The End For Which God Made Us

“The patristic concept of theosis is the most precise and compendious possible evocation of the end for which God creates us,” writes Robert Jenson in a characteristically dense essay in The Catholicity of the Reformation. It doesn’t imply that the Creator-creature distinction is somehow erased; that difference is “indeed absolute and eternal.” 

Far from compromising the Creator-creature distinction, theosis is premised precisely on the difference between the infinite God and His creatures: “Precisely because God is the infinite Creator there can be no limit to the modes and degrees of creatures’ promised participation in his life” (3). If God were finite, we’d run out of new depths of knowing love. Because He is without limit, there is no limit to the fresh ways we may love and know Him. 

Jenson, as we’d expect, emphasizes that “it is of God’s life that we here have to think. Our end is not participation in an abstract essence of Godhead, but in the love that the Father, Son, and Spirit have among themselves.” We are—every thing is—as “anticipation of its own participation in God’s being.” We are nothing except the form now of what we will be when we see Him face-to-face. And there is no koinonia now except one founded and defined in the koinonia that, under the traditional label perichoresis, is the life of the triune God” (3). Each hypostasis in this fellowship is “real as and only as the poles of that fellowship,” but in this way “the triune hypostases subsist genuinely, as identifies capable of fellowship.” Again, the Creator-creature distinction is the basis for the possibility of our theopoiesis: “As the communion that is God, their communion is at once infinitely intimate and infinitely comprehensive; therefore they can even make room among them for others. And by God’s free choice, that room is opened to created persons, and the church is taken to be those persons” (3).

Since things are now as anticipations of what they will be, the church is presently an anticipation of the entire assembly of the saints. And as the hypostases are only as poles of a fellowship, so churches are only as communions communing with the larger communion of the saints. As Jenson puts it, “each local fellowship can know itself as the one church of God only in fellowship with all those other fellowships that know themselves in the same way and with which it will at the end be joined” (4).

Trinity is the ground for theosis; Trinitarian theosis is in turn the ground for a catholic ecclesiology.