Grace and Agency in Paul and Second Temple Judaism

Transformative Creatures: Theology, Gender Diversity, and Human Identity

“…As recent theological engagements with some more remote theological forebears make clear, transformation recurs as a theme across the tradition. We see what it means to be transformed into the likeness of Christ, as in John Chrysostom (Naidu 2012); we see resources for understanding Christianity as a process of becoming transformed into more joyful and passionate existence via dynamic dialogue with God, in tension with the undermining of our reason and correspondence to Christ because of sin as in Kierkegaard (Torrance 2016); we see Paul wrestling with grace and agency as he works out what it means for his identity to be profoundly changed (Wells 2015), as when he holds in 2 Corinthians 3:18 that “all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed … from one degree of glory to another.” We see, especially in the early theologians, including Athanasius, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, frequent appeals to theosis and deification; a recent scholarly uptick in interest in theosis in general, across various theological traditions (in e.g., Kärkkäinen 2004; Kharlamov 2012; Cooper 2014; Sidaway 2016); and arguments that theosis might be understood as an organizing principle across recent theological giants’ work (e.g., Habets 2016 on T.F. Torrance).…”