The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
Introduction xv
East only, she maintains, because "the Latin tradition, under the influence of Augustine, tended to set an unbridgeable gulf between man and God by way of their doctrine of the fall and original sinfulness."10 Augustine is once again presented as denying humanity's possible divinization in Christ and thereby charged as the Western proponent of humanity's supposed disparagement and lack of union with God. Given the rarity of deification language within Augustine's writings, the position of Mausbach and those who have leveraged similar conclusions is certainly understandable. However, a fuller assessment demands that we situate Augustine's understanding of the concept of deification within the wider framework of his theology. To achieve this goal, I propose two main theses.
The first is that, while the limitations of Augustine's approach will be highlighted and examined, the Bishop of Hippo strongly advocates a theology of deification in a manner hitherto unappreciated. He uses the term deificare both in number and in ways unprecedented in the Christian West. Furthermore, the reality of humanity's deification is clearly present in ways and in places where the term deification fails to appear. Augustine's ability to use the term deification without defense or comment follows from his wider and consistent understanding of the nature of Christian salvation. Life in Christ is ultimately a creature's participation in the divine life and the renovation of the Christian believer by the Holy Spirit in and through Christ's church. If we were to simply take the eighteen instances of deificare, we would suffer from limiting deification
10. Ibid. Such facile accusations abound. In almost any popular history of Christian theology wherever deification is addressed, Augustine is the foil opposing the conviction that human salvation can be formulated as theosis and godliness: e.g., Alan Johnson and Robert Webber, What Christians Believe (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishers, 1989): "Deification is a process of salvation through which God heals the wounded sinner, bringing her or him more and more into the wholeness of being like God. This Eastern view of salvation as process stands in contrast to the Western view, which is more punctiliar and stresses forgiveness as an act of God. Let us examine the Western view as it is articulated in Augustine," 304.