Perhaps what comes to mind most commonly when people hear the term deification is the practice among the ancient pagan religions of elevating mere men to the status of gods. Historically, this became most prominent in the Roman Empire, where reverence for the Caesars as gods united the multi-national and multi-religious empire. Such reverence was adamantly resisted by two groups alone, the Jews and the Christians (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 16:120h), no doubt because of their absolute insistence on a belief in the one true God. But reactions to deification also reflected particular views on what deity was. It was so much easier for the pagan religions to admit deification into their religious systems because for them the gods were little more than men. Pagan gods were made in the image and likeness of men, so to speak, somewhat fallen and given to the same vices we humans suffer. The ancient world was filled with the intrigue and drama of fleshly tales about the pagan gods. To become god, at the standard of these gods, was hardly an improvement over being mere man and hardly a great leap for humanity. On the other hand, the God of the Jews and the Christians is eternal, perfect, above nature, and certainly above the multitude of flaws of humanity. The most virtuous man could easily qualify as a god in the pagan mind, but for Jews and even more so for Christians “our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (Isa. 64:6). The chasm between God and man, and particularly unsaved man, could not be as easily bridged as the emperor cult of Rome suggested.
Furthermore, in the ancient pagan religions men became gods by mere declaration. The process was called apotheosis in Greek and consecratio in Latin, and generally occurred after the death of the emperor. Yet no one believed that the deified ruler had changed in any way except in how he was revered. Formerly, he was respected as an emperor; now he was worshipped as a god, but essentially he was still a man. There was no change in life and nature. It was much the same as the inauguration of a modern president: Formerly, he is without the office and is not accorded the dignity and respect of the office, but in a moment, at his inauguration, he is declared president. The man himself does not change at all, but his status is uplifted, and by this he gains the respect of the citizenry. This contrasts with what the Bible says about God’s redeemed, regenerated, and transformed people, who not only gain the status of being the sons of God but, more importantly, experience a change in life and nature that gives an essential reality to their being the sons of God.
In the early church Christians opposed the deification of man in the widely held pagan sense, but they did not oppose a proper understanding of deification. But how could the early church believe in a God who is far above man in His being and essence and still hope in a salvation so complete that man is ultimately deified? The overwhelming concept among ancient Jews and modern Christians alike is that God is transcendent above all creation and that His transcendence prevents man from ever sharing in what He is. God is God and man is man, and there exists an insuperable distance between the two. Yet for the early teachers of the church there were obvious “contradictions” that could easily be found in the Scriptures. Paul says that God “alone has immortality” (1 Tim. 6:16), but elsewhere he declares that “this mortal must put on immortality” (1 Cor. 15:53). Immortality was viewed as a defining characteristic of God, an attribute that made God what He is. How then could the believers be said to put on immortality without becoming, in some sense, God themselves? Further, the Lord Jesus used Psalm 82:6 to show that the term gods could legitimately be applied to men. Second Peter 1:4 also presented problems, since our partaking of the divine nature strongly implies that we too can be said to be divine. Once this kind of scrutiny is introduced, other “contradictions” can be found. Revelation 15:4 says, “Who will not fear, O Lord, and glorify Your name? For You alone are holy”; and yet Peter exhorts the believers: “But according to the Holy One who called you, you yourselves also be holy in all your manner of life; because it is written, ‘You shall be holy because I am holy’” (1 Pet. 1:15-16). In Revelation 21 the bride, the wife of the Lamb, that is, the consummation of God’s elect, redeemed, and transformed people, is described as “having the glory of God. Her light was like a most precious stone, like a jasper stone, as clear as crystal” (v. 11). Certainly these are God’s people, yet having the glory of God, they appear to be God. Their aura is that of jasper, and likewise He who sits on the throne has the appearance of jasper (Rev. 4:3). These “contradictions” invite us, as they did the early church, to surmise that in some sense man can be said to be God in God’s salvation. Far from ignoring these “contradictions” or dismissing them as mere metaphors, the early church made it her task, in reverence to the sacred text, to somehow see how man may become God in light of what the sacred text tells us about God and His salvation. As the centuries progressed, the church’s teaching on deification was refined and by the fourth century reached a full, stable, and mature form. Contrary to what some scholars of the nineteenth century believed (e.g., cf. Harnack History of Dogma, vol. III, ch. 2), the teaching concerning deification was not a holdover from Hellenic religion but a conclusion drawn from the careful consideration of biblical truths. (On this, see, for example, Louis Bouyer, History of Christian Spirituality, pp. 416-420.)
