Did the Early Church Believe Christians Could Become “God”? — What Theosis Actually Meant

Theosis explained: did the early church really believe Christians could become God? Deification, or theosis, was not poetry — it was the argument Athanasius used against Arius to prove Christ was God, and it runs from Irenaeus in the second century to Maximus the Confessor, Gregory Palamas, Aquinas, Calvin and C.S. Lewis. We look at 2 Peter 1:4 and "partakers of the divine nature" in the Greek, Psalm 82:6 and John 10:34, where the word theosis actually comes from, the essence-and-energies distinction, why this is not the Mormon doctrine of exaltation, and what the West kept when it changed the vocabulary. Verdict left open. Tell me in the comments which tradition you heard this in first. Sources: Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54.3; Discourses Against the Arians Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 5 preface (c. 180) Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations; Letter 101 to Cledonius Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua; Questions to Thalassius 22 Gregory Palamas, Triads (c. 1338); Constantinople councils, 1341–1351 Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford, 2004) Jules Gross, The Divinization of the Christian According to the Greek Fathers Catechism of the Catholic Church 460; Aquinas, Opusc. 57 Calvin, commentary on 2 Peter 1:4; Institutes 1.13.14, 1.15.5–6 Mannermaa et al., Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Eerdmans, 1998) Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma (1885–1899) C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952), Book 4 #Theosis #ChurchHistory #EarlyChurch