Five theses against those who deny our participation in the divine nature
First thesis:
If they claim that our participation is in the humanity of our Lord and not in his divinity, they without knowing have made the church a mere human existence where humans are linked by human means, which is impossible.
a) There is no way we can become the living human one body of our Lord without our participation in his divinity because one body of several persons in impossible according to biology.
b) Jesus our Lord is the head of one body the church. This fact does not allow us to consider the church as just some gathering and collection of persons. Because he is God Incarnate, he gathers all those in heaven and on earth under one Head which is impossible to do by just human power and energy.
This thesis declares that those who deny our participation in the divine nature are new generation of Arians since our Head is just a man and a creature who unites us by created means.
Second thesis:
Those who claim that our participation in the divine nature makes us like Christ our Lord have not understood that the Son is God by nature who "for our sake came down from heaven". We are earthly but He is divine. Our hypostases are human called to be heavenly but the hypostasis of the Son is divine and became earthly for our sake. Therefore we cannot become a divine Incarnation but divinized humans and remain humans because the Incarnation did not abolish our humanity but made it united with the life of God. Our Coptic brothers and sisters must make an effort to get rid of the Monophystism which denies the existence of the humanity of our Lord. The deification of the humanity of our Lord is a common teaching in the fathers of the church not only in the writings of St Athanasius. Those who deny the deification of the humanity of our Lord do confess Nestorianism which is well known to us as a teaching of two separate natures connected but not united. The humanity of our Lord after his resurrection is a glorified humanity by more than just immortality but by living en-hypostatized life where Jesus is alive because his humanity receives the fullness of life from him divinity and not by eating, drinking, and sleeping.
Third thesis:
We receive the gift of adoption which allows us to the, "children of God". We receive this in Baptism in the name of the divine Trinity. Those we say that we do not participate in the Sonship of the Son of God and deny that this is the gift of deification confess the Arian teaching. It is because the Son is divine our gift of adoption is also divine and does not come from a created source but from the divine Son of God.
Fourth thesis
In the Divine Liturgy we do not receive a human body united with the divinity. We have our human bodies and receiving an extra human body like our body is not a great advantage at all.
We receive the Son of God our God Emmanuel when we receive his body and blood. This body has been the immortal food of the church for the last 2,000 years and will continue to be so till the Lord come in glory. Therefore those who deny that the humanity of our Lord was not deified and became the source of eternal life are Nestorians as some of them said, "that our Lord and God said take eat this is my body and this is my divinity." Their objection that the divine nature cannot be eaten is truth but used for an evil purpose which is to dent that we in the great Mystery receive:
a) Eternal life
b) Resurrection from the inner death waiting for the resurrection on the last day.
c) Forgiveness of sins
d) Unity with the divine Trinity
e) Becoming the living body of Christ the church according to the common saying by the saints, (John Chrysostom and Augustine) the Eucharist makes the church the body of Christ.
Let those who deny deification tell us openly that the above gifts from A to E are created and not the direct out pouring of the life of God through his Son and in the Holy Spirit.
Fifth thesis
We do not receive the only the gifts of the Holy Spirit but also the Holy Spirit himself in order to know and live the holy Christian life. Those who deny our deification have not read the words of the baptismal Liturgy of all the Orthodox Churches and in particular the words that are used in the Anointing with the holy Chrism. Among these words in the Coptic Liturgy where there is no reference to the gifts of the Holy Spirit but all the words point to the Person of the Holy Spirit are;
a) immortal unction
b) Unction of eternal life
c) Holy Unction and unbroken Seal
Let those who deny that the Holy Spirit read the words of St Cyril of Alexandria and see for themselves what is lost under the fear of Islam
In his Thesaurus, after recalling that the Holy Spirit sanctifies the heavenly spirits, our holy father continues:
"This same sanctifying power, which proceeds from the essence of the Father and which perfects the imperfect, we call the Holy Spirit. And it is obviously superfluous for the creature to be sanctified by some intermediary since the love of mankind of God does not disdain stooping down to the smallest of beings and sanctifying them by the Holy Spirit, all being His work... If the Holy Spirit does not work in us through Himself autourgei if He is not by nature what we understand Him, if it is by participation that He is filled with holiness from the divine essence, and if He only helps transmit to us the grace that has been given to Him, it is manifest that the grace of the Holy Spirit is administered to us by a creature, which is not true. For the law is through Moses or the angels; grace and truth, on the contrary, are through our Savior. It is therefore through Himself that the Spirit acts in us, truly sanctifying us, uniting us with Himself by contact with Him enoun hmas eautw dia ths pros auto sunafeis and making us partakers of the divine nature.'
