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I’ve been thinking lately about what we’re actually trying to accomplish as Christians.

We spend a good deal of time in the Church talking about sin, repentance, forgiveness, and becoming better people. We encourage people to pray, read Scripture, attend worship, and care for their neighbours, and that’s all well and good. These are important parts of the Christian life. But sometimes I wonder whether we’ve become so preoccupied with what’s wrong with humanity that we’ve lost sight of what God intended for humanity in the first place.

What if Christianity isn’t primarily about making bad people good? What if it’s about bringing human beings fully alive?

It’s a question that takes us back to some of the earliest and most compelling voices in Christian theology, particularly those of the Greek-speaking Church, and introduces us to an understanding of salvation that I think we in the Anglican tradition would do well to recover.

The Eastern Church calls it theosis, a Greek word usually translated as divinization or deification. Now, before anyone gets too concerned, we’re not talking about becoming gods, acquiring supernatural powers, or somehow ceasing to be human. Theosis is the understanding that through Jesus Christ, and by the grace of the Holy Spirit, we are invited to participate in the very life of God. We are gradually transformed into the likeness of Christ, becoming more fully what God created us to be.

It’s an extraordinary claim, and one that I think offers us a much richer understanding of what we Anglicans generally call sanctification.

The Story Begins Before the Fall

In an earlier theological reflection, I explored the distinction between the Western understanding of original sin and the Eastern Christian understanding of ancestral sin. Both traditions recognize that something has gone terribly wrong with humanity, but they have often approached the problem from somewhat different directions.

Western theology, particularly under the influence of Augustine, has tended to emphasize sin, guilt, and humanity’s need for forgiveness. Eastern Christianity has generally placed greater emphasis on mortality, corruption, and our estrangement from the life of God. These are differences of emphasis as well as, in some cases, genuine theological disagreement. Western Christianity has never been concerned only with guilt, any more than Eastern Christianity has ignored the reality of personal sin.

The distinction matters because the way we understand the human predicament shapes the way we understand salvation. If our problem is simply that we have broken God’s commandments, then forgiveness might appear to be all that is required. But if our condition also involves mortality, corruption, and alienation from the source of life, then salvation must involve something more. We need healing, restoration, and to be brought back into communion with the One who is life itself.

And this is where I think we need to return to the beginning of the biblical story. Genesis does not begin with the Fall; it begins with creation. When God creates humanity, the declaration is rather extraordinary: we are made in the image and likeness of God.

Before there is sin, there is blessing; before there is alienation, there is communion; and before there is death, there is life. God looks upon creation and declares it good, something I think we sometimes forget.

We can become so absorbed in the story of human failure that we begin to imagine Christianity as primarily a rescue operation for a defective creation. But the biblical story begins with a God who delights in what God has made. Humanity was created for communion with God, and while the Fall represents a tragic distortion of that calling, it does not erase the divine image or cause God to abandon creation.

This raises an important question. Did Christ come simply to return humanity to the condition Adam and Eve enjoyed before the Fall? Or is God doing something even more extraordinary, bringing humanity toward the fulness of life for which it was created?

For the early Church Fathers, particularly Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa, the answer opens up an astonishing vision of human destiny.

Why God Became Human

Athanasius, the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria, understood this rather well. He’s probably best remembered for his defence of the full divinity of Christ during the Arian controversy, but what interests me most is why he thought that struggle mattered so profoundly. For Athanasius, the question wasn’t simply whether Jesus was divine. It was whether humanity could actually be saved.

His answer was rather startling. In his great work On the Incarnation, Athanasius writes, “He became human that we might become divine.”

Think about that for a moment. God became human so that humanity might participate in the divine life.

Athanasius wasn’t suggesting that we could somehow become God by nature. The distinction between Creator and creature remains. Rather, because the eternal Word of God has assumed our humanity, we are able, by grace, to participate in the life that belongs eternally to God.

This was not an incidental consequence of the Incarnation. For Athanasius, it was central to understanding why God became human. Humanity had been created for life in communion with God, but through sin, we had become subject to corruption and death. We were losing the life for which we had been made, and that condition couldn’t simply be remedied by issuing a pardon.

