David Bentley Hart On Theosis

DBH on theosis as the historical rationale for the trinity

"In all of us, and in all things, there sleeps a fallen god called by God to awaken and seek union with him as a natural end—to risk a formulation that will offend just about every Christian, but that merely expresses the inescapable conclusion of thinking the theology of divine incarnation and human glorification through to its logically inevitable terminus"

  • (Hart, pg. 72, Kindle Edition).
  • "Theological Territories", this sentence in "Remarks to Bruce McCormack regarding the Relation between Trinitarian Theology and Christology".

Orthodox Christology, after all, insists not merely that there is no conflict or rivalry between Christ’s divinity and his humanity, nor merely that they are capable of harmonious accord with one another. Rather, it asserts that humanity is so naturally compatible with divinity that the Son can be both fully divine and fully human at once without separation or confusion, in one agent whose actions are all therefore at once fully human and fully divine.

From eternity, God has brought spiritual creatures into existence in the only way that such creatures could be formed: by calling them to ascend out of the darkness of nonbeing into the infinite beauty of the divine nature. To exist as a spiritual creature is simply to have heard and (from the very first instant) responded to this total vocation. Creation is already deification—is, in fact, theogony. For that eternal act—that summoning of all created natures out of the primordial darkness—is most certainly an entirely free and unmerited gift of being, imparted to those who were not and who in themselves had no claim to be; but it is also, and no less originally, the call that awakens the gods.

And the radical implication of this way of seeing things is that the immanent telos of God’s own life and the transcendent telos of the life of a spiritual creature are, formally and finally, one and the same telos: the divine essence, understood as the perfect repletion of God’s life of love and knowledge.

As God is God in the eternal and eternally accomplished movement of God to God, so we are gods in the process of becoming God solely by virtue of always existing within that movement, proceeding from the same source and toward the same end; we do so in the mode of finitude, contingency, and successiveness, and so are not God in se; but teleologically we are nothing but God. There is no “place” other than “in him” where a spiritual creature can live and move and have its being and so seek its ultimate end—which is to say, the fullness of reality that God is.

#DBH #theosis

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David Bentley Hart; You Are Gods

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DBH on theosis as the historical rationale for the trinity

…roups/552331154934653/posts/1986825618151859 shared: https://www.facebook.com/groups/749186598934347/posts/1239923839860618/ #DBH #theosis David Bentley Hart on Theosis --- short quote David Bentley Hart on theosis as the historical rationale for the doctrine of the trinity: > The greatest achievements of th…

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David Bentley Hart; You Are Gods

…human at once without separation or confusion, in one agent whose actions are all therefore at once fully human and fully divine. > - David Bentley Hart; You…

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