On Not Shirking Deification

The title of my essay turns on a little wordplay, exploiting the two meanings of shirk. The most common meaning of shirk is to evade an obligation, especially in a devious manner.1 I will argue that Christian theology has an obligation to affirm a high soteriology, a doctrine of salvation that describes not just a repair project or a rearrangement of created elements, but one that rather envisions an exaltation to transformational fellowship with God. “Not shirking deification” in this sense means rising to the demands of a soteriology developed in a fully theological perspective. But the word shirk also happens to have come into English independently, by way of Arabic. In Islamic thought, shirk is the sin of associating something creaturely with the majesty of the one God. Shirk avoidance guards a principle of jealous monotheism. These two meanings of shirk are conveniently suggestive for situating the task of Christian soteriology, which takes place according to a definite index of obligations. Soteriology is obligated to reach high enough, but not too high. It must track the relocation of believers to the divine neighborhood, without trespassing onto the private property of God. Deification can neither be shirked nor commit shirk. The Oxford Handbook of Deification sets out to be a significant landmark in the field of “deification studies,” a term introduced by the editors in their opening theses (1-4). The Handbook succeeds decisively in every way. The contributors are authoritative, their chapters are carefully focused, and the range of topics is encyclopedic. The entire project is intelligently designed, cohering persuasively under the editing of Paul Gavrilyuk, Andrew Hofer, and Matthew Levering. It is framed by biblical sections (Chapters 1 to 5) and systematic considerations (Chapters 33 to 44) which carry the main burden of defining and theorizing deification. But filling out the volume's center, at nearly two thirds of the page count, is a generous portion of historical chapters. The range of coverage makes the Handbook a wonderfully informative reference work for grasping in detail what deification has meant across a diverse array of cultures, traditions, and theological sensibilities. Especially after the patristic and medieval material, the volume opens out onto a surprisingly vast panorama of sources: Palamites, Lutherans, Reformed scholastics, Anglicans, Pietists, and Wesleyans; Byzantine and Russian figures; Barth and neo-Thomists and contemporary Greek Orthodox thinkers. It is within this range of soteriologies that we can actually pursue the question of how well deification has done as an instrument for meeting the obligations of soteriology. If we trace it out through all the varied idioms of vernacular theologies, how has it served? This helpful category of vernacular theologies surfaces in the eighteenth chapter, “Western Vernacular Mystics.” This one chapter is itself a mini-survey, co-authored by a team of theologians (John Arblaster, Rob Faesen, S.J., and Louise Nelstrop) with expertise in Middle Dutch, Picard/Old French, and Middle English writings. The major figures covered include Hadewijch, Ruusbroec, Marguerite Porete, Richard Rolle, and Julian of Norwich. “Vernacular mystics” is a term widely used in recent historical writing on spirituality, having been coined by Bernard McGinn (quoted on 283) to help pick out and highlight a distinct category of medieval theology operating alongside scholastic and monastic theologies. This stream of spiritual writing is vernacular in the direct sense of being produced in regional or national languages rather than in Latin, but also in the extended sense that its authorship is more diverse, its readership broader, and its alignment with authoritative patterns of speech looser. The relative freedom of speech among vernacular mystics means that they often write about the matter of deification without using the word. Indeed, there is a wondrous resourcefulness in their vocabularies: Believers are said “to grow to be God with God” (284), to “live without solace” (285), to “become with Him all that He himself is” (285), “to be one spirit with God in love” (288), to die three deaths (291), to experience “annihilating union” (291), to achieve the generosity of “pure charity” (292), and to reach perfection in the higher part of the soul (297). We catch Julian of Norwich in the act of forging new ways of talking as she tries to articulate the reality of her experience: “I saw no difference between God and our substance, but as it were, all God, and yet my understanding took it that our substance is in God: that is to say that God is God, and our substance is a creation within God” (297). Examples could be multiplied. Indeed, examples are multiplied copiously not just in this chapter but across the entire Handbook, which not only theorizes deification but serves up a generous helping of how many ways there are to speak of it. The reader comes away from the survey not only impressed with the variety and diversity displayed, but with a strong sense that even what is gathered here must only be a partial report. Having opened the door to such a manifold witness to deification, this project seems to have representatively opened the door to the entire Christian tradition and all its sub-traditions. It seems that all along nearly everybody has been talking about deification without talking about deification, that is, by speaking in diverse tongues and finding their own words to signify the thing. But this expansion of forms of speech brings to a crisis the question whether everybody is in fact talking about the same thing. Of course it will not do to insist that deification is only being spoken of when the word itself is being used. That would be a crass collapse of word and concept. Still, as the Handbook documents a simultaneous proliferation of both, it is worth considering whether word and concept may sometimes interfere with each other. Consider the temptations of jingle and jangle. Educational psychologists concerned with assessment have identified these two fallacies2 that bedevil attempts to measure learning. Jingle is a mere verbal resemblance that is taken to be a real similarity. Two distinct things acquire the same name, a name which “sounds the same, and thus we come to treat it as a single concept.” They have the same jingle. Jangle, on the other hand, is “the use of two separate words or expressions covering in fact the same basic situation, but