Instead, Baur’s depiction remains deeply incomplete and
misleading. Although space constraints preclude a comprehensive treatment of deification among patristic figures, we can briefly demonstrate by reference to both key
patristic texts and scholarly treatments of those figures that Baur misrepresents their
understandings of the doctrine. In particular, Baur neglects major strands of the doctrine that (1) uphold the distinction between God and human beings, (2) resist the mechanical, automatic deification of humanity as a whole, in part by explicitly maintaining
a role for the will of the individual human being, and (3) guard against the dissolution
of the human being into God.
Upholding the distinction between God and humanity stands out as a predominant
concern for many of the exponents of deification whom Baur treats. Although the doctrine’s arresting terminology runs the perpetual danger of being understood in too elevated a sense, precisely for this reason do these figures go to great lengths to articulate
what being “deified” does—and does not—mean. Irenaeus, for instance, clearly holds
that when human beings are called “gods” in scripture (Psalm 82:6), the Bible does not
“declare them as gods in every sense, but with a certain addition or signification, by
which they are shown to be no gods at all.”98 Similarly, he insists that the immortality of
the soul is granted by God’s grace, and that it is not within the nature of humanity to be
immortal.
Even more emphatic is Athanasius, who as Norman Russell observes responds to the
biblical notion that human beings are “gods” by clarifying, “But if some have been
called gods, they are not so by nature, but by participation.”99 Again and again, in fact,
Athanasius insists that human beings are not divine by nature: “We cannot become like
God in essence;”100 “We are called gods, not like the true God or His Logos, but just as
God has wanted, who has given this grace to us.”101 Athanasius repeatedly insists that
98
Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 3.6.3; ET in Carl Mosser, “The Earliest Patristic Interpretations of Psalm 82,
Jewish Antecedents, and the Origin of Christian Deification,” Journal of Theological Studies 56 (2005): 70.
99
Athanasius, Ep. Serap. II.4. ET in Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 181.
100
Athanasius, Ad afros epistola synodica, 7. In Select Writings and Letters of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria,
ed. Archibald Robertson, NPNF, second series, vol. 4 (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1892; reprint,
Edinburgh, 1987), 492.
101
Athanasius, Or. c. Ar. III.19; ET in Jules Gross, The Divinization of the Christian according to the Greek
Fathers, trans. Paul A. Onica (Anaheim, CA: Affirmation and Critique Press, 2002), 172-73.
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human beings are fundamentally different in nature from God, and he will not accommodate any bridging of that crucial ontological divide.
Along similar lines, Donald Fairbairn points his reader to Cyril of Alexandria’s
Commentary on John, in which Cyril guards against misunderstanding the sense in which
human beings can be called gods: “Shall we depose the Word of God from his very
sonship and sit in place of him with the Father? . . . May it never be! Rather, the Son will
remain unchangeably in that condition in which he is, but we, adopted into sonship and
gods by grace, shall not be ignorant of what we are.”102 To Cyril, we are not “sons” by
nature; instead we are adopted into sonship by God’s grace.
Augustine, too, spends enormous effort in articulating the fundamental difference
between God and the world, and his anthropology abides by the distinction. When
Augustine speaks of deification, he makes clear that we are not divine by nature: “Only
the Son of God [is] God. . . . The rest that are made gods are made by his own grace, are
not born of his substance, that they should be the same as he, but that by favour they
should come to him, and be fellow heirs with Christ.”103
In clear opposition to Baur’s depiction of a single divine-human nature, then, patristic figures emphatically and repeatedly maintain that humanity does not stand in
a substantial union with God. To these theologians of the early church, human beings
are not divine by nature. Instead, the doctrine of deification entails our participation
in divinity through God’s grace, an incorporation often depicted as our adoption as
children of God.
The second aspect of Baur’s mischaracterization requires a subtle response. One
might be inclined to argue that the church fathers’ own Platonism, and not Baur’s
German Idealism, gives rise to the characterization of patristic figures as advocating
an automatic deification of all humanity that unavoidably follows from Christ’s deified
human nature. To be sure, Platonic categories play a role in many patristic versions of
deification. However, major patristic theologians clearly hold that Christ’s deified humanity does not simply extend to us mechanically and result in our unthinking deification. Instead, those figures maintain that the deification of the particular human being
depends on a number of factors, among which is the moral striving of the individual.
