Deification Through the Cross

The topic of deification/divinization/theosis has been "hot" for well over 15 years by this point, with new books appearing almost every year. I have documented and discussed many of them on here in the past decade. Late this year we shall have another book by a prominent and important scholar, an author whom I have interviewed on here before, whose voice as a Melkite priest within the contemporary academy is a rare and important one: Khaled Anatolios, Deification through the Cross: An Eastern Christian Theology of Salvation (Eerdmans, November 2020), 500pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

It is commonly claimed that Western Christianity teaches salvation as deliverance from sin through Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross, while Eastern Christianity teaches salvation as deliverance from death—and as deification—through Christ’s incarnation. But is it really true that there is no normative, unified doctrine of salvation to be found in Scripture and tradition?

Theologian Khaled Anatolios, deeply grounded in both East and West, here expounds a soteriology that speaks deeply to all Christians. He argues that both Western and Eastern perspectives are needed, and especially that Eastern theology and liturgy, contrary to Western misperceptions, hold cross, resurrection, and glorification together in an exemplary way. Anatolios uses the phrase “doxological contrition” to suggest that the truth of salvation is found both in Jesus’s perfect glorification of God and in his representative repentance for humanity’s sinful rejection of its original calling to participate in the life of the Holy Trinity.

Deification through the Cross is a salutary rebuttal of the postmodern fragmentation that assumes no single, normative soteriology can apply globally. Anatolios systematically expounds an integrated soteriology, which he then puts into dialogue with various perspectives, including liberation theology, Girardian theory, and penal substitution. All who seek to understand and teach “the joy of our salvation” will find indispensable help in this magisterial retrieval of an often-misunderstood doctrine.