In order to understand what the early church believed and taught concerning deification, it is useful to consider a distinction the writers of the early church utilized to advance this teaching. Perhaps the simplest way to present the distinction is to consider the term God as an answer to two questions: Who are you? and, What are you? If we were to ask God Himself, Who are You, O Lord? He would certainly answer, I am God. If we were to ask Him, Dear Lord, what are You? again, He would say, I am God. If, however, the believers were asked the same questions, the answers must differ. When asked, Who are you? we must say, We are Brother Paul, Brother Aquila, and Sister Priscilla, for example. But when asked, What are you? we, as redeemed and regenerated believers, can say and even we should say, We are God. The distinction respects God as a unique Person with His own unique, personal identity and God as a species to which the Triune God belongs as the source and the believers belong as the partakers. In the language of the early church, we should distinguish between God by nature, referring to God Himself, and God by grace, referring to the believers. These terms even more accurately express not only the difference between God as Person and God as kind or species, but also the difference between God as He is in Himself and God by virtue of what is gained through grace by participation in the organic union with Christ. Hence, in the teaching of the early church, only the Triune God Himself is God by virtue of what He is in Himself; we believers are God only by virtue of what we have received, by virtue of our union with God.
The language of the New Testament certainly respects this distinction. Second Peter 1:4 calls us “partakers of the divine nature,” indicating that it is not our own nature that makes us divine but His. He is God by nature; we are God by virtue of partaking of His nature. John tells us that Christ is life (John 11:25; 14:6), but “he who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life” (1 John 5:12). He is the divine life in Himself, and being the divine life, He is the unique God; we have the divine life through regeneration and through our continued oneness with the Son, and thus we are God in life as well. Further, Paul calls the Body of Christ, Christ (1 Cor. 12:12); but the Lord Jesus is the Head, and we are the Body. He is uniquely Christ, God become flesh; we are Christ because we are His members. In this sense too, we can say that we are God. The Second of the Divine Trinity is the only begotten Son of God, and this admits no brothers; yet on the day of resurrection, the Lord said, “Go to My brothers and say to them, I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God” (John 20:17). Uniquely He is the only begotten Son, but in relation to His believers He is the Firstborn among many brothers (Rom. 8:29). Hence, we are sons of God by participation in Him, by partaking of His life and nature. And just as sons are in kind what their fathers are, we too are in kind what our Father is, God.
Our teaching concerning man becoming God in God’s salvation must respect this distinction recognized by the church from its earliest centuries. And as the many quotations from Brother Lee’s ministry indicate, this distinction is clearly and forcefully held by us. Because of this distinction, man will never take part in the Godhead; he will never be a fourth person in the Trinity; he will never be worshipped as God. Because man will never lose his attributes as a creature, he will never be the Creator. Man will forever possess the human form and the human nature; thus, he will never be omnipresent. Man will forever be endowed with the limited mental faculties he was given by creation; hence, he will never be omniscient. God is God both outside of creation and within creation; man can at best be joined to God and thereby become God within the confines of creation.
In every way, man’s becoming God will be tempered by and limited to his status as a creature; and actually, what man is by creation gives the greatest credence to the notion that man may become God. In the account of creation in Genesis 1, all living things were created “after their kind” (vv. 11, 12, 21, 24, 25) except man. Hence, in God’s creation there are species of living things, each bearing its own characteristics that distinguish it from other species. But when the creation of man is recounted, he is not said to be created “after his kind.” Instead, the Scriptures say, “Let us [God] make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). We understand this sentence to correspond to the phrase “after their kind” in the other sections of the creation account; we see it as a finer, more detailed utterance of the same notion. Hence, we understand by this sentence that man was created after God’s kind. The apostle Paul made the similar declaration to the Areopagus in Athens: “Being then the race (Gk. genos, ‘species; kind’) of God” (Acts 17:29).
Of course, we all know the sad history of man’s fall, by which man lost a great bit of his likeness to God. Nevertheless, man was created in such a way that through God’s economy man may become God. Adam before the fall was not a deified man; he was not created with God’s life and nature but only with the capacity to receive these. The fall delayed the realization of what man was created for and brought in negative elements that required our redemption. But through Christ’s salvation God’s original intention for man is fulfilled, and man becomes God in life and nature though never in the Godhead.
As a final note to this historical survey, we should comment on J. S.’s statement concerning the capitalization of the word God when it is applied to the believers. J. S. says, “Whether with big or small “G” does not make any difference,” but there is significance to the use of each. The distinction held by the early church is respected by the presence or absence of the capital G: God denotes the unique Person, who alone is God by virtue of His divine self-existence, “God by nature” in the language of the early church; god denotes what we become in God’s salvation, by virtue of partaking of His life and nature, “God by grace” as they would say. Yet even though the presence or absence of the capital letter technically respects the distinction, there is a very real and true sense in which the capital G can be used to denote both aspects at the same time. First Corinthians 15:28 says, “And when all things have been subjected to Him, then the Son Himself also will be subjected to Him who has subjected all things to Him, that God may be all in all.” What does God denote here? Certainly the unique God. But that He is to be all in all means that God is to be everyone—Christ, the believers, the church fathers, Witness Lee, J. S. The goal of God’s economy is God as all in all. Whoever denies that the believers will be made God denies God and His economy. Thus, as J. S. says, “Whether with big or small “G” does not make any difference.” But it makes no difference to him because he believes it is heretical either way, while it makes no difference to us because it is true and right either way.