sounding different, as though they were in truth different.”3 In the context of education, theorists may talk about “achievement” and “intelligence” as if they are different things, only to realize that every method of measurement they devise is always testing for the same thing under different names. “They have different ‘jangles,’ and thus we treat them as if they were different in truth.”4 But as a result, errors of analysis creep in, not just in tagging and counting, but in theorizing: researchers are fooled by their ears into pondering imponderables like how to relate achievement and intelligence. The jingle and jangle fallacies are evidently special forms of the intellectual errors that Francis Bacon called “idols of the marketplace” (idola fori). Bacon called these “the most troublesome of all—idols which have crept into the understanding through the alliances of words and names. For men believe that their reason governs words; but it is also true that words react on the understanding.”5 In deification studies, it is difficult to know whether theologians are most at risk of the fallacy of the same jingle or the fallacy of the different jangle. The case for same jingle is that two or more different vernaculars of high soteriology might be coded as both referring to deification. But perhaps all these different ways of describing salvation should not be grouped together at all, being in reality more different than they are alike. In that case, the same jingle fallacy could be misleading deification studies into treating as identical what are in fact fundamentally diverse phenomena. This is especially problematic since the decision to classify them all under the title deification is markedly recent. The hypothesis of same jingle would account for the sudden rise and growth of deification studies, which might be diagnosed as inflation. The hypothesis that a same jingle fallacy is at work would also account for the difficulty of talking about deification in a wide variety of different settings. Theologians often start out thinking they agree with each other about deification because they agree to use the same word, and only later discover that they disagree so fundamentally about its character that they have in fact been talking past each other. They need to come to terms. On the other hand, the case for different jangle is that when we consider all these different vernacular expressions of high soteriology, we are at risk of considering them disjunctive from each other simply because they sound different. On this view, a vast number of Christian sub-traditions have already been talking past each other for a long time, misled by different jangles. Deification studies, historically considered, would then constitute a programmatic correction by reclassification. Where theorists might have been misled into pondering the complex ways that Lutheran pietism, Wesleyan perfectionism, and Orthodox hesychasm were related to each other, they can now recognize that they are in fact not so much related as identical—though expressed in different vernaculars. What the range of The Oxford Handbook of Deification makes clear is that disputes about the word deification are not merely a distraction or a preliminary issue, but are in fact baked into the discussion. The editors acknowledge this programmatically in the Introduction: “Term/concept distinction plays an important hermeneutical role in deification studies” (3). But it is in the long series of historical chapters that we see just how deeply ingrained terminological variation is, and how deep it cuts. This definitive handbook does not resolve the issue, because the issue is not one to be resolved and moved on from; it is a permanent fixture of business as usual for deification studies. Deification serves as a historical and terminological tool for elevating soteriology to a greater height. To speak of a high soteriology is to establish a contrast with a low soteriology, which can be described as one that presents salvation as nothing more than a kind of reconfiguration of the elements of creaturely life. On this view, God intervenes to reorder habits and actions, recalibrating them to each other in a way that reorients the fallen creature toward its natural goals. Virtues and vices are rearranged; loves are placed in their right hierarchy of order. Such a soteriology may include much wisdom and be of great value for the lives of individuals and societies, and it even includes a reference to divine power as the agent of change. Because a rearrangement soteriology involves a certain kind of transformation, it ranks higher than an abstractly forensic soteriology that simply exhausts salvation in considering it as a changed legal status. And even a sheerly forensic soteriology, since it considers that change as being a change with reference to God, ranks higher than the kind of popular-level soteriology that leaves the present life entirely unchanged but posits a new afterlife destination: heaven or hell. Salvation reduced to nothing but a change of future destination is in grave danger of being stated in a disconnected way that is indistinguishable from mere mythologizing. There are other varieties of low soteriology at large, in many vernaculars. William Sherlock (1639–1707) reacted against Puritan piety by reducing soteriology to a kind of political submission to the precepts given by Jesus: “Let us all fetch our Religion from the plain Doctrines and Precepts of the Gospel of Christ, not from any pretended Personal Acquaintance with him.”6 What all of these low soteriologies omit, however, is a transformation that goes deeper than the rearrangement of human capacities. They omit, in fact, God from a central place in their descriptions of salvation. That is, they omit God as the telos, object, and personal horizon of salvation. By contrast, high soteriologies make the character and presence of God central to their view of salvation, calibrating human change to the divine reality. High soteriologies almost invariably are carried out by way of retrieval, that mode of theologizing that regathers classic intellectual and spiritual resources after a period of neglect or culpable suppression. And their formal disposition almost always takes on a trinitarian shape, gathering the Spirit and Son into the divine work that brings believers ultimately to the Father. The more exalted and transformative the soteriology, the more God-oriented it will be. And the more God-oriented it is, the more trinitarian, especially