A Review of Jordan Cooper's Christification

Managing editor’s note: The following article is a review of Jordan Cooper’s Christification: A Lutheran Approach to Theosis. Although written ten years ago, when the book was released, the review has not been published anywhere until now. We present it here with the hope that it will be of interest to some readers.

When a confessional Lutheran writes a book subtitled “A Lutheran Approach to Theosis,” he has his work cut out for him. He has to combat several different prejudices in his readers. First, like everyone who writes on theosis, or divinization, he must clarify what is meant by the term: not apotheosis, in which a man becomes a member of a pantheon or is absorbed into the Godhead, but a creaturely participation, by grace, in the divine nature. Then he must deal with the assumption that a Lutheran writing about theosis must be a disciple of Tuomo Mannermaa, willing to set Luther himself (esp. the Galatians Commentary of 1535) against the Formula of Concord and the later dogmatic tradition in order to further ecumenical dialogue with the Eastern Orthodox. And in doing that, of course, he must be sure to distinguish his position from the Eastern one, since that is what most people will think of when they hear the word “theosis.” Cooper’s book does not have a defensive tone, but it does deal with each of these potential misunderstandings.

The name of the book is the name he gives to the kind of theosis that he sees being taught in the New Testament, the early church fathers, and the Lutheran tradition. He defines it this way:

Christification is the ontological union of God and man, initiated through the incarnation, which the Christian partakes in through faith. Through this union, that which belongs properly to Christ—namely divine incorruptability and immortality—is transferred to the believer by faith. This union is increased and strengthened as the Christian participates in the sacramental life of the church, and it is demonstrated through growth in personal holiness.[i]

This is one kind of theosis. The other kind is philosophical and mystical, rather than biblical, patristic, or Lutheran, and has had undue influence in modern Eastern Orthodoxy. He deals with this distinction in the last chapter of the book, so I will discuss it at the end of this review.

Cooper does not find the word “divinization” in the Lutheran sources, although he does point out that Luther accepted the language of 2 Peter 1:4, which says that Christians become “partakers of the divine nature,” at face value.[ii] Instead he focuses on demonstrating three points of overlap between his definition of Christification and what he finds in Luther, the Lutheran Confessions, and the dogmaticians: “Within Luther’s writings, some prominent themes connected with theosis include participation in the divine life of the Holy Trinity, the contention that salvation involves a progressive element, and union with God through the sacramental life of the church.”[iii] Because of its importance in Mannermaa’s work, one might expect the Galatians Commentary (1535) to figure heavily in this discussion, but Cooper wisely sticks to less contested evidence and demonstrates these three themes entirely from the Large Catechism: e.g. 1) “We see here in the Creed how God gives himself completely to us, with all his gifts and power, to help us keep the Ten Commandments”;[iv] 2) “Holiness has begun and is growing daily”;[v] and 3) “We are called the children of God and have the sacraments, through which he incorporates us into himself.”[vi]

Cooper does also reference Mannermaa and quote from the Galatians Commentary, but only to address the related question of the role that theosis plays in justification, not to prove that Luther teaches theosis in the first place. When the Formula of Concord rejects divine indwelling as a factor in justification, he argues, it does not reject indwelling in every sense, but specifically “this indwelling,” meaning that “of the essential righteousness of God,”[vii] i.e., “the Osiandrian sense of indwelling—the infusion of virtues and love,” which if it were to precede justification would amount to “righteousness based on works.”[viii] This rejection of Osiander, he argues, does not rule out “the indwelling of the person of Christ in faith”[ix] that Luther identifies as the vehicle of justification in the Galatians Commentary.[x] Thus he suggests “two distinct stages” of the Christian’s union with God: “There is the union of Christ, wherein Christ is present in faith, granting his benefits subjectively to the recipient. It is in this sense that union precedes justification. However, growth in one’s union with God, wherein moral qualities are given to the believer, follows rather than precedes the act of justification inasmuch as sanctification is a result of justification.”[xi] In his survey of the Lutheran dogmaticians, he acknowledges that Quenstedt leaves no room for this theory, but he also finds that Hollaz backs him up quite nicely:

Although the mystical union, by which God dwells in the soul as in a temple, may, according to our mode of conception, follow justification in the order of nature, it is however to be acknowledged that the formal union of faith, by which Christ is apprehended, put on, and united with us, as a mediator and the author of grace and pardon, logically precedes justification.[xii]

This distinction is an important contribution.

