Mcinroy 2021

Modern Theology Month 2021 DOI:10.1111/moth.
12700
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)
ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
HOW DEIFICATION BECAME EASTERN:

GERMAN IDEALISM, LIBERAL
PROTESTANTISM, AND THE MODERN
MISCONSTRUCTION OF THE DOCTRINE
MARK MCINROY
Abstract
This article develops an original account of the rise of the modern misperception of deification as an exclusively Eastern
Christian doctrine antithetical to Western theology. The study argues that the origins of the misconstruction lie in the
distorting influence of German Idealism on the seminal treatment of the doctrine advanced by Ferdinand Christian
Baur. With Idealist categories shaping his retrieval, Baur inaccurately portrays ancient Christian figures as advocating
an automatic, mechanical deification of humanity as a whole that leaves the individual no role to play in his or her
salvation. Such a view of deification as a mechanical, “physical” process is the precise basis on which Baur’s student
Albrecht Ritschl and those in his school influentially claim it has no place in Western theology. The antecedent condition
for deification coming to be characterized as Eastern, then, is it being understood as “physical,” and it is Baur who
is ultimately responsible for Ritschl so viewing the doctrine. Baur’s Idealist-inspired retrieval thus raises a mistaken
understanding of deification to prominence in the modern period, resulting in misunderstandings of the doctrine that
persist down to the present day.
1. Introduction
This study demonstrates that the Christian doctrine of deification (theōsis, theopoiēsis)1 has been
particularly prone to misunderstanding in the modern period, and it accounts for key mispercep-
tions of the doctrine through a previously unidentified line of influence that begins in the early
nineteenth century. Deification is often misjudged to be an exclusively Eastern Christian
Mark McInroy
Department of Theology, University of St. Thomas, 2115 Summit Avenue, JRC 109, St. Paul, MN 55015, USA
Email: mark.mcinroy@stthomas.edu
1
Deification is often succinctly defined as “the attaining of likeness to God and union with him so far as is possible”
(Pseudo-Dionysius), yet the doctrine involves a broad constellation of biblical passages and theological concepts, includ-
ing participation in God (cf. 2 Pet. 1:4), union with God, and becoming children of God (cf. Psalm 82:6, John 10:34-35)
by various means, including adoption as portrayed in Pauline literature, being born anew from God as found in Johannine
literature, and divine filiation as depicted in the synoptic gospels. Additional aspects of the doctrine include the exchange
formula (God became human so that human beings might become divine) and the taking on of divine properties by the
human being, especially immortality and incorruptibility. For a discussion of contemporary efforts at defining the doc-
trine, see Daniel Keating, “Typologies of Deification,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 17 (2015):
267-83.
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