when it is elaborated by way of retrieval. This is the high soteriology to which theology is obligated, with a responsibility that it must not shirk. But the second sense of shirk obligates theology not to pitch its soteriology so high that it transgresses the creator-creature distinction, encroaching on the divine essence. This obligation can be hard to observe, but here again, the Handbook supplies methodological accounts in its early chapters and a generous helping of examples in its central chapters. If the rule is “no trespassing,” are there theological traditions which we can definitely charge as guilty of trespass? If trespassers have existed, they have been confined to the margins or localized in the effusions of idiosyncratic enthusiasts. In tradition after tradition, we see high soteriology worked out with a lively sense that the upper boundary is not to be transgressed. The Greek tradition provides the all-important exchange formula “God became man so man could become God” (a leitmotif cited repeatedly in its multiple forms throughout the Handbook), but the careful incarnationalism of the first half always acts as a restraint on the second half. The implicit control built into the formula is that God became human without ceasing to be divine, requiring us to take the verb “became” in a technical sense, as a term of art carefully delineated along Chalcedonian lines. Consequently, the deification in the second half of the formula operates according to a limited sense of what becoming can mean. Further, when the divine-human exchange formula reaches its full elaboration in the synthesizing formulations of John of Damascus, it is accompanied and safeguarded by the limiting formula “according to our The proliferation of vernacular deification theologies in the Handbook also The wide perhaps resources the project of that deification talk does not its distinct that its own way to a high soteriology must also its own for limiting its The fact that a variety of theologies of deification are here is especially since so many expressions of high soteriology a for being about theologies of or of the the Handbook might make toward in deification studies is the generous way it documents and every tradition seems to its own forms of there is reason to that theologies of deification, as they become more and may to a and of the doctrine that would be for all For an important from the Wesleyan tradition, does the work of this we are of the divine and become like God, do we not become more than one of makes the of is like the and yet it is not the of is not the and yet it is like the The is the The Christian may be like God, and not God, as a is like the and yet not the when a kind of is about how to pursue a high soteriology without that to in the question of what to this high soteriology. The rise and of deification studies that this is the that has as the and that it will to establish itself in in The Oxford Handbook of Deification an both in of the of high soteriology and the for talking about it. On the we could just a Oxford Handbook of which programmatically from the by the It would be a and But more to the it would be a volume and a since the present handbook high soteriology as the Christian On the we might also a handbook that a high soteriology but on to to it by the term now as It would be a kind of Oxford Handbook of It would not be as as our volume of low soteriology. Still, in the present of it would be for the not so much a as an it is not the business of this handbook to there has long been to much use of the of deification, even in traditions a high soteriology to the has deification any of its built on words for and so to sound and to a number of have accounts of how the became this work does not so much the as a partial of its reality. does this of though it is at how a on soteriology, fully account for long and recent the of deification, is an in and It has for the most up into from but has in scholastic settings. To in a about deification is to take up the burden of to how are speaking these in and The word deification, not in to be on the and the always involves at one of and to of the many things not we do not reach with God, God, into God, or to be The of deification the of the that to present to the though there is biblical for talking about deification cited are and as in John these often in the Handbook), it is neither a from these to contemporary nor does deification to and The Handbook of course has taken the measure of all these and It has worked them into both its and its extended survey of vernacular of the most significant by the of this definitive and reference work is that it the fact that of this are not things to be and for all, but are built into deification There may be a at work for make the to deification high soteriology, and that has to do with the character of the become is a thing to and theologians may to On the other hand, theologians may be for the right formula to up an and their For the of the may be an but for a This the biblical of soteriology into all, with that would and in need of careful if they were not so to We a term that the of a and the of divine We are as and does not from words to us our than Believers are that God has in way out with we not being here that and have been to and that the has been For have the that deification is helpful because of its or deification serves a kind of the biblical into its it great things and us to on It is worth that John of the “according to our to the way we as well as to our salvation our soteriologies high without them too high is an obligation on us by and our hermeneutical about the basic of Deification a and case for out this what the took in discussion. about to say that believers are of God, has to devise a for might that believers from the of God the in truth and reach an with the That would to the of created since too is said to be of God. that the natural Son them power to become of God, the of and goes on without danger to “They were of This is to the of toward them since as it were, what is to God the into a natural and what is to because of toward This is avoidance of shirk on both it “the of but because we are with a trinitarian for The by himself in the place we can and our character as of God from on the word or the Greek word we might this the of or But that no matter how well it brings trinitarian into the of soteriology, is more and than the term which has now itself as the of high soteriology in deification, the of which is here to