Some readers will doubtless reject this solution, but they will have a harder time rejecting the overall argument that the doctrine of the mystical union as it appears in the Lutheran Confessions and dogmaticians amounts to a Lutheran doctrine of of theosis, in the sense of “Christification.” In the process of rejecting Osiander, the Formula of Concord makes it clear that there is an indwelling, not only of God’s gifts but also of the divine Persons.[xiii] It states, “To be sure, God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who is the eternal and essential righteousness, dwells through faith in the elect.”[xiv] Cooper is also able to demonstrate that the dogmaticians adhered uniformly to this understanding. And that this indwelling results in progressive sanctification is something that Cooper proves not only from the Large Catechism, but also from the Apology (“the keeping of the law must begin in us and then increase more and more. And we include both simultaneously, namely, the inner spiritual impulses and the outward good works”),[xv] and the Formula (“The gifts [sic] of the Holy Spirit . . . cleanses human beings and daily makes them more upright and holier”).[xvi]

Cooper follows his chapter on Lutheran sources with one on biblical evidence. He acknowledges that the clearest single passage supporting the concept of divinization comes from 2 Peter (1:4), one of the disputed books in the New Testament canon, but proceeds to argue convincingly that this is not an isolated verse, but one that “serves to clarify teaching that is extant in other New Testament literature.”[xvii] In Gal. 2:19-20, Paul attributes his freedom from the Law to having died “with Christ,” and his life to “Christ who lives in me.” In I Cor. 15, he says the resurrection body will be “a spiritual body,” one that “puts on the imperishable, and . . . immortality” through conformation to “the image of the man of heaven” (Christ). In Phil. 3:8-11, the Apostle makes both of those points again: to have the righteousness of faith is to “gain Christ and be found in him,” to “become like him in his death” and “attain the resurrection from the dead.” In II Cor. 3:18, he says that Christians, “beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” And then there’s the description of Holy Communion as “participation in the body of Christ” (I Cor. 10:16) and Holy Baptism as being “buried with him” (Col. 2:12), “into Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:3). “Participationist language is central to Paul’s soteriology,” Cooper writes. “In justification, the believer participates in Christ’s death and resurrection; in glorification, the Christian participates in Christ’s divine power and receives a pneumatic body through his exalted human nature.”[xviii] He wraps up the chapter by citing John 10:34-35 (Jesus’s appeal to “I said, ‘You are gods’” (Ps. 82:6) and connecting it to the theme of adoption running through John from the first chapter (vv. 12-13).

The next chapter contributes patristic evidence from Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Tatian, Theophilus, and (at much greater length) Irenaeus and Athanasius. Cooper shows that they all understood salvation as participation in God, particularly His immortality and incorruptability. The section is straightforward. Only in the case of Ignatius does the demonstration require any synthetic argumentation on his part. He shows further that they base this participation in the incarnation of Christ. “Deification is not, for these writers, an abstract philosophical reality. Rather it is an economic reality, placed within the scope of the divine oikonomia.”[xix] Of course, salvation-by-incarnation would fall short of a Lutheran soteriology, so Cooper also explains what they have to say about the cross, arguing convincingly that both Irenaeus and Athanasius include the substitutionary atonement. By His incarnation, Christ unites God and Man; by His crucifixion He pays the debt that would have disqualified us from sharing in that union. As in St. Paul, juridical and participationist themes work together:

In Athanasius, the ‘Anselmian’ and Christus Victor motifs cohere with one another. . . . This demonstrates that the false dichotomy proposed by both Protestant and Eastern interpreters has no grounding in the writings of Athanasius. In Athanasius, as well as in other patristic sources, legal and ontological categories coexist in perfect harmony. The contemporary church would do well to rediscover this patristic model.[xx] 

This observation concerning the way that theosis of the “Christification” kind allows for both legal/personal and ontological union with Christ, allowing a harmonious combination of the two main soteriological themes found in the Bible, the fathers, and the Lutheran tradition, is another important contribution of the book.

Finally Cooper deals with the other kind of theosis, the kind he must at all costs distinguish Christification from—the philosophical and mystical variety. It is necessary to make this distinction, but there are actually two other kinds of theosis, the purely Neoplatonic and the Dionysian/Palamite (Eastern Orthodox), and they get mixed up in such a way that it is not clear which of them is supposed to be “the other kind.” He associates the two by arguing that the Palamite tradition grew out of the [Pseudo-]Dionysian tradition, which was admittedly very Neoplatonic. “Dionysius does not place deification, as earlier writers do, primarily in the context of the divine economy.”[xxi] “In opposition to the economic approach to theosis, the Dionysian perspective is speculative and philosophical, rooted as it is in a Christian revision of neoplatonic philosophy.”[xxii] But the mystical theology of Dionysius is still Christian, and not “in opposition to the economic approach” at all; rather, it’s a method designed to be set in that context. Much to his credit, Cooper is trying to be fair to Eastern Orthodoxy. He notes that “the Dionysian tradition” is “strongly sacramental,”[xxiii] and observes in his first chapter that both kinds of theosis “are at work within Eastern Orthodox theology.”[xxiv] He even borrows the term “Christification” from an Eastern Orthodox writer, Nellas.[xxv] But in places he still ends up criticizing Eastern-Orthodox theosis as a purely Neoplatonic doctrine. When he says that theosis in the Dionysian tradition “is achieved through mystical experience,”[xxvi] it would be more accurate to say it is “experienced” in that way. Dionysius and the Eastern tradition teach that mystical ascent grants a foretaste of divinization in this life, but such experience is not a prerequisite for final divinization, which is achieved only at the resurrection, through the work of God.[xxvii] The Christocentric strand of the tradition isn’t present just in a few authors; it’s all over.