2 Mark McInroy
doctrine that is antithetical to Western theology,2 yet a number of studies have criticized this as-
sessment, often by noting the presence of the doctrine among Western theologians.3 What re-
mains to be diagnosed adequately, however, are the reasons that the paradigm of deification as
Eastern arose in the first place. Only a few investigations of this question have been conducted
to date, and they have already arrived at some unexpected conclusions. Foremost is Carl Mosser’s
provocative claim that the initial characterization of deification as Eastern occurred not at the
hands of Eastern Orthodox figures, but instead the Liberal Protestant theologian Albrecht Ritschl
(1822-1889) and the Ritschlian “school” that followed him.
A question remains, however, concerning why Ritschl understands deification as he does. This
article maintains that Ritschl comes to view deification as Eastern as a direct result of the por-
trayal of the doctrine advanced by his teacher, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), who mis-
characterizes patristic figures as advocating an automatic, mechanical deification of humanity as
a whole that leaves the individual human being no role to play in his or her salvation.4 It is pre-
cisely this aspect of Baur’s retrieval that leads Ritschl to characterize deification as a “chemical
process of nature,” which members of the Ritschlian school such as Adolf von Harnack popular-
ize as a “physical” doctrine of salvation.5 This view of deification as a “physical,” mechanical
2
Such a characterization can be found among both supporters and critics of the doctrine. For the former, see Emil
Bartos, Deification in Eastern Orthodox Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007), 7; Dumitru Staniloae, The
Experience of God, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, vol. 2, Creation and Deification (London: A&C Black, 2002), 1; John
Romanides, “Orthodox and Vatican Agreement,” Theologia (Athens, Greece) 6, no. 4 (1993): 570-80; John Meyendorff,
Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), 186-88,
225-26; Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 139-64. Among
critics, additional mischaracterizations tend to accompany the view of the doctrine as Eastern. Most prevalent is the
perception of deification as an unchristian product of the Hellenization of Christianity. See Benjamin Drewery, Origen
and the Doctrine of Grace (London: Epworth Press, 1960), 200-1. Also common is the notion that deification bridges the
creator-creature distinction. See K. Zwanenpol, “Luther en Theosis,” Luther Bulletin 2 (1993): 69–70. Other critics
worry that deification endorses an absorption of the human being into God that utterly dissolves that person’s individu-
ality. See Andrew McGowan, “Colossians 3: Deification, Theosis, Participation or Union with Christ?” in Theological
Commentary: Evangelical Perspectives, ed. R. Michael Allen (London: T & T Clark, 2011), 163. Most important for our
purposes, many hold that deification proceeds according to a logic that fundamentally differs from that of justification,
and these figures insist that the two doctrines cannot coexist in the same soteriological model. See George Vandervelde,
“Justification and Deification—Problematic Synthesis: A Response to Lucian Turcescu,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies
37, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 74.
3
A partial list of the most recent studies includes the following: Jared Ortiz, ed. Deification in the Latin Patristic
Tradition (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019); John Arblaster and Rob Faesen, eds., Theosis/
Deification: Christian Doctrines of Divinization East and West (Leuven: Peeters, 2018); Fr. David Meconi, S.J. and Carl
E. Olson, eds., Called to be Children of God: The Catholic Theology of Human Deification (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius
Press, 2016); Daria Spezzano, The Glory of God’s Grace: Deification according to St. Thomas Aquinas (Ave Maria, FL:
Sapientia Press, 2015); Adam G. Cooper, Naturally Human, Supernaturally God: Deification in Pre- Conciliar
Catholicism (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014); Fr. David Meconi, S.J., The One Christ: St. Augustine’s Theology
of Deification (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013); J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation,
and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
4
The central text is Ferdinand Christian Baur, Die christliche Lehre von der Versöhnung in ihrer geschichtlichen
Entwicklung von der ältesten Zeit bis auf die neueste (Tübingen: C. F. Osiander, 1838). All translations are my own.
5
Harnack issues this assessment of deification as “physical” at several junctures throughout his highly influential
History of Dogma, trans. N. Buchanan, 7 vols. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1896-99); for instance, vol. III, 189-90.
He puts more specificity to this criticism in his description of Irenaeus as advocating “the deification of Adam’s children,
viewed as a mechanical result of the incarnation” (II, 241, n. 2), and in holding that Athanasius’s insistence on the con-
substantiality of the Father and the Son “guaranteed the deification of human nature” (III, 141).

How Deification Became Eastern 3
process has exerted enormous influence on modern perceptions of the doctrine,6 and it is the
basis on which both Ritschl and Harnack claim that it has no place in Western theology. The
antecedent condition for deification coming to be characterized as Eastern, then, is it being un-
derstood as “physical,” and it is Baur who is ultimately responsible for Ritschl understanding the
doctrine in such a manner.
Baur’s treatment of deification gives rise to yet another question, one that must be addressed
for an adequate account of how the doctrine came to be characterized as Eastern: why does Baur
so egregiously misread the patristic figures he examines? The texts of Athanasius, Augustine,
and others make abundantly clear that deification is no automatic process, and that it instead
includes a role for the individual human being. Baur, however, entirely overlooks these features
of the doctrine among its patristic exponents. Why? This study claims that Baur advances a
mistaken interpretation of patristic versions of deification as a result of the distorting influence
of German Idealism on his retrieval of the doctrine. With Idealist models of reconciliation and
divine-human union palpably shaping his treatment of ancient Christian texts, Baur erroneously
portrays patristic versions of deification as advocating an intrinsic union with God according to
which human beings are divine by nature, not by grace. Furthermore, although Idealists devel-
oped the subjective dimension of reconciliation in an effort at preventing the immediate, fully
realized extension of divinity to humanity in its entirety, patristic figures (according to Baur’s
Idealist model of history) advanced deification at a point too early in the unfolding of the idea
to possess an adequate account of subjectivity in divine-human union. According to the Idealist
categories that Baur imposes on patristic texts, then, ancient Christian theologians could not suf-
ficiently articulate the subjective dimension of reconciliation, and as a consequence deification
automatically extended to humanity as a whole.
This crucial line of influence from German Idealism to Baur to Ritschl remains completely
neglected in academic examinations of deification, and it demonstrates that the origins of the
modern misconstruction of the doctrine lie deeply recessed in the nineteenth century, a genera-
tion before Ritschl sunders Eastern and Western soteriologies. Furthermore, although the roles
of Harnack and, to a lesser extent, Ritschl have been documented, what has not been noticed is
that these figures unknowingly inherit from Baur a version of the doctrine that stands in manifest
tension with the actual positions of its patristic exponents. Baur’s Idealist-inspired retrieval,
then, raises a misleading understanding of deification to prominence in the modern period, and
it leads directly—if somewhat unexpectedly—to the misperception of the doctrine as Eastern.
2. Albrecht Ritschl and the Expulsion of Deification from Western Theology

