Andrew Guffey

As I was entering the Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity program at the University of Virginia, I was told another entering student would be working on theosis or deification in Paul, and I thought, "That's weird."  I hope I can be forgiven such a dismissive reaction, since my interest in Paul at the time was mostly to do with the so-called apocalyptic Paul.  In Joseph Kitagawa's foreword to Peter Brown's Haskell Lectures ( The Cult of the Saints ), he observes, "A number of graduate students remarked to me that at the beginning of the five lectures, they had no interest in the cult of the saints at all; by their conclusion, they had more interest in that subject than in their own area of research!" (x).  I have occasionally felt the same about the work of my colleague at UVa, David Litwa .  I have already mentioned that his book, We Are Being Transformed:  Deification in Paul's Soteriology (BZNW 187; Goettingen: de Gruyter), came out earlier thi...

A belated congratulations to my friend and colleague, David Litwa on the publication of his book . I read parts while it was in progress, and it is a very learned volume. Litwa's approach is certainly more historical than most approaches to deification, but precisely therein lies its value. If you are interested in Paul, I recommend you read it. I will try to post a review in the near future.

"It is a commonplace to allude to the Platonism of the Fathers in connexion with these doctrines [of the cosmic body]. But instead of invoking the Platonic doctrine of essential being, we should do better to account for them--to the extent that they are dependent at all on a philosophic basis--by looking rather to the Stoic conception of universal being. There are many expressions in Marcus Aurelius, for example, regarding the integration of the individual in the concrete totality of the cosmos, and still more concerning the reciprocal immanence of those who are participators in the Nous . But all this is of secondary importance, and we should beware of adopting the practice known in accountancy as double-entry, as so many Protestant historians do in dealing with the Fathers and the Bible. For in the Fathers they will see nothing but Hellenistic borrowings and influence, whereas in St. Paul and St. John they will find nothing but 'pure revelation' or at least 'pure rel...