In the late nineteenth century, Hermann Sträter suggested that Athanasius understands deification as consisting of an “ethical” dimension, and a substantial body of
scholarship has since drawn attention to this feature of Athanasius’s thought.104 A number of Athanasian texts uphold the significance of moral striving for deification, perhaps most clearly his Festal Letters. In those writings, as K. E. Norman observes,
Athanasius instructs with the following words: “Let us cleanse our hands, let us purify
the body. Let us keep our whole mind from guile . . . occupying ourselves entirely with
our Lord, and with divine doctrines, so that, being altogether pure, we may be able to
partake of the Logos.”105 To Athanasius, participating in the Word depends upon the
ability of the individual Christian to keep him- or herself pure. Along similar lines,
Jeffrey Finch draws attention to a portion of the Festal Letters in which Athanasius discusses the will: “Our will ought to keep pace with the grace of God, and not fall short;
102
Com. Johan. 1.9; ET in Donald Fairbairn, “Patristic Soteriology: Three Trajectories,” Journal of the
Evangelical Theological Society 50, no. 2 (June 2007): 306.
103
Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, 49.2; ET in Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 331.
104
Hermann Sträter, Die Erlösungslehre des hl. Athanasius (Freiburg: Herder, 1894), 11.
105
Ep. Fest. 6.5; ET in K. E. Norman, “Deification: The Content of Athanasian Soteriology” Ph.D. dissertation (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1980), 116.
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lest while our will remains idle, the grace given us should begin to depart.”106 Contrary
to Baur’s characterization of deification, Athanasius views continual human effort as
indispensable to sustaining union with the Word. To Athanasius, then, Christ’s deified
human nature establishes the possibility of our deification, but each individual must
appropriate the divine life through ethical formation.
Similar emphases on the ethical and sacramental aspects of deification can be found
in figures such as Irenaeus,107 Origen,108 and Cyril of Alexandria.109 Even Gregory of
Nyssa, who is sometimes cast as standing at the apex of the “mystical” trajectory of the
doctrine,110 has been characterized as not in fact holding a “physical” view of salvation,
most notably by Reinhard Hübner.111
Concerning the question of the will, it is unfortunate and somewhat odd that Baur
does not in the Versöhnung make use of Maximus the Confessor in his effort at developing the subjective dimension of reconciliation. Maximus famously defends the human
will of Christ against the Monothelite view that Christ had only a divine will.
Correlatively, when he treats deification he explicitly retains an integral place for the
will of the individual human being. Elena Vishnevskaya has recently demonstrated that
Maximus views God and the human being as reciprocally responsible for deification.
Maximus clearly states, “Our salvation is contingent upon our will,”112 and in his
Ambigua he maintains, “Deification by grace [could not occur] without first being born
by the Spirit in the exercise of free choice, because of the power of self-movement and
self-determination inherent in human nature.”113 Importantly, too, for Maximus the
human being does not simply offer a one-time assent, thereafter becoming passive as
deification occurs. Instead, deification requires continual effort on the part of the human
being.
Crucially, too, Maximus was far from an obscure Byzantine figure in the early nineteenth century. He was in fact known among contemporaries of Baur such as Augustus
Neander (1789-1850), with whose work Baur was intensely occupied throughout his
career.114 In his six-volume General History of the Christian Religion and Church (1825106
Ep. Fest. 3.3; ET in Jeffrey Finch, “Athanasius on the Deifying Work of the Redeemer,” in Theōsis:
Deification in Christian Theology, eds. Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov (Eugene, OR: Pickwick
Publications, 2006), 104-21, at 111.
107
K. E. Norman notes that for Irenaeus “deification is not automatic; man is required to attain moral
perfection in this life through imitation of Christ” (Ad. Haer. 5.7.2.; Norman, Deification, 57).
108
Origen of Alexandria, De Principiis IV, 4, 9. ET: On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (London:
SPCK, 1936), 326.