Although deification was a topic of some scholarly interest in the nineteenth century, it is not
until Albrecht Ritschl that one finds a sustained critique of the doctrine as a soteriological
6
Such a characterization can be found, often with overt reference to Harnack (and occasionally Ritschl), in any
number of histories of doctrine and dogmatic theologies of the last 150 years, many of which have been influential in
their own right. See, for instance, Friedrich Loofs, Leitfaden zum Studium der Dogmengeschichte (Halle: Max Niemeyer,
1893), 94, 148-49, 366, 394; Jean Rivière, The Doctrine of the Atonement: A Historical Essay, vol. 2, trans. Luigi
Cappadelta (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trübner, 1909), 172-78; Hugh Ross Mackintosh, The Doctrine of the
Person of Jesus Christ (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), 198, 322-23; Robert S. Franks, A History of the
Doctrine of the Work of Christ (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), vol. 1, 70, 193; Hastings Rashdall, The Idea of
Atonement in Christian Theology (London: Macmillan & Co., 1919), 240, 288, 297-99, 307; Joseph Tixeront, History of
Dogmas, trans. H. L. B. (St. Louis: Herder, 1923), 149-50; Martin Werner, The Formation of Christian Dogma: A
Historical Study of its Problem, trans. S. G. F. Brandon (London: A & C Black, 1957), 168; Gustaf Aulén, Christus
Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, trans. A. G. Herbert (London:
Macmillan, 1969), 18; J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1978), 377-80.

4 Mark McInroy
distortion advanced by Eastern Christian figures. In fact, Carl Mosser has proposed that Ritschl
and those in his school simply “invented the notion that deification is a distinctively Eastern idea
incompatible with the Western theological tradition.”7 Before Ritschl, indeed, one looks in vain
for figures who characterize deification as an exclusively Eastern doctrine that is opposed to
Western theology.8 Even more surprisingly, given the doctrine’s current reputation, before
Ritschl deification had yet to become a topic of robust academic interest among Eastern Orthodox
theologians.9 The first comprehensive examination of patristic treatments of the doctrine by an
Orthodox scholar was not published until 1906 by Ivan V. Popov,10 and Norman Russell even
maintains that deification remained marginal to Orthodoxy well into the twentieth century.11
Although deification is frequently portrayed as an unceasing refrain within Eastern Christianity,
then, its present centrality in Orthodoxy is in fact a product of theological retrieval.12 That re-
trieval, moreover, is indelibly shaped by the Ritschlian school, particularly Harnack, who heaped
scorn on the doctrine as the most egregious instance of the Hellenistic corruption of the gospel.
Popov attended Harnack’s lectures in Berlin in 1901 and 1902, and the latter’s influence can be
observed throughout Popov’s seminal article.13 Even more significantly, Harnack’s derisive
treatment of deification rouses the ire of early twentieth-century Orthodox émigrés in Paris such
as Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944), Vladimir Lossky (1903-1958), and Myrrha Lot-Borodine
7
Carl Mosser, “Recovering the Reformation’s Ecumenical Vision of Redemption as Deification and Beatific Vision,”
Perichoresis 18, no. 1 (2020): 18 (emphasis added). See also Carl Mosser, “Deification: A Truly Ecumenical Concept,”
Perspectives (July/August 2015): 11-12; and “An Exotic Flower? Calvin and the Patristic Doctrine of Deification,” in
Reformation Faith: Exegesis and Theology in the Protestant Reformations, ed. Michael Parsons (Milton Keynes:
Paternoster, 2014), 40-41.
8
The relatively few academic treatments of deification that precede Ritschl tend to mention both its Eastern and
Western exponents, and they do not insist on incompatibility between deification and Western theology. For example,
Baur himself does not characterize the doctrine as Eastern, and in fact he treats Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers, and Leo the
Great in his discussion of patristic versions of deification. See F. C. Baur, Die christliche Lehre von der Versöhnung,
110-18. Similarly, John Henry Newman’s retrieval of deification in his Lectures on Justification (1838) makes no men-
tion of the doctrine as Eastern, and he also draws from patristic figures in both East and West for his understanding of the
doctrine. See John Henry Newman, Lectures on Justification (London: J. G. & F. Rivington, 1838); Mark McInroy,
“Before Deification became Eastern: Newman’s Ecumenical Retrieval,” International Journal for Systematic Theology
20 (2018): 253-68. Carl Ullmann (1796-1865) locates figures in the East and West who espouse deification, and in one
of his most significant studies he even insists on the compatibility between the theological vision of the Reformers and
the version of the doctrine found in the Theologia Germanica. See Reformers before the Reformation, vol. 2, trans.
Robert Menzies (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1863), 213-33.
9
Paul Gavrilyuk observes that Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900) provided the initial impetus for modern Orthodox
retrievals of deification in the late nineteenth century. Paul Gavrilyuk, “The Retrieval of Deification: How a Once-
Despised Archaism became an Ecumenical Desideratum,” Modern Theology 25, no. 4 (October 2009): 648. Although his
Lectures on Divine Humanity (1878-81) appears after Ritschl’s magnum opus, Soloviev operates independently of
Ritschl’s influence. Accordingly, his understanding of the doctrine is neither exclusively Eastern nor opposed to Western
theology. Instead, he advances a sophiologically inflected version of deification that draws from Jacob Boehme and
German Idealists, among others. Soloviev’s understanding of the doctrine is arguably as shaped by Western sources as
by those of the East, and in later works he even insists that deification should serve as the central concept for uniting
Eastern and Western Christianity. Soloviev’s The Justification of the Good (1897), for instance, advances a view that,
according to Jeremy Pilch, “fully integrates theological approaches to deification of both east and west.” Jeremy
Pilch,‘Breathing the Spirit with Both Lungs’: Deification in the Work of Vladimir Solov’ev (Leuven: Peeters, 2018), 3.
10
Ivan Popov, “Ideia obozhenia v drevne-vostochnoi tserkvi,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 97 (1906): 165-213.
Translated in English as “The Idea of Deification in the Early Eastern Church,” trans. Boris Jakim, in Theosis: Deification
in Christian Theology, vol. 2, ed. Vladimir Kharlamov (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), 42-82.
11
According to Russell, before the 1960s, “The word [deification] hardly featured in the standard theological hand-
books,” and he explains that “it was a technical term familiar only to monks and patristics scholars.” Norman Russell,
Fellow Workers with God: Orthodox Thinking on Theosis (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009), 13.
12
In an indication that he is conducting a retrieval of deification, Popov begins his study with the claim that the
doctrine is “completely forgotten in contemporary theology.” Popov, “The Idea of Deification,” 42.
13
Popov refers to Harnack by name in his study, and deification is tellingly portrayed as “physical” at several junc-
tures. Popov, “The Idea of Deification,” 44, 51, 52, n. 36, 81.

