Spring 2024 · Vol. 53 No. 1 · pp. 109–113
Book Review
Triadosis: Union with the Triune God
Eduard Borysov. Cambridge, UK: James Clark, 2019. 228 pages.
In Triadosis, Eduard Borysov contributes to a growing set of conversations in contemporary Protestant theological and biblical study that engages the concept of theosis, that is, the notion that the end of being a Christian is deification, becoming godlike, union with God, or even becoming God. His stated goal is “to assess how the concepts of theosis and the Trinity can inform and transform the traditional anthropocentric reading of Paul’s soteriology into one that is theocentric or even trinity-centric” (2). One key piece in the background of this project is the p. 110 “New Finnish School,” which has been principally concerned to develop a new interpretation of Luther’s teaching on justification in conversation with Orthodox theology. This New Finnish interpretation of Luther argues that his concept of justification is insufficiently understood in terms of the forensic declaration of righteousness imputed to the believer; indeed it contains notions of transformation in believers much more akin to theosis. Borysov’s goal with Triadosis, then, is to bring the fruits of this Finnish theological scholarship to bear more directly upon the study of Paul himself, and thus help reframe related conversations around justification in St. Paul that stand behind this Lutheran theological heritage.
I say he brings it to bear on the study of Paul, since, although Borysov’s objective is explicitly to offer a transformed reading of Paul, he does not give a sustained reading of any portion of St. Paul’s work itself. He opts instead to offer a critical review of key contemporary readings of theosis in Paul, namely, those of M. David Litwa, Ben C. Blackwell, and Michael J. Gorman. In Borysov’s assessment, each of these authors’ weaknesses points to aspects of historical Christian theology that need further nuance in order to understand Pauline theosis more accurately. In a nutshell, these are as follows: Litwa reads Paul against subsequent Christian tradition in a way that obscures the differences he had from his contemporaries, both Jewish and gentile, and the continuities he had with that later tradition which thereby help illuminate our understanding of him. Blackwell helpfully draws more on Paul’s patristic reception but does so in a way that tends to slip into a kind of “binitarianism” or “bitheism” of Christ and the Father that effaces the role of the Holy Spirit in salvation. This is a problem that Borysov notes is not uncommon in historical critical biblical scholarship but difficult to sustain in a close reading of Paul. Finally, Gorman emphasizes the significance of the tri-unity of God for Paul’s understanding of salvation but makes arguments about God’s essence in support of this that suggest theological positions long opposed by both Reformers and the Orthodox (e.g., patripassianism).
It is with these readings of Paul that Borysov, in fact, ends the book in chapter 5, having attempted to lay groundwork for these criticisms in the preceding chapters. The book’s contribution, then, is really to bring a variety of sources into conversation with one another toward the end of informing his review of those readings, thereby opening up space to look for fruitful connections between Protestant and Orthodox theology that take theosis seriously, i.e., in a way that is genuinely patristic and genuinely trinitarian. He thus lays this groundwork with a selection of early church fathers (chapter 2); the fathers of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin (chapter 3); and one of the most prominent p. 111 Orthodox thinkers of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century, the late Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon (chapter 4).
All of this makes for an admittedly complex structure for the book (4), and it would be excessive to rehearse too many of the manifold constitutive arguments Borysov makes to open up this conversational space. Some key points, in brief: He begins his work looking at patristic authors to highlight the variety and sophistication of thinking about theosis in the early centuries of Christian theology and hoping to add much needed nuance to understandings of theosis in contemporary explorations of the topic in Pauline studies. He offers a heuristic distinction between four basic patristic approaches to theosis, with his favored model based in the writing of the Cappadocian fathers (i.e., Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil of Caesarea), naming it the eponymous triadosis for its thoroughgoing emphasis on the role of each person in the trinity in the deification of the faithful. He proceeds to consider Luther and Calvin both to pick up and affirm the New Finnish School’s arguments about the place of theosis in their theologies of justification, and to suggest there is continuity between the church fathers and the Reformers on the matter, especially with respect to triadosis. And in the lead up to Paul himself, Borysov looks to John Zizioulas for his trinitarian emphasis, his patristic bona fides (over against other similarly “social-trinitarian” theologians), and his representation as an Orthodox theologian in Borysov’s ecumenically oriented project.
