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Mormons believe God was once a man, and humans may become gods (theosis). God is embodied, sexuality is divinized, and the mundane, the quotidian, the earthly, is made celestial. Sacred distance collapses, and all things are spiritual. The result is a tension bordering on blasphemy or heresy.

This chapter gives a new, comprehensive interpretation of Gregory's Christology, focusing on his account of creation, the fall, and final redemption; his seminal doctrine of divinization (theosis); the relationship between soteriology and Christology; the singular identity of Christ as “one and the same” God and Son; the unity of Christ, against longstanding dualistic interpretations of Gregory's Christology; the principles of Christological exegesis; Gregory's vivid sense of the divine suffering in Christ and the centrality of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection; the predominance and unifying effect of Christ's divinity on his humanity; and Gregory's Christological spirituality, whereby the doctrine of Christ is itself the means of the Christian's ascent to God. Attention is also given to Gregory's opposition to the Antiochene Christology of Diodore, in addition to as that of Eunomius and Apollinarius.

This chapter examines the status of the martyrs after death in the heavenly hierarchy and the way that this status informs our understanding of the martyrs’ identity. Rather than focusing on the traditional terminology of theosis, it uses the language and imagery of the martyr acts to assess the relative status of the exalted martyr. It argues that the depiction of the martyrs as enthroned in heaven and their portrayal as sons of God and coheirs with Christ in conjunction with the unsettled issue of Christology yielded some ambiguity about the status of the martyrs in heaven. This ambiguity is preserved in the writing of some patristic authors, for whom this presented the dangerous possibility that martyrs were equal to Christ.

This chapter connects Joseph Smith's religion-making, in both its scope and its method, to the intellectual revolution called Romanticism. Like all intellectual revolutionaries of that era from Malthus to Marx to Darwin, Joseph Smith rearticulated the fundamental vision of his field of influence in terms of contestation, struggle, and dynamism. His collapse of sacred distance, rupturing of the canon, doctrines of pre-existence and theosis, and gestures toward a comprehensive, scriptural Ur-Text—all betoken an emphasis on process over product, and a precarious tension between the searching and certainty that characterized both his personality and the faith he founded.

Romanticism brings back the twinned concepts of preexistence and theosis. The revival of Plato (under Thomas Taylor's influence) sparks revival of interest in preexistence especially. William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Coleridge are only the most prominent names among the Romantics, as is Alfred, Lord Tennyson among the Victorians, and Ralph Waldo Emerson among the Transcendentalists, to espouse preexistence.

The tradition of prisca theologia and the Corpus Hermeticum are Pico della Mirandola instrumental in revival of preexistence. Real flowering is under the Cambridge Platonists, especially Henry More, along with Anne Conway and Kabbalists, who often combined the idea with theosis or deification. Thomas Traherne was the most prolific poet of the idea. Poets reworked Milton's great epic, to restore what they saw as occluded references to human preexistence.

This chapter examines the monastic synthesis, looking at Evagrius Ponticus, the Macarian writings, Diadochus of Photice, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Maximus the Confessor. Deification entered the Byzantine tradition through Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor. For Dionysus, theosis was primarily the attaining of unity and likeness. Deification is the condition of the saved, which begins with baptism and is nurtured by participation in the holy synaxis, by reception of the Eucharist, and by opening the mind to divine illumination. For Maximus, it was not the problem of oneness and multiplicity that was central, but how a mortal human being can participate in a transcendent God. He took up the Gregorian and Dionysian approach but supplied a major corrective, for Dionysius has little to say about the Incarnation.

With the notable exception of the Russian mission in Alaska, for the most part the Orthodox Church did not come to America as mission but followed its people’s departure from the homeland, often under extremities of war, social upheaval, or natural disaster. There was no preparation for coming here. They left behind historical Orthodox cultures and were immersed immediately into a society that the Orthodox faith had no role in shaping, a secular society that bafflingly was also religious, though not in any familiar way. Through conversation with theologians and public intellectuals like Schmemann, Parsons, Herberg, Berger, and Berry, this essay first traces the lineage of secularism back to Christianity. The unmooring of virtue from the transcendent, more specifically from the salvific sacrifice of Christ, has yielded secularism as a “step-child” of Christianity. In response, many Orthodox Americans turn to ethnic identity as a means of imbuing daily life with the faith. This, however, is more a sign of a dying church than a means of sustaining its life. The challenge is to renew a sense of the sacred, a liturgical worldview, within the pluralism of American society.