109
Fairbairn has charted what he calls a “personal trajectory” that begins with Irenaeus’s view that deification is first and foremost the communion with God that human beings are offered through adoption as sons
and daughters. This personal aspect is developed by Athanasius and Cyril.
110
See, for instance, Wilhelm Herrmann, Gregorii Nysseni Sententiae de Salute Adipiscenda (Halis Saxonum:
Karrasian, 1875). I am grateful to Carl Mosser for calling my attention to this work. It should be noted that
Herrmann is influenced by Baur for his characterization. See esp. pages 27-30.
111
Reinhard M. Hübner, Die Einheit des Leibes Christi bei Gregor von Nyssa. Untersuchungen zum Ursprung der
“physischen” Erlösungslehre (Leiden: Brill, 1974).
112
Liber ascetic. 42. ET in Elena Vishnevskaya, “Divinization and Spiritual Progress in Maximus the
Confessor,” in Theōsis: Deification in Christian Theology, 135.
113
Amb. 42. ET in Vishnevskaya, “Divinization and Spiritual Progress in Maximus,” 135.
114
Baur was positively disposed to Neander early in his career, but during the 1830s he became more
critical. See Baur’s letter to L. F. Heyd, July 10, 1840 (U.B.T., Md 619r, 26), in Hodgson, The Formation of
Historical Theology, 159. On this point, it is not insignificant that Neander resisted the Hegelianizing trend in
German historical theology in the mid-nineteenth century, opting instead for what he saw as a more
empirically-based approach.
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1836), Neander treats Maximus’s model of deification, and he describes Maximus’s opposition to Monothelitism along lines directly related to our inquiry:
Many among the Monothelites supposed the final result of the perfect development of the divine life in believers would be in them, as in the case of Christ, a total
absorption of the human will in God’s will; so that in all there would be a subjective
as well as objective identity of will, which, consistently carried out, would lead to
the pantheistic notion of an entire absorption of all individuality of existence in the
one original spirit. Maximus well understood this, and contended earnestly against
the notion. He maintained that . . . the subjective difference would ever remain, the
difference, namely, between the will in God, which works salvation, and the will of
those who receive it from him.115
Neander addresses with remarkable precision the very issue at hand, and his treatment
demonstrates that a different version of deification was on offer in the early nineteenth
century—one that unambiguously preserves a place for the will of the individual human
being in the process of salvation. And yet, Baur neglected this model of deification in the
Versöhnung, and as a result the misperception of deification as an automatic subsuming of
the human within the divine gained purchase among modern scholars.
Concerning the third aspect of Baur’s mischaracterization of deification, namely, the
absorption of the individual into God, it should be said that the possibility of total absorption is assiduously denied from an early point in the history of the doctrine. In the
first place, the above treatment of the ethical dimension of deification guards against
such an interpretation. (After all, exerting one’s will typically involves a situation in
which one’s individuality is retained.) Additionally, often through the language of participation, patristic advocates of deification insist that their understanding of the doctrine does not involve an obliteration of the self, and they instead explicitly maintain
that a distinction remains between the individual and God. Origen, for instance, holds
in On First Principles that participation in God grants the human being a share in immortality and incorruptibility, which results in the ongoing integrity of the individual
human soul as it partakes of the divine.116 The doctrine of deification, then, can be disentangled from a mysticism of radical, absorptive union, and in fact early Christian
theologians exerted considerable effort in making just such a distinction.
Another major element of the doctrine of deification, one that works against both a
“physical” understanding and the absorption possibility, concerns the centrality of the
term “children of God” for the doctrine. Patristic figures make frequent use of Psalm
82:6, along with the Pauline language of adoption and Johannine models of birth “from
above” in order to claim that being “deified” involves standing in a filial relation to God
the Father. This filial dimension of deification retains a place for the individual human
being, and it also suggests that the will has an ongoing role as one is drawn more deeply
into the divine life.
With a sense of the other versions of deification that lay before Baur as he conducted
his retrieval, we can clearly see that he puts forward a highly questionable portrait of the
doctrine. Other models of deification—which had the benefit of textual support—were
available to him, both in the patristic materials themselves and among contemporaries
115
Augustus Neander, General History of the Christian Religion and Church, vol. 3 (Boston: Crocker and
Brewster, 1856), 183.
