Partakers of the Divine Nature

Peter writes a sentence that would get a man investigated in most evangelical churches: "Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust." (2 Peter 1:4). Partakers of the divine nature. Not visitors to it, not admirers of it. Partakers. The early church built an entire doctrine of salvation on that phrase and was not remotely nervous about it. Most of us have never heard a sermon on it, and the reason is worth examining, because the sentence is not marginal. It sits in the New Testament, and it says what it says.

The Fathers said it in language that will make you flinch

Irenaeus, around AD 180, writing against the gnostics: the Word of God "became what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself." Athanasius, in the fourth century, put it in the sentence everyone quotes and few finish: "He became man that we might become God." Gregory of Nazianzus wrote of being made God, and Augustine, in a Christmas sermon, said God became man so that man might become God.

These are not obscure figures on the edge of the church. That is Irenaeus, who learned from Polycarp, who learned from John. That is Athanasius, who attended Nicaea as a young deacon and then spent the following decades, and five exiles, holding the line against the claim that Christ was a creature. The men most responsible for defending the Son's full deity are the same men who said this about us, and they did not think the two claims were in tension. They thought the second was the whole point of the first.

What they meant, stated carefully

They never meant that a creature becomes God. Every one of them would have called that blasphemy, and several of them spent their lives fighting it in another form. The distinction they held, later stated sharply in the East, is between God's essence and God's energies: what He is in Himself, which no creature can enter, and what He gives of Himself, which He genuinely gives.

So the claim is not that the gap closes. It is that God really shares His own life with creatures, and that the sharing changes them permanently. Paul says the same thing without the vocabulary: "But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the LORD." (2 Corinthians 3:18). Changed. Into the same image. From glory to glory. And the destination is named: "For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren." (Romans 8:29), conformed to the image of His Son. John says it plainest of all: "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." (1 John 3:2).

Christ Himself prays for it the night before He dies: "And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me." (John 17:22-23). The glory given. I in them. Made perfect in one. That is not a metaphor for good behaviour.

The counterfeit, which is why the doctrine frightens people

It frightens people because there is a version of it that damns, and it is the oldest lie on record. "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:5). Ye shall be as gods. The serpent offered deification too.

Which means the difference is not in the destination but in the route, and the route is the whole thing. Here is how the two separate, every time.

The serpent's version is seized. It is taken by reaching, against a command, on the promise that God is holding out. The true version is given. Peter's word is partakers of promises, and Paul's verb is passive: we are changed, we are conformed, we do not climb.

The serpent's version makes you independent. Eyes opened, knowing good and evil for yourself, no longer needing to be told. The true version makes you more dependent, not less: a branch in a vine, and "without me ye can do nothing."

The serpent's version produces shame and hiding, immediately, in the next verse. The true version produces the opposite, an open face, unveiled, beholding.

And the serpent's version costs nothing at the time and everything afterwards. The true version runs straight through a cross, because the way God chose to share His life with us was by taking ours, including the dying part.

Anyone can test a teaching against those four. Seized or given, independent or dependent, hiding or unveiled, cheap or crucified. Every counterfeit in the history of religion, from the garden to the self-help shelf, fails at least three.

Ye are gods

There is one more text, and it is usually handled badly by everybody. Jesus, accused of blasphemy for making Himself God's Son, answers, "Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?" (John 10:34), quoting the psalm: "I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High." (Psalm 82:6).

The psalm is addressed to unjust judges, and the sentence right after it is that they will die like men. So it is not a promise of divinity; the point in context is that these judges bore an office of God and abused it. But notice what Jesus does with it. He does not say the word is too strong. He says Scripture itself uses that language of creatures who received God's word, and if it can be said of them, the charge against Him collapses. Whatever else the verse settles, it settles that the Bible is less nervous about this vocabulary than we are.

Why most of us never heard it

Partly the Reformation's proper fear of anything that sounded like earning, and this can be made to sound like a ladder if you are not careful. Partly a legal frame for salvation that, once it became the whole story rather than one true picture inside a larger one, left no obvious room for a doctrine about being changed rather than acquitted. And partly the counterfeit itself: once you have watched enough people claim to be little gods, you flinch at the words, and the flinch is understandable.

But the cost of the flinch is high. Salvation shrinks to a verdict filed, when Scripture keeps describing it as a life shared. The three tenses collapse into one. And the ordinary means, prayer, the table, the Scriptures, the gathered church, look like maintenance rather than what they actually are, which is how a branch stays in a vine while sap does its work.

Where this lands

God did not come to improve us. He came to share His own life with creatures who had lost it, and to bring that sharing to a completion we cannot yet picture. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." The right response to that sentence is not caution. It is the poverty of spirit that opens an empty hand, and then keeps it open.

Related: What the Word Says, and What We Believe It Means, The Oldest Lie, The Vine, The Three Tenses of Salvation, Sanctification, Adoption, What Did the Cross Do?, The Character of God, and Athanasius. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of Christ are marked in purple. Irenaeus is quoted from Against Heresies V, preface (public-domain Ante-Nicene Fathers translation); Athanasius from On the Incarnation 54; the essence and energies distinction is stated as the Eastern tradition later formulated it, and is described here rather than defended.