(1882-1957). These figures, in direct response to Harnack and others, develop a widely dissem-
inated counter-narrative according to which deification in fact lies at the heart of authentic
Christian teaching, which has been preserved exclusively in Eastern Orthodoxy.14 And yet, for
all of the enthusiasm generated by this émigré Orthodox understanding of deification, it is sel-
dom noticed that it actually accepts central features of Harnack’s position at the very same time
that it attempts to reject his portrayal. That is, although émigré treatments of deification resist the
notion that the doctrine is a distortion of authentic Christianity, they nevertheless accept the more
fundamental claims that the doctrine is Eastern and that it is antithetical to Western theology.15
According to Mosser, “Their characterization of deification as the distinctive patrimony of the
Eastern Churches was appropriated directly from Ritschlians like Adolf von Harnack.”16
This revised genealogy demonstrates, however briefly, that the view of deification as an
Eastern doctrine opposed to the West is a relatively recent construction; it also directs one to ex-
amine closely the forces that gave rise to Ritschl’s understanding of the doctrine, as his judgment
can be seen to set in motion a cascading set of misperceptions that persist down to the present
day. To Ritschl, then, why does deification not belong in Western theology, and how does he
arrive at his view?
In the opening pages of A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and
Reconciliation (1870),17 Ritschl singles out deification as a primitive and misguided doctrine of
the Christian East that must be eliminated for the proper understanding of justification and
14
In a series of articles in Revue d’histoire des religions, Lot-Borodine develops a virulent anti-Western narrative that
identifies Harnack as a root cause of the Western misunderstanding of deification. She insists that “Harnack, who has
never understood anything about the Greeks,” incorrectly regards deification as a “physical” doctrine. Myrrha Lot-
Borodine, “La Doctrine de la ‘déification’ dans l’Église grecque jusqu’au XIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire des religions 105
(1932): 5-43; 106 (1932): 525-74; 107 (1933): 8-55, 245-46, at 105 (1932): 33, n. 1. Along similar lines, Bulgakov in
several