"Perhaps no single doctrine is more classically expressive of the Orthodox faith than the doctrine of the Divine exchange (divinization or theosis)." + Fr Stephen FreemanTheosis is salvation in the Orthodox Church (all Orthodox Churches share this teaching. It has been preserved and continues to be witnessed through Patristic Teaching, the Liturgical ethos and the Lives of the Saints).
A Church that doesn't encounter, teach or embrace deification in her lived theology and witness of her saints, cannot in essence be understood as Orthodox.
At the risk of appealing to moralism, one can say that an Orthodox Church cannot remain Orthodox while rejecting deification, because deification is the process of salvation in the Orthodox understanding and a mystery of participation in the Divine Life of Christ by the Love and Power of the Holy Spirit.
A local Church or Orthodox rite that rejects the Orthodox witness of deification will soon begin to appeal to reductionism and misplaced presuppositions to dialogue with the world. She will begin to forget her priestly calling, the offering of all things back to God for the life of the World. She will acquire the language of secularism and feed into the secular machine because she will have forgotten the grammar that the world so desperately needs but has suppressed.
She will look incessantly for contemporary messages of relevance in order to fulfill the very experience her worship and her traditions record, actualize and are evidence of: the divine life of Christ, the life in communion with the Living God.
This has even more significance for a Church that proclaims the evangelical light of the Cross and Resurrection.
Suppress the theology of Theosis and mission becomes a triumphalist colonial outpost, a nationalist endeavor, a marketing strategy, or a means of "getting as many people to a place." Remove or obscure the theology of Theosis and a Church's missionary activity will either be shaped by suffocating rigorism, 'world-changing' handouts, theoretical faith, or sugar-coated sentimentality. Remove the theology of Theosis and she will no longer be an Orthodox mission but will lapse into a missiology of utility and crusade, a reduction of life to ideological certainties instead of a maximalist encounter of apophatic Holiness that manifests and lives in the Light of the Kingdom.
Of the centrality of theosis and of theosis in Orthodox missiology, His Eminence Metropolitan Geevarghese Mar Osthathiose (Indian Orthodox Rite) writes:
“Salvation is more than liberation of humanity or humanization, but divinization of the humanity and the cosmos. Finite salvation of the created is not infinite liberation, that is the infinite divinization as humanity is not created for one another alone, but for the Creator as well.
The aim of salvation is not restitution of the unfallen state and Adam and Eve, but elevation to the status and fulness of the Second Adam, which is called Christification or Trinitification.
The first Adam fell when tempted, but the Second Adam did not fall. Therefore our aim is not just humanization, but theosis. It is for this theosis that the Incarnation took place as "good news of a great joy which will come to all the people" (Lk 2:10)...
Ulltimately all the differences and separations between human beings will be dissolved in a mutual sharing of beingness (perichoresis) where 'thine and 'mine' are different in the case of property, purpose or will, but different only in different personal and group identities with full openness to penetrate each other...
The aim of mission can't be anything less than the deification, unification and reconciliation of all churches and the whole world into the unity of the measure and the stature of the fullness of Christ. It is not humanization or socialization but divinization, which is social transformation in the model of Holy Trinity, which may be called Trinification. The aim of mission is not only Theosis but along with it the establishment of the Kingdom of God.”
+ Metropolitan Geevarghese Mar Osthathiose . “Sharing God and a Sharing World” (India: ISPCK & CSS, 1995), 150-152.