Imagine someone trapped beneath the wreckage of a collapsed building. You can tell them that they’ve been forgiven for whatever brought them there and assure them that no charges will be laid against them. But they’re still trapped beneath the rubble. They need someone to come and get them out.

That is what God does in Jesus Christ.

The Word through whom all things were created enters creation itself. Christ assumes our humanity, experiences our suffering, enters our death, and through his Resurrection breaks the dominion of death. God does not stand at a safe distance from the human condition and announce that everything has been forgiven. God enters the wreckage.

Because Christ is truly divine, he can communicate to humanity the life that belongs to God. This is why Athanasius defended Christ’s divinity so vigorously. If Jesus were merely an extraordinary creature, however exalted, he could not unite us to the uncreated life of God. Only God can bring humanity into communion with God.

The Incarnation, then, is not simply God visiting humanity; it is God joining humanity to himself in Christ. And the Resurrection is not merely proof that Jesus was right. It is the beginning of a renewed creation.

That is the foundation of theosis. But if Christ has opened the way into divine life, how does that life actually unfold in us? This is where Gregory of Nyssa becomes particularly interesting.

Gregory of Nyssa and the God Who Is Never Exhausted

Gregory of Nyssa is one of my favourite theologians. He lived in the fourth century and was one of the three great Cappadocian Fathers, along with his brother Basil the Great and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus. His sister Macrina was also a remarkable theological and spiritual influence on him.

Gregory had a wonderful ability to take a familiar biblical story and reveal dimensions of it that we might never have considered. One of the best examples is his Life of Moses.

We know the story well enough. Moses encounters God in the burning bush, leads Israel out of Egypt, ascends Mount Sinai, and enters the cloud of divine mystery. But Gregory notices something rather curious. Even after all these encounters with God, Moses still longs for more. He asks to see God’s glory.

Now, we might imagine that someone who has encountered God in a burning bush, spoken with God on Sinai, and led an entire people through the wilderness ought to have achieved a fairly respectable level of spiritual maturity. Surely by that point Moses should have arrived.

But Gregory sees things differently. For him, Moses’ continuing desire for God is not evidence that he has failed to reach perfection. It is precisely what spiritual growth looks like. The closer Moses comes to God, the greater his desire for God becomes.

The reason is rather wonderful. God is infinite, and if our destiny is communion with an infinite God, then there can never be a point at which we have exhausted the divine life. There is always more of God to discover, more love into which to grow, more beauty to behold, and more goodness in which to participate.

Gregory understands the spiritual life as an endless movement into the inexhaustible mystery of God. This idea is often described by the Greek word epektasis, drawing on Paul’s language in Philippians about pressing forward toward what lies ahead. For Gregory, perfection is not a static condition in which we have finally achieved everything there is to achieve. It is an ever-deepening participation in the life of God.

I find that enormously hopeful.

We tend to think of spiritual maturity as something we should eventually accomplish. We work on our weaknesses, develop better habits, become more disciplined in prayer, and perhaps grow a little less inclined to say exactly what we’re thinking during diocesan meetings. Presumably, somewhere along the way, we become holy.

But Gregory offers something far more compelling. Holiness is not simply the elimination of our faults. It is the continual enlargement of our capacity for love. We become more open to God, more generous toward others, more capable of compassion, and more fully alive to the goodness and beauty of creation. And because God is infinite, that growth is never exhausted.

Even eternal life is not imagined as a kind of spiritual retirement in which we have finally arrived and have nothing left to discover. For Gregory, our journey into God continues. The Christian life is not about becoming something other than human. It is the endless discovery of what being human in communion with God can mean.

What About Human Freedom?

There is another dimension to Gregory’s theology that I find particularly important: human freedom.

If we are created in the image of God, then our freedom is not an unfortunate design flaw. It is part of what makes genuine relationship possible. Love cannot be coerced. We can compel obedience, but we cannot compel love, and the capacity to love necessarily involves the possibility of refusing love.

This is part of the tragedy of the Fall. Humanity turns away from communion with the source of life, and the consequences are alienation, corruption, and death.

The early Christian tradition understood evil not as some independent substance God had created, but as a distortion or deprivation of the good. Sin is not what humanity was created for; it is what happens when our freedom becomes turned away from its proper end.

