Called to Be the Children of God: The Catholic Theology of Human Deification by Carl Olson & David Vincent Meconi

Author:Carl Olson & David Vincent Meconi [Olson, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681497037
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2016-05-06T05:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Among Christians, the renewed interest in deification seems to hold ecumenical hope. For over a century, Roman Catholics have been engaged in a ressourcement—a “return to the sources” of the Christian faith represented by the writings of the Church Fathers. As the narrative goes, the West lost contact with some of these sources as time passed, and elements of their theologies went underemphasized. In particular, the West has sought a reengagement with the thought of the Eastern Church Fathers. This reengagement with the East is most famously represented in the work of Roman Catholic theologians Yves Congar, Louis Bouyer, Jean Danielou, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, and has been reiterated recently in Orientale lumens call for Catholics “to deepen their knowledge of the spiritual traditions of the Fathers and Doctors of the Christian East”.79

The East has also returned to its sources through what is commonly referred to as a “Neo-patristic synthesis”—a term and call initiated by Georges Florovsky. For the most part, it has involved a recovery of Eastern patristic sources, but is increasingly re-receiving Western authors.80 It is hoped that this Eastern turn in the West, and perhaps vice versa, will result in healing the breach of 1054 through a gradual recovery of the (supposedly) unified mind of the first millennium. Then the Church, according to the well-known metaphor of Vyacheslav Ivanov, can once again “breathe with both lungs”.

The renewed emphasis on deification is one of the first fruits of these recovery efforts, and serves a symbolic role because of its centrality in the Christian system of doctrine. Hence, one of the purposes of this present volume is to show that Roman Catholic theology has always affirmed the idea of deification, even if the doctrine was not always formally emphasized. John Henry Newman was both a forerunner and catalyst of the modern ressourcement movement in the West, which makes his understanding of deification particularly significant. Like the Fathers, he was a “prophet of great truths” who returned to the Eastern Fathers of the Church before it was en vogue.81 His appropriation of the Eastern Fathers, and the centrality of deification in their thought, led him to the Roman Catholic Church, which he saw as “the nearest approximation in fact to the Church of the Fathers”.82 The Eastern character of Newman’s thought began to influence the shape of Catholic theology in the years leading up to the Second Vatican Council, leading some to term Newman the “Father of the Second Vatican Council”.

But the ecumenical value of Newman’s recourse to deification goes even deeper. As he demonstrated in his own life, the indwelling of Christ was not only a doctrine for Christians to affirm, but the very principle of their life, thought, and action. No one has recognized this as well as George Dragas. He showed that Newman’s thought was patristic primarily because he sought to “appropriate the vision and mind of the Orthodox Fathers”, which was rooted in their shared participation in Christ’s life.83 Such was the

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