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To make sense of deification, we must start with God's words at Creation: "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness" (Gen. 1:26).

In Orthodox teaching, "image" and "likeness" are not the same: the first is gift, the second, goal. With these words, God distinguished what human beings were from what they were to become. Adam and Eve bore the image of God, but they were to grow into the divine likeness. They were to live in communion with God, walk in his ways, serve him, tend his creation, and love him and each other and the children they were to produce. If they did, they would grow in holiness, righteousness, and love—becoming ever more like God, who would bless them with the eternal life that belongs only to him.

From an Orthodox perspective, then, the serpent's temptation was especially insidious because it offered an illicit shortcut to God's good intention. The serpent assured Adam and Eve that they would become "like God" by eating the forbidden fruit (Gen. 3:5). The question is not whether Adam and Eve were to become like God, but how they would do that. By disobeying God's command, they fell into death, as God had warned. In his mercy, God promised salvation through a deliverer, but for Eastern Orthodoxy, salvation is less about rescue (though it is about that) and more about return. Christ rescues us from our enemies and redeems us to God, so that we get back on the right track to becoming like him.

In the ancient Hellenistic world in which the church was born, divinization in some form or another was a common way of describing humanity's ultimate goal. The leaders of the ancient church in the East seized on this familiar concept but filled it with new content. Whereas the usual notion entailed being absorbed into God like a drop in an ocean—losing consciousness and individuality forever—Eastern church leaders insisted that in deification we are made like God yet remain distinct from him. The way they put it is that we experience his "energies" but do not share his "essence." This distinction is crucial, because it clarifies that for the Orthodox, becoming like God is not the same as becoming identical with God. We can never become the same as our Creator (the Uncreated), though we can take on crucial aspects of his character and being.

The story of Jesus' transfiguration is a key text for Eastern Orthodoxy. All three synoptic Gospels tell the story. Significantly, in the verses immediately preceding it, Jesus tells the disciples that some of them will not die before they see the kingdom of God "coming in power"—one of the common ways the Gospels speak of the fullness of salvation in Christ. In a scene thoroughly focused on God's promised salvation, Jesus is transfigured with a blinding light. As the Last Adam, he lived up to God's original purpose for humanity and became like God, for "God is light" (1 John 1:5). What the three disciples saw, Orthodoxy says, was a manifestation of what will one day be true for all who are in Christ—a holy people characterized by pure light and love.

As one Orthodox leader put it: "We become by grace what God is by nature."

The Wesleys, as noted earlier, appreciated the Greek patristic writers, and Charles Wesley's hymns overflow with vivid language pointing to this final glory:

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October 2008, Vol. 52, No. 10