The Trinity was central to Edwards's theology. More than most early modern Christian thinkers, Edwards delineated distinct roles for each of the three divine Persons. He departed from the Western Trinitarian tradition by rejecting its emphasis on divine simplicity and by starting with threeness rather than oneness. He also placed more emphasis on the Holy Spirit and put a new spin on the way the moral life relates to the Trinity by recasting moral life as divinization or theosis. Edwards provided resources for what could play something of a mediating role in the filioque debate between East and West. For him, Trinitarian doctrine was not for mere speculation but for the enjoyment and enrichment of God's people in the church.

Chapter 8 offers a critical account of the Edwardsian doctrine of the consummation of creation, focusing on the question of the destiny of the saints in theosis and the reprobate in hell, and whether Edwards's views in this matter are consistent with other aspects of his philosophical theology considered earlier in the book. This involves taking issue with several recent objections to this way of thinking about the consummation of creation by systematic theologians like Bruce McCormack and Edwardsian interpreters like Robert Caldwell III. Like other Edwards scholars such as Michael McClymond, the chapter argues that Edwards's commitment to theosis must be taken with full seriousness. He really thinks the goal or end of creation is the union of elect creatures with the divine nature. He also offers a robust defense of the justice of hell and its place in the grand scheme of creation. In so doing, says Amy Plantinga Pauw, “Edwards's Trinitarian harmony faltered.” The chapter argues that the internal logic of Edwards's position is consistent; his defense of hell may be unpalatable to some modern readers but is not a failure of nerve. The chapter also shows that such Edwardsian logic could be used to develop a much more optimistic eschatology than Edwards would have acceded to. This may be one way in which contemporary theology might reappropriate and develop basically Edwardsian insights.

Assent to Mormonism as a belief system is largely a matter of assent to several alleged historical events. These begin with visions and revelations of Joseph Smith, as well as his production of the Book of Mormon. Before his murder in 1844, Smith would dictate well over a hundred revelations, write doctrine-filled epistles, and give numerous sermons, expounding principles of a “restored gospel.” He would describe other visions and angelic visitations, some associated with the bestowal of additional priesthood authority or “keys,” and he would produce other scriptural writings later canonized by the Mormon Church. His successor Brigham Young and subsequent LDS prophets would add clarity and detail, occasionally propound new doctrines, and revise or even rescind old ones. However, with the death of Smith virtually all theological foundations were in place.

This chapter engages a series of texts that I determine illustrate what I call “incarnational ethics” and juxtaposes them to the larger discussion of Jewish ethics in Modern Jewish Thought. The Hasidic thinkers in question (Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk and Levi Yizhak of Berdichev) present a model of ethics that more closely resembles a Christian Orthodox ethics of “becoming divine” (theosis) and seeing the other as “divine” than the virtue or Kantian ethics that dominate modern Jewish Thought. The central point of this chapter is that this Hasidic ethics I am suggesting does not emerge from nor is it bound to, the law but is focused on the divine element on the self and other as its foundation. This would be a major departure from classical and modern conceptions of Jewish ethics.

In some brief concluding remarks, the author considers the degree to which his proposed model is successful, according to the criteria established in the book’s introduction, in addressing the problem of hell as a “weak” theodicy. He contends that the model should be judged a success when evaluated on these terms, while recognizing that this is not enough to demonstrate that its claims actually are true. In closing, the author considers whether the divine presence model, or the broader theological framework in which it is most naturally situated, supports any reasonable conjectures as to what lies beyond the Day of Judgment.

Chapter 7 proposes a manner of conceiving of God’s deifying love, whereby God shares His intra-trinitarian life of love with men and women through the life and death of Christ. The proposal, which builds upon the Eastern Orthodox distinction between God’s essence and energies, includes partial accounts of both the Atonement and deification, along with an explanation of how these two doctrines fit together. The offered account of God’s deifying love is also shown to fit nicely with the understanding of love’s union exposited and defended in Chapter 2, thereby highlighting a connection between the defended model of God’s love and a classical way of thinking about Christian salvation.

This chapter surveys modern research on participatory accounts of salvation in the New Testament, particularly those developed in Pauline scholarship, with a view to establishing key considerations for the rest of the study. The connections between participation in Christ and the discussions of justification theology in the ‘New Perspective on Paul’ will be noted, as will the significance of the so-called ‘apocalyptic’ approach to Paul, with its hostility to covenant theology. The growing interest in theosis and the problems associated with this will also be explored. In each of these areas, the relevance of historical theology to New Testament scholarship will be demonstrated, highlighting the need for an integrative study of union with Christ, particularly one that pays attention to primary theological literature.