But here’s the important thing. God’s response to human failure is not to eliminate our freedom, but to heal it.

Through communion with Christ, our desires are gradually transformed. We become less enslaved by fear, resentment, possessiveness, and the need to control. We become increasingly capable of loving freely, and that has enormous implications for how we understand the Christian life.

It suggests that sanctification is not fundamentally about God making us obedient, but about God making us free: free to love, free to forgive, and free to become the people we were created to be.

Sanctification Is Not Another Self-Improvement Project

We Anglicans have a perfectly good theological word for much of what Gregory is describing: sanctification.

It’s a word we use fairly regularly, although I’m not sure we always give much thought to what it actually means. We generally understand sanctification as the process through which Christians become more holy, more Christlike, and more attentive to the work of the Holy Spirit. And that’s certainly true.

But I wonder whether we’ve sometimes reduced sanctification to a kind of religious self-improvement programme.

We live in a culture obsessed with optimization. We measure our fitness, our productivity, our finances, our sleep, and increasingly even our happiness. We track our progress and look for ways to improve our performance. Some of this is helpful, but it can also lead us to imagine that our worth is determined by how well we’re doing.

It’s remarkably easy to bring that same mentality into the Church. We pray more regularly, read more Scripture, attend worship, and develop better habits. Gradually, we hope, we become better Christians.

But theosis invites us to see something deeper taking place. Sanctification is not primarily a programme of moral improvement. It is the transformation of our humanity through participation in the life of God.

Paul speaks about this in his second letter to the Corinthians, where he describes believers being transformed into the image of Christ, from one degree of glory to another, through the work of the Spirit. The transformation is not simply the result of our own efforts; it is the work of the Spirit. And its goal is the image of Christ.

The Eastern Christian tradition speaks here of synergy, the cooperation of human freedom with divine grace. God acts, and we respond. We are neither puppets nor independent spiritual entrepreneurs. God does not force us into holiness, but neither can we manufacture divine life through sheer determination. We are invited to respond freely to the grace that is already at work within us.

This changes how we understand the practices of Christian discipleship. Prayer is not a technique for making God more available; it is an opening of ourselves to the God who is already present. Repentance is not simply feeling badly about our failures; it is a turning away from whatever diminishes life and a return to the One who is life itself. And the Eucharist is not a reward for spiritual achievement, but the gift of Christ’s own life, nourishing and transforming those who receive him.

None of this means that moral behaviour is unimportant. Quite the opposite. If we are genuinely growing in communion with God, that transformation ought to become visible in the way we live: in our patience with one another, our willingness to forgive, our generosity toward those who have little, our courage to challenge injustice, and perhaps most revealingly, in how we treat people with whom we profoundly disagree.

These are not simply the marks of a well-behaved Christian. They are signs of a life being transformed by grace.

An Anglican Understanding of Theosis

Although theosis is particularly associated with Eastern Orthodoxy, the underlying theological vision is not foreign to Anglicanism. In fact, it belongs to the shared inheritance of the early Church.

Richard Hooker, one of the foundational theologians of Anglicanism, speaks extensively about our participation in Christ and the way Christ communicates his life to believers, particularly through the sacraments. Hooker’s theology is not identical to Gregory of Nyssa’s, but there is a profound connection between them. Both understand salvation as something more than an external declaration that God now regards us differently. Salvation involves a real participation in the life of Christ.

We find similar insights throughout the Anglican spiritual tradition, from Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor to Evelyn Underhill and Michael Ramsey. And we encounter them every time we gather for the Eucharist.

In baptism, we are united with Christ in his death and Resurrection. We become members of his Body and are called to live as part of a renewed humanity. In the Eucharist, we receive the Body and Blood of Christ. We are nourished by the life of the risen Lord and drawn more deeply into communion with him and with one another. Through the ordinary rhythms of prayer, worship, repentance, and service, we are gradually formed into the likeness of the One we follow.

This is where I think the Eastern understanding of theosis has something particularly valuable to offer Anglican Christianity. It reminds us that worship and discipleship cannot be separated.