Cooper also puts too much blame on Neoplatonism. “For the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Athanasian conviction that God became man so that man might become God was blended with a neoplatonic philosophy that culminated in the theology of Gregory Palamas. This was connected to experiential mysticism.”[xxviii] Athanasius himself was a Neoplatonist, as were the Cappadocians, as were the Arians that they famously opposed. In philosophical terms, the Arian controversy was an intra-Platonist argument about the place of the divine Logos: on which side of the ontological chasm between the One and the world did He belong? Was He just as transcendent as the Father, or did His incarnation prove that He was a lower hypostasis, like Intellect in Plotinus or the Henads in Proclus (both of whom were pagan Neoplatonists)? The difference between the patristic kind of theosis that meshes so well with the biblical evidence and the Lutheran tradition, and the Neo-Palamite kind of theosis, which has alien elements, stems not from a later injection of Neoplatonism into something purely biblical, but from the “experiential mysticism” that Cooper mentions as an additional cause.

Although the definition of this second kind of theosis is confused, and the diagnosis made broader than it should be, Cooper does identify the problem that makes the Dionysian and Palamite method of spirituality inimical to Lutheran theology:

Although remaining strongly sacramental, the Dionysian tradition expounds upon a process of deification that is divorced from the means of grace, wherein the emphasis lies not on the external Word, but on the inner life of prayer. The Christian should not seek for a direct experience of God, as in the vision of the uncreated light, because that is not God’s manner of working. Rather, God works in His hiddenness, behind the means of Word and Sacrament. No experience of God is necessary aside from that of the liturgy, the preached Word, and the sacramental life of the Church.[xxix]

Experiential mysticism, wherever it comes from, never gets along well with Lutheran theology, because it always turns into a ladder of ascent, some way for human devotion to pursue God into heaven and experience Him directly, “beyond the means of Word and Sacrament.”

These deficiencies in the critique of the Eastern Orthodox tradition are unlikely to bother many Lutheran readers of the book. Lutheran criticisms will probably focus on the proposal of two kinds of divine indwelling. But Cooper makes that proposal well, with some good support from the sources. And even those who will not be sold on that point will have a hard time denying that Cooper has demonstrated the sense of using the term “theosis” in Lutheran theology—not to link it to Eastern Orthodoxy, but rather to the “Christification” taught by the early Greek fathers.

[i] Jordan Cooper, Christification: A Lutheran Approach to Theosis (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014) Kindle loc. 342. All further references beginning with loc. are to the Amazon Kindle edition of this book.

[ii] Loc. 1141.

[iii] Loc. 495.

[iv] LC II.68, loc. 493.

[v] LC II.57.

[vi] LC III.37, locs. 531, 551.

[vii] SD III.54.

[viii] Loc. 636.

[ix] Loc. 649.

[x] LW 26.167-8.

[xi] Loc. 785.

[xii] David Hollaz, quoted in Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, loc. 798.

[xiii] Loc. 649.

[xiv] FC SD III.54.

[xv] Apology IV.136, loc. 608.

[xvi] FC SD II.38, loc. 664.

[xvii] Loc. 1099.

[xviii] Loc. 1335.

[xix] Loc. 2103.

[xx] Loc. 2105.

[xxi] Loc. 2439.

[xxii] Loc. 2377.

[xxiii] Loc. 2656.

[xxiv] Loc. 249.

[xxv] Loc. 287, note 48.

[xxvi] loc. 2441.

[xxvii] See e.g. Dionysius, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy VII.1.

[xxviii] Loc. 2663.

[xxix] Loc. 2656-2667.

Eric Phillips has a PhD in Early Christian Studies (Greek & Latin Patristics), and pastors Concordia Lutheran Church in Nashville, TN. He contributes to Just & Sinner as the Weidner Institute Fellow of Historical Theology.