116
Origen of Alexandria, De Principiis IV, 4, 9. ET: 326.
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such as Neander. And yet, Baur chose to depict deification in a manner that cannot actually be supported by reference to the writings of patristic figures. The explanation for
this curious, unsustainable interpretation is most plausibly located in the influence of
German Idealism on his retrieval.
6. Correcting Ritschl: Deification, Justification, and the West
Baur’s retrieval of deification decisively shapes the history of scholarship on the doctrine, as Ritschl views deification through Baur, and in so doing mischaracterizes the
doctrine for generations of scholars in his wake. Most notorious is Ritschl’s claim that
deification is a “chemical process of nature,” with which comes the inaccurate view
that deification necessarily replaces the individual will with a mechanistic soteriology.
Ritschl also appears to borrow from Baur the notion that deification elides the distinction between God and creation, and we see in Ritschl’s wholesale identification of deification with radical mystic union that he mistakenly views the doctrine as involving the
absorption of the self into the ocean of the absolute.
As much as Ritschl simply replicates aspects of Baur’s view of deification, he makes
his own distinctive contributions to the modern misconstruction of the doctrine. Two
items stand out as particularly untenable. First, Ritschl claims that deification is Eastern
and justification Western. Oddly, however, Ritschl blurs his own sharp geographical
delineation by acknowledging that deification appears in the West—repeatedly, as it
turns out. Ritschl discloses that deification can be found among Western medieval figures and Pietists, and he even concedes that Luther betrays an “echo” of deification in
his hymn, Vom Himmel kam der Engel Schaar.117 Ritschl’s initially clean division between
East and West is therefore troubled by Ritschl himself, and the picture of deification that
emerges from the pages of his study is not a doctrine that can be comfortably confined
to the Christian East. Instead, Ritschl depicts deification as a view of salvation with remarkable staying power and ubiquity, as it perennially recurs throughout the history of
Christianity. During the past few decades a number of studies have confirmed just how
widespread deification is throughout the West, as dozens of major Western theologians
have been shown to advocate the doctrine.118
Although Ritschl’s geographical demarcation has been exceptionally influential, it is
but a consequence of the theological claim on which the distinction between East and
West relies, namely, that deification and justification are mutually exclusive soteriological options. However, Ritschl’s stance itself depends on the inaccurate understanding
that he receives from Baur, namely, that deification is a mechanical extension of divinity
into humanity that eliminates the will. Furthermore, although the intricacies of the relationship between justification and deification cannot be examined in detail here, we can
demonstrate that Ritschl’s position is confronted by a number of figures who view deification and justification as intimately related to one another. Most clearly and succinctly, Augustine straightforwardly claims, “He who justifies is the same who deifies
because by justifying he made [human persons] into children of God. . . . If we are made
God’s children, we are made gods: but this is through the grace of the one who adopts
and not through the nature of the one who begets.”119 To Augustine, deification is the
117
Ritschl, Positive Development, 389.
See n. 3 above for a list of relevant works.
119
Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, 33-50, 381.
118
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direct result of justification; to be justified is to be deified. The two understandings do
not compete with one another. Instead, they cohere in a unified soteriological vision.
Cyril of Alexandria, too, according to Daniel Keating, incorporates deification and justification: “Properly speaking, Christ in us—through his Spirit and life-giving flesh—is
the source and ground of our divinization, accomplishing our justification, our sanctification, our divine filiation, and our participation in the divine nature.”120 Along similar
lines, Edith Humphrey has recently drawn attention to John Chrysostom’s emphasis on
both justification and deification.121 Thomas Aquinas also views deification and justification as intimately related to each other, as Keating has elsewhere demonstrated.122
Bonaventure, too, puts forward a vision of salvation that, in the words of Christopher
Cullen, “while consisting in the grace of justification, also involves being made Godlike.”123 The precise relationship between justification and deification varies among
these figures, to be sure, but they do not view the two as mutually exclusive possibilities
for understanding salvation. In fact, in a number of cases the two ideas are inextricably
intertwined with one another, as justification brings with it incorporation into the divine life.124
Remarkably, however, to Ritschl the fact that major Christian theologians have endorsed both justification and deification is not evidence that the two doctrines stand in
harmony with one another. Ultimately, despite the number of figures in the West who
view deification and justification as related to one another, Ritschl explains away these
persistent features of the history of Christian theology by simply claiming that all figures before him have been muddled in their thinking. They have not achieved a “selfconsistent arrangement,” in Ritschl’s estimation.125 This assessment, as we have seen,
problematically relies on the questionable definition of deification that Ritschl receives
from Baur, namely, as a doctrine with no place for the will. When this misunderstanding
is eliminated, concord can be achieved between the two doctrines.