We sometimes behave as though church is where we go to be spiritually refreshed before returning to the business of real life. But theosis suggests something rather different. The Eucharist is not an escape from the world. It is an encounter with the One who is renewing the world.

We receive the Body of Christ so that we may become more fully the Body of Christ, and that necessarily changes how we live.

Theosis and the World We Inhabit

This is where the theology becomes particularly challenging.

We live in a society that has become remarkably efficient at measuring human worth. We measure productivity, wealth, influence, appearance, and usefulness. We celebrate those who succeed and often struggle to know what to do with those who cannot keep up.

The elderly, the poor, people living with disabilities, those struggling with mental illness, and those who find themselves on the margins of society can easily become invisible. Our economic and political systems frequently treat human beings as units of productivity, consumers, or problems to be managed.

But the Christian understanding of humanity begins somewhere entirely different. We are not valuable because we are useful. We are valuable because we bear the image of God, and theosis makes an even more audacious claim: God is not finished with any of us.

Every human being has a destiny that exceeds anything the world can measure. We are created for communion with the infinite God, and that conviction ought to change how the Church understands its mission.

If we believe that every person is created in God’s image and called toward participation in divine life, then we cannot remain indifferent to the forces that diminish human dignity. Poverty matters. Injustice matters. Violence matters. The destruction of creation matters.

These things matter not simply because Christians ought to be good people who care about social issues, but because they stand in opposition to God’s intention for creation.

Theosis cannot be reduced to a private spiritual experience. Participation in the life of God necessarily draws us into God’s love for the world, and that love is not sentimental. It challenges the structures of power that diminish human life, calls us to stand alongside those who suffer, and asks us to recognize the image of God even in those whom society has learned to disregard.

A spirituality that speaks beautifully about communion with God while remaining indifferent to human suffering has misunderstood the communion it claims to seek. The Christian life is not simply about our own transformation. It is about becoming participants in God’s work of healing and renewing creation.

The Glory of God Is a Living Human Being

Long before Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa, the second-century theologian Irenaeus of Lyons offered a remarkable insight into the purpose of human life.

In his great work Against Heresies, he wrote: “The glory of God is a living human being; and the life of the human being is the vision of God.”

We often hear the first part paraphrased as “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.” It’s a beautiful expression, but the second part matters just as much.

For Irenaeus, humanity does not become fully alive simply by pursuing whatever we happen to understand as personal fulfilment. We become fully alive through communion with the God who created us. Our humanity finds its deepest meaning not in independence from God, but in relationship with God.

This brings us back to Gregory of Nyssa. If God is infinite, and our destiny is communion with God, then the journey into divine life is never exhausted. There is always more love to discover, more goodness to receive, and more of ourselves to offer.

Even death does not bring that journey to an end. In Christ, death has lost its ultimate claim upon us. The Resurrection opens the way into a life that is not merely endless in duration, but inexhaustible in its depth.

I find that an extraordinary way to think about our Christian hope.

Becoming Fully Alive

I wonder what might happen if we began to understand our Christian lives this way. What if we stopped thinking of discipleship primarily as an exercise in becoming better behaved and began to see it as the extraordinary invitation to participate in God’s own life?

What if we understood the Eucharist not simply as something we receive, but as an encounter that is gradually transforming who we are? And what if we began to see the people around us, not simply as they are today, with all their limitations and failures, but as people whom God is calling into an unimaginable fulness of life?

That would change something, I think. It would change how we understand holiness, how we understand the Church, and perhaps even how we understand one another.

The Christian story does not begin with human failure. It begins with the goodness of creation and the astonishing declaration that humanity is made in the image of God. And it does not end with forgiven sinners merely tolerated by their Creator. It opens into the inexhaustible life of God.

Perhaps, then, the most important question we can ask about our Christian lives is not simply whether we are becoming better people, but whether we are becoming more fully alive in Christ.

Are we growing in our capacity to love? Are we becoming more generous, more compassionate, more courageous? Are we learning to see the image of God in people we would rather avoid? Are we allowing ourselves to be changed by the God we encounter in prayer, in Scripture, in the Eucharist, and in one another?

Because God has not simply come to forgive what is wrong with us. God has come to bring us alive, and that is a rather extraordinary thing.