Thes. Trin ass. 33 PG 75:597
In a passage from the seventh dialogue on the Trinity St Cyril is even more explicit.
A. Are we not saying that on earth humankind has been made in the image of God?
B. Surely
A. Is it not the Spirit who gives us the divine image and, like a seal, imprints on us the super-terrestrial (lit. above the cosmos) beauty to uperkosmion kallos?
B. But not as God, he says, only as a minister of the divine grace.
A. Is it therefore not Himself, but the grace which, through Him, is imparted to us?
B. It seems.
A. Then it would be necessary to call humankind the image of grace rather than the image of God. But when they were established in being, they were formed like God, the breath of life having been breathed into them. After losing their holiness.. They were not called back to the original and ancient beauty in a way different from the beginning. Indeed, Christ breathed upon the holy apostles saying: "Receive the Holy Spirit,".. If the grace given by Him was separate from the essence of the Spirit, why does the blessed Moses not clearly say that, after having made the living being, the Demiurge of the universe breathed grace into this one by the breath of life? And does not Christ say to us: Receive grace by the ministry of the Holy Spirit? Now the first says: breath of life. This means that the nature of the God is real life, if it is true that we live, we move, and we exist in it. In its turn, the voice of the Savior says: Holy Spirit. This is the same Spirit whom, in truth, He makes indwell and whom He brings into the souls of the believers, by whom and in whom He changes them into the original form, that is to say, into Himself, into His own likeness by means of sanctification, renewing us in that way to the archetype of the image, namely, the nature of the Father, and the Son. But the complete and nature similitude omoiwsis of the Son is the Spirit. Configured to Him by sanctification, we are shaped just like the very form omrfhof God. This is what the word of the apostle teaches us:
"My children," he exclaims, "whom I beget once again, until Christ be formed in you." Now He is formed by the Spirit, who through Himself restores us according to God. Since then we are formed according to Christ, who is Himself indeed engraved and reproduced in us by the Spirit, as if by someone who is physically like Him ws di omoiou fusikws tou pveumatos the Spirit is God—He who makes like God, not as by a ministerial grace, but by giving Himself to the righteous one in the participation of the divine nature.
B. I have nothing to correct in what has just been said.
A. We are called, and we are, temples of God, and even gods. Why? Question the adversaries whether we actually partake only of a grace, bare and devoid of hypostasis eper esmen alhqws filhs kai anupostatou caritos metocoi But it is not so. For we are temples of the Spirit, who exists and subsists; because of
Him, we are also called gods insofar as, by our union with Him, we have entered into communion with the divine and ineffable nature. If the Spirit who deifies qeopoioun us through Himself is actually foreign and separate, as to essence, from the divine nature, then we have been defrauded of our hope, assuming for ourselves who knows what vain glory. How, indeed, would we then still be gods and temples of God, according to Scripture, by the Spirit who is in us? For how would the one who is deprived of being God confer this capacity on others? But we are in reality temples and gods.... The divine Spirit is therefore not of an essence different from that of God."
Dial Trin 7 PG 75:1088b – 1089d
What preoccupies St Cyril in this text is the proof of the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. The process of our divinization interests him only insofar as is able to serve him as an effective weapon against the those who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit . The latter acknowledged with all the believers that the sanctification which Christianity provides is deification. Starting from this common conviction, Cyril argues in this way: It is the Holy Spirit who divinizes us through Himself. Of course nothing created could do this. Therefore the Spirit is truly God. In order to give this argument the maximum convincing force, our theologian excludes any intermediary from the deifying action, any grace which would act separately from the person of the Holy Spirit and would thus be "empty and deprived of hypostasis."
Please notice that I have selected this text because it reflects the same words of the invocation of the Holy Spirit in the Coptic Liturgy of St Cyril, "Send down from your holy place … and from your ruling throne of glory the Paraclete your Holy Spirit who exists as Person Hypostasis …who acts for the sanctification of those whom he loves and not as a servant .."
George Bebawi
Robert Show
Beshir M Beshir
Friday, March 02, 2007