The title of this book had already been chosen when I was invited by Chad Meister and Paul Moser to contribute a volume to their series. I liked it because I saw that it offered me possibilities for ranging much more widely than in my previous work on deification and perhaps making connections that I had not seen before.
Theosis has become a vogue word in Anglophone theology. Although long familiar to patristic scholars as a Greek term – θέωσις, meaning literally ‘becoming god’ and signifying deification or participation in the divine life – it was not widely discussed until towards the end of the twentieth century. There appear to be several reasons for this. First, the scholarly foundations needed to be laid through a close examination of the relevant texts. Then, the rise of the Ecumenical Movement (which led to the founding of the World Council of Churches after the Second World War) was necessary in order to bring Western theologians into dialogue with their Eastern counterparts, stimulating the former, initially representatives of Reformed Churches, to take a fresh look at their own soteriology. Anglicans and Roman Catholics in the early days had their own contacts with Orthodox theology through their interaction with the Russian émigré theologians who had settled in Paris after the 1917 Revolution.
At the same time, there was a parallel development in the understanding of ‘religion’. Religion was subjected to theological and sociological critiques which sought to deconstruct what was seen as a fundamentally nineteenth-century ideological category. As a result, departments of theology in many universities were renamed departments of religious studies. On a more popular level, in Western Europe and North America there has been a move away from commitment to specific churches (‘organised religion’) to an interest in ‘spirituality’. God is back, as some commentators have said, but not as the God of the traditional Western theological systems. The purpose of this book is to uncover the different meanings of theosis that have emerged in recent years and to relate them to developments in our understanding of religion.
In the course of writing this book, I have incurred a number of debts to friends and colleagues. I am especially grateful to John Gale, whose thoughtful comments on working carefully through the entire manuscript have greatly improved the book; to Matthew Levering, the Press’s reader, who likewise made a number of perceptive and very helpful comments that are reflected in the final version; and also to Eduard Borysov, Maria Carlson, Douglas Dales, Paul Gavrilyuk, Pantelis Kalaïtzidis, Daniel Keating, Étienne Leclercq, Andrew Louth, Spyros Petritakis, Raymond Russell, and Antonella Sannino, who answered queries and sent me copies of their articles. I also thank Chad Meister and Paul Moser for their great patience in the face of my long delay in submitting the manuscript. My earliest book on deification was dedicated to the memory of my mother, my first teacher of Greek. This book is dedicated to the memory of my father in grateful recognition of the unfailing support he gave to my studies over many years.
