People are often shocked when they go to the early Christians hoping to find a solution to problems that have preoccupied Christians since the Reformation. They often find the Fathers relatively unconcerned. A case in point is the debate about what it means to be “saved,” and correspondingly what it means to be justified and sanctified. The post-Reformation tendency, especially among Protestants, is to section these terms off and consider them as discrete events, points on a timeline. The Fathers, however, preferred to speak of salvation as an irreducibly integrated process, which they called “divinization” — or “deification,” or “theosis.”

Those are daring terms, but they are biblical in essence, as is the idea that we share in divinity by our incorporation into Christ. The Apostle Peter said, after all, that Christians are “partakers of the divine nature.”

Whenever people asked me about this doctrine of the Fathers, I usually pointed them to two excellent modern explanations: Scott Hahn’s book First Comes Love and chapter 2 of Cardinal Christoph Schonborn’s book From Death to Life. These are excellent resources — thorough and winsome — but I always wished for something that was handier for evangelism, along the lines of those tracts I often find at the laundromat or supermarket (“Are YOU Saved?”). After all, why should the whole truth — why should our divinization — prove resistant to modern media?

Yesterday I discovered just such a handy booklet: Theosis: Partaking of the Divine Nature, by Mark Shuttleworth, an Orthodox layman. The 20-page booklet is, like the teachings of the Fathers themselves, saturated with the testimony of the Good Book.

“I said, ‘You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High’ (Ps 82:6)… What on earth does it mean — “you are gods”? Doesn’t our faith teach that there is only one God, in three Persons? How can human beings be gods? … Theosis is the understanding that human beings can have real union with God, and so become like God to such a degree that we participate in the divine nature.”

Shuttleworth gives several pages over to New Testament quotations explaining the meaning and implications of our deification. He then summons the early Fathers to the witness stand: Origen, Athanasius, Basil, Cyril of Alexandria and others. C.S. Lewis even makes a cameo appearance.

This is a very useful little book, great to buy in bulk and stack in the back of the church. And it’s an invaluable tool for modern apologists.

The very first question I received when I launched this blog was from a group of tenacious Catholics living in the Mormon heartland of Utah. My correspondent said that Mormons were increasingly trying to invoke the Fathers’ doctrine of theosis as a sort of anticipation of the Mormon belief that the faithful will be made gods to rule over their own planets in the afterlife. These Utah Catholics, though, diligently applied themselves to studying and discussing the patristic doctrine, and formulating a deeply Christian, patristic response to their nearby neighbors.

The author of Theosis, Mark Shuttleworth, has put this ancient doctrine to the biblical test; he has put it into words that engage the mind; but, a man of extraordinary talent, he has also done something more with the doctrine. He has put it to beautiful music. Shuttleworth has translated these biblical and patristic notions into music in the contemporary praise idiom. His CD travels with me wherever I go. I especially love his setting for the ancient Trisagion and his own composition “My Lord, I Love You.” The disk is not yet available on the Web, but you can buy it directly from the artist. Just send a check for $15 ($12 for the CD; $3 for shipping and handling) to Mark Shuttleworth, 2962 Voelkel Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15216.

Then settle in for some truly divinizing listening.