The complexity of the project has the ambivalent effect of making it difficult to discern the audience for the work. The book began its life as a dissertation and in this it retains some of that feel. One of Borysov’s most important contributions is his willingness to include post-Apostolic theological witness in a Protestant biblical-theological project as a matter of hermeneutical principle. With this he resists modern biblical scholarship’s tendency to define itself by opposition to early Christian theological reflection and tradition. Whether one is inclined to welcome this or not, Borysov does this self-reflexively, mounting a defense of this approach in the introduction that is worth careful consideration by anyone with personal or ecclesial stakes in the question of how to interpret the Bible.
Most basically, though, Triadosis attempts to bring the notion of theosis, so central in the Orthodox world, to a Protestant audience, much of which remains largely unacquainted with the idea. The popular understanding of Luther’s salvation through faith alone and its implicit—if not explicit—opposition to theological notions of the process and ends of transformation of believers has exercised a certain dominance in Western theology. A fresh look at things in light of Orthodox theology should offer interesting new avenues of inquiry. Moreover, the patristic section p. 112 is extensive and Borysov’s heuristics helpful, and thus it has the potential to provide a useful introduction to the early history of the idea.
Having said that, the book contains a significant number of untransliterated and occasionally untranslated Greek terms. Furthermore, there are technical discussions about sophisticated theological arguments to which the reader will need to have had a substantive introduction to historical theological doctrines. Interested lay readers may find it a bit of a mouthful to chew. Nevertheless, speaking as a reviewer, I warmly welcome Borysov’s effort to open up this conversational space. For scholars interested in its various facets or for Protestant theology buffs with the patience and perhaps a little unsatisfied with the stereotypical Lutheran or Calvinist sola fide soteriology or maybe just curious about patristic or Orthodox theology and theosis, this is probably worth a read. Speaking as a theologian, on the other hand, and specifically an Orthodox one, it raises important questions for me, which I offer by way of concluding comment.
When I began reading, I was anticipating a Protestant theology of theosis for pastors and lay readers that might expand their theological horizon past the terms that have dominated it since the sixteenth century. But Borysov’s book is in some fundamental sense a piece of academic scholarship. His basic modus operandi is to present critical readings of a variety of texts and ideas to argue for a theological opinion he thinks is correct. This is fair enough for a scholarly text, but as theology it raises potentially serious ecclesial questions. For example, in his preference for Cappadocian conceptions of theosis, Borysov separates them from the later thought of Gregory Palamas. Palamas is a saint for the Orthodox, however, and a hero for his defense of medieval Greek monastic practice and experience. I do not want to overstate the case, but I think it fair to say that Orthodox Christianity as we find it today is in a not insignificant sense Palamite. Likewise, in the attempt to argue for a participatory notion of justification in Luther and Calvin, Borysov in turn quite explicitly blames the reduction of the Reformers’ soteriology to a purely forensic notion of justification on subsequent Lutheranism and Calvinism (119). In other words, Borysov builds his common conversation about theosis only by pitting the Cappadocians against the Orthodox and Luther and Calvin against Lutherans and Calvinists. Having endeavored to build a bridge between the New Testament and later tradition, Borysov still seems inclined to open up new chasms in later eras.
Therein lies the rub. Triadosis constitutes an argument about how one should think of theosis within a faith that is for this very reason conceived as opinions about the truths one holds or the things one thinks. There is a profound irony here, though, as the whole point of theosis, as Borysov clearly knows, is that salvation is insufficiently conceived as long as it p. 113 remains only a declaration of status or a forensic requirement fulfilled by thinking a certain thing. Theosis is rather about the adoption of men and women as sons of God conceived as co-heirs with Christ, participants in God, and members of the divine council, and the transformation of the human into the fulness of that role through participation in the life of the church as Christ’s body. If Lutheran, Calvinist, and Orthodox Christians are all part of churches that have lost the proper concept of theosis as definable by such scholarship as Triadosis presents, is that not, in fact, an argument that they have lost their very capacity to enable and cultivate theosis itself? And, if so, is this not the loss of the church’s very capacity to save? If various historical theological errors have left us with the result that no church has retained the capacity to make gods of humans in union with God (by virtue of in fact being Christ’s body, vivified by the Holy Spirit) such that it was left to scholarship and the critical reading of texts to rediscover it, could a scholarly volume like this one offer even the slightest hope of ever recovering it? On the other hand, if there is such a body capable of deifying men and women—a body of Christ—would it not behoove us to identify where such mysteries occur and seek to understand better its theology of god-making, not as we might reconstruct it from the sources but as it actually happens?