As a final remark, I would suggest that as much as Ritschl objects to deification as he
understands it, he ironically places a major strand of the doctrine at the very center of
his theology. Without calling it deification, and in fact after stripping it of its “mystical”
and metaphysical features, Ritschl situates our adopted status as children of God at the
heart of his model of justification. The following from his Instruction in the Christian
Religion is striking: “In adoption (acceptance as children of God) the gracious purpose
of the judgment of forgiveness or justification is put into effect, so that God confronts
the believer as a father and gives him the right to the full confidence of a child.”126 To
Ritschl, adoption entails acceptance, which is precisely what justification establishes for
the individual Christian. Ritschl ostensibly rejects deification, then, yet he actually
120
Daniel A. Keating, The Appropriation of Divine Life in Cyril of Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 193.
121
Edith Humphrey, “Orthodox Christian Reception of the Pauline Teaching on Dikaiosynē: Chrysostom,
in Conversation with Calvin, on Romans 1-3,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 20, no. 2 (April 2018):
267-84.
122
Daniel A. Keating, “Justification, Sanctification and Divinization in Thomas Aquinas,” in Aquinas on
Doctrine: A Critical Introduction, eds. Thomas Weinandy, Daniel A. Keating, and John Yocum (London and
New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 139-58.
123
Christopher Cullen, Bonaventure (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 156.
124
Roland Chia, “Salvation as Justification and Deification,” Scottish Journal of Theology 64 (2011): 125-39.
125
Ritschl, Critical History, 1.
126
Albrecht Ritschl, “Instruction in the Christian Religion,” in Three Essays: Theology and Metaphysics,
“Prolegomena” to The History of Pietism, Instruction in the Christian Religion, trans. Philip Hefner (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press, 1972), 237.
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sanctions a central component of the doctrine by emphasizing the filial status of the
human being in relation to God. Ultimately, then, Ritschl does not in fact comprehensively eliminate deification from Protestant theology once and for all, as he intends, but
instead allows traces of the doctrine to endure in his own theology.
7. Conclusion
A proper understanding of deification requires shedding to a great extent the hermeneutical lens that has been used since the nineteenth century to examine the doctrine.
That interpretive approach, as this study has argued, arises through the influence of
German Idealism on Ferdinand Christian Baur, whose retrieval of deification fundamentally determines the understanding of the doctrine held by Albrecht Ritschl and
those in his school. This Liberal Protestant characterization, in turn, decisively shapes
the view of the doctrine held by twentieth-century Orthodox theologians, who overturn
the negative assessment of the doctrine advanced by the Ritschlian school yet ultimately
reinforce the deeper claim that deification does not fit within Western soteriologies.
Ultimately, then, it is Baur’s Idealist-inspired retrieval that lies at the root of the widely
held perception of deification as an exclusively Eastern doctrine that precludes justification, mechanically divinizes human nature as a whole, bridges the creator-creature distinction, and absorbs the individual human being into God. As we have seen, however,
these characterizations do not in fact follow from rigorous scrutiny of ancient Christian
figures. Instead, they arise under particular historical conditions that ultimately distort
perceptions of the doctrine in the modern period. Deification to patristic figures is not
exclusively Eastern, it does not preclude justification, it is not a “physical” doctrine of
salvation, it does not disregard the distinction between God and creatures, and it does
not dissolve the individuality of the human being. Having established an account of the
trajectory through which these misunderstandings have arisen, this study equips future
examinations of deification to avoid the misperceptions of the doctrine that have been
prevalent in the modern period.
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd