Pauline Soteriology: Theosis or Deification (Part II: M. David Litwa)

"Today, biblical scholarship on deification is more or less dominated by theological discourse and presuppositions.  In this climate, it is tempting to simply focus on Christian forms of deification when treating Paul.  I am convinced, however, that scholars will never understand Paul and deification until they open themselves up to honest historical inquiry about other, larger discourses of deification in the Greco-Roman world.  ...If we are going to achieve a truly historical understanding of deification in the Greco-Roman world (including Christian deification), it seems to me that scholars need to be more sympathetic to ancient forms of thought.  In modern theology, the very way we think about humans and God(s) tends to preclude deification.  ...In this study I try--as best I can--to peer behind centuries of Christian theological discourse about deification.  But the road is hard.  Some of the texts are scattered and unfamiliar.  My argument requires deep and sympathetic listening to Greco-Roman sources and the careful reconstruction of ancient modes of thought.  ...The best reader of this study is the one who will bracket later theological distinctions (e.g., the essence/energies distinction, synergy vs. sola gratia, 'natural' vs. adoptive sonship) in an effort to look at the evidence afresh and with an open mind.  Every author desires such readers, but the controversial nature of this study requires that I must ask for them" (vii-viii).

Already in the preface to his book M. David Litwa announces the difference between his approach to deification in Paul's soteriology and what he takes as the more common approach to deification in biblical scholarship.  Litwa takes a comparative, history of religions approach to the question and deliberately brackets questions raised by later theological discourse in order to understand Paul's language of deification in his historical context.  Methodologically, then, Litwa is a child of the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment every bit as much as was F. C. Baur or Adolf von Harnack, and his study represents the continuing value of historical-critical study of early Christianity.  As with the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule Litwa undertakes to explore deification as a soteriological category for Paul not as he was later understood and employed in the Christian doctrine of theosis, but as he might have been understood in the context of the ancient Jewish and Hellenistic world of which he was a part.

Pauline Soteriology: Theosis or Deification (Part I: Ben Blackwell)

As I was entering the Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity program at the University of Virginia, I was told another entering student would be working on theosis or deification in Paul, and I thought, "That's weird."  I hope I can be forgiven such a dismissive reaction, since my interest in Paul at the time was mostly to do with the so-called apocalyptic Paul.  In Joseph Kitagawa's foreword to Peter Brown's Haskell Lectures (The Cult of the Saints), he observes, "A number of graduate students remarked to me that at the beginning of the five lectures, they had no interest in the cult of the saints at all; by their conclusion, they had more interest in that subject than in their own area of research!" (x).  I have occasionally felt the same about the work of my colleague at UVa, David Litwa.  I have already mentioned that his book, We Are Being Transformed:  Deification in Paul's Soteriology (BZNW 187; Goettingen: de Gruyter), came out earlier this year.  His intensity and tenacity in exploring the theme of deification in the ancient world and Paul is contagious.  As it turns out, though, David has not been the only one thinking along such lines.  Ben Blackwell's revised Durham dissertation, Christosis (WUNT II, vol. 314; Tuebingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011) also takes up the theme.  Indeed, there have been a few hints toward the question by Michael Gorman and Stephen Finlan, but these two volumes by Blackwell and Litwa represent the first two detailed discussions of theosis/deification as a Pauline soteriological model. One could not ask for more different approaches.  Blackwell suggests that there are two open paths for investigating the theme of theosis in Paul:  one can approach the subject either through history of religions or through history of interpretation.  Surely there are other approaches as well, but this simple schema highlights precisely the difference between Litwa and Blackwell.  In this post, and in one or two following, I will be reviewing Blackwell and Litwa, and I will offer some concluding thoughts.  Those who know my online style know that I can come off as hyper-critical.  To my mind, one of the highest compliments one can pay to an author is sharp criticism.  I trust that those under review will so take the following remarks.

David Litwa on Deification in Paul

A belated congratulations to my friend and colleague, David Litwa on the publication of his book. I read parts while it was in progress, and it is a very learned volume. Litwa's approach is certainly more historical than most approaches to deification, but precisely therein lies its value. If you are interested in Paul, I recommend you read it. I will try to post a review in the near future.

