“He has granted to us His most precious and great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion and may become partakers
of the divine nature” (II Peter 1:4)
It is impossible to conceive of a gift more precious and valuable that a human being can possess than to be freed from the disintegration of our essential being and to share in that portion of divinity that is possible for created beings. Of course it is out of the question to have a share in whatever the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are in their essence. After stating that reality, we are quick to affirm the option afforded us by the love of God, and that is to have a part in what the theologians call God’s energy. We are invited—more, urged—to become like God in overcoming our passions, then to live with the Holy Trinity eternally.
This all comes not because we will it, but because God offers it through the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection of the Son of God. That glorious gift is not unique to Orthodox Christians. Other Christians—Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and followers of Calvin—have the same doctrine, but Protestants especially often distort this supreme teaching that Orthodox Christians are preoccupied with. They tend to dismiss it because of their obsession with the fallen nature of humanity, which makes salvation exclusively the responsibility of God, without any cooperation with humans. They feel that the emphasis of the Orthodox on purging ourselves of sin is futile and conceited. To them, anything other than God’s act on our behalf smacks of arrogance and pride.
Our response is one of surprise. Can God save us against our wishes and will? If He created us to be free, is it not the option of freedom to say “No” to salvation? What if we choose to follow Satan and remain apart from holiness through all eternity? If freedom means what the word implies, that ought to be our free choice. Frightening, but true—we can choose hades over heaven.
Conversely, as we grow in awareness of the great gift of salvation in Christ—as we liberate our minds from the tangled web of sinfulness, leaving the darkness of ignorance and proceed into the bright light of spiritual vision, we walk towards that Light Who is Christ. As we do so, we thank God for the gift of deification by cooperating as best we are able with the process of our salvation. Our lives become a procedure by which we escalate from the first stage of salvation, purification, into the middle stage of illumination, before arriving at the final stage of union with the energies of the Holy Trinity.
Granted, many if not most never get beyond the stage of purification while in this lifetime. They are not rejected, heaven forbid, from the Kingdom; they just move on to whatever remains to be completed, then to the next two stages. How long will that take? Well, they have an eternity to continue their journey to union. The record of the church fathers and the lives of saints describe how often the great ones had to back up and fill in what they had assumed they had already moved beyond, and their biographies give hope to us all. One monk explained to a visitor to his monastery who asked him what was the purpose of his routine, what was he accomplishing with his life? The monk responded: “We stand, then we fall. Then we get up, and then we fall again. That’s how we spend our days.” And he described physically what we Orthodox do metaphorically. We also make a bit of progress with our prayers and fasting, Bible reading and meditation. Then along comes a wave of temptation, knocking us down. No sooner do we find our way to our feet and compose ourselves before another wave of passion, anger, frustration or sin shoves us to our knees again. Nevertheless, step by step we eventually wend our way to God’s Kingdom.