De Lubac on Platonism and Stoicism in the Bible and the Fathers

"It is a commonplace to allude to the Platonism of the Fathers in connexion with these doctrines [of the cosmic body]. But instead of invoking the Platonic doctrine of essential being, we should do better to account for them--to the extent that they are dependent at all on a philosophic basis--by looking rather to the Stoic conception of universal being. There are many expressions in Marcus Aurelius, for example, regarding the integration of the individual in the concrete totality of the cosmos, and still more concerning the reciprocal immanence of those who are participators in the Nous. But all this is of secondary importance, and we should beware of adopting the practice known in accountancy as double-entry, as so many Protestant historians do in dealing with the Fathers and the Bible. For in the Fathers they will see nothing but Hellenistic borrowings and influence, whereas in St. Paul and St. John they will find nothing but 'pure revelation' or at least 'pure religion.' So severely critical an attitude on the one hand, such naive simplicity on the other, are in fact equally the causes of their blindness.

"For in whatever degree a philosophical basis was necessary to the Fathers, were it Platonist or Stoic, their speculation was conditioned less by considerations of philosophy than by a keen realization of the needs of Christianity. How else indeed could they make the most of the metaphor of the body and its members in the great Pauline epistles if they were to leave Stoicism out of account? Or how could they interpret with accuracy the epistle to the Hebrews if first they must eliminate all trace of Platonism? In fact, they never scrupled to borrow, and that to a large extent, from the great pagan philosophers whom they held in esteem. But, wiser than Solomon, they were not led into idolatry by their philosophy, and as a modern historian, Christopher Dawson, has remarked, we must go back to St. John and St. Paul if we would understand patristic thought."

--Henri de Lubac, Catholicism (transl. Lancelot Sheppard; New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958) 9-10. (Pages 40-1 in Ignatius Press version pictured above.)

John Ashton on Demythologization

In his splendid book on the Fourth Gospel, John Ashton has some truly wonderful turns of phrases.  It is one of the most erudite and humane books in biblical studies I have ever read.  One of the hidden gems can be found in his discussion of John 1.51 ("Amen, amen I say to you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man"):

"One of the difficulties of interpreting the saying satisfactorily is that the imagination, for once, is of no avail.  Confronted with the bizarre spectacle of the angels clambering up and down on the strange new figure of the Son of Man, it seizes and stalls.  This is a common experience of twentieth-century Westerners:  as they look at myth, they feel compelled, somehow, to demythologize.  But why should a demythologized myth be any more use than dehydrated water?  The medium is the message--it does not contain it or hold it imprisoned like a genie in a bottle, waiting to be released.  Somehow, then, we have to allow the picture of the ladder, base on earth and top in the clouds, to fuse with that of the Son of man, and at the same time to allow the busily climbing angels, some going up and others going down, to convey the message with which the evangelist has charged them" (249-50).

What is that message?  You'll have to check out the book, which besides being a thoroughly humane and cultured volume, mounts an impressive interpretation of the Fourth Gospel.

Incidentally...

Remember when I posted about "Constantinianism"?  I vaguely do, so I won't blame you if you don't.  Well, I have been enjoying (when not reading about Paul or writing about the Encratites) Peter Leithart's Defending Constantine.  Leithart draws on an impressive array of evidence and scholarship in his sensitive treatment of Constantine.  Let me humbly advise all who think Constantine was the worst thing to ever happen to the church to read this book.  I'm only about one third of the way in, but so far it is shaping up to be an excellent contribution.

Why pray? Oh, right.

The monastic literature of the fourth and early fifth centuries develops the pattern of a contemplative ascent through the moral life to the perception of reason and order in creation and thence to that openness to God as God which evades all conceptual definition and is true theologia.  In other words, the person who prays is the person who both in behaviour and in understanding restores order to a disordered world, a person who makes visible the effect of submission to logos; he or she is someone who vindicates the Christian faith as a scheme that unifies the world of experience rather than fragmenting it.  And the climax of the process is an acknowledgement of the absolute difference of God:  holiness is both living in an ordered universe and recognising that this order is derivative from a reality quite uncontainable within it.  It is as if the contemplative acts out in his or her life of prayer the relation between Christ's human and divine natures.  The mature life of contemplation is an embodiment of logos (just as it might have been for a certain kind of philosopher), but that logos emanates from a reality that cannot be encompassed by rational perception, only by love and radical detachment and the silencing of analytical and imaginative activity.  Just as in Christ, a human life is transfigured from within in function of an indwelling divine agency which is in loving relation with an infinite source.  In and with Christ, the believer represents both the unshakeable order of the universe and the utter freedom and mystery of the self-giving God. 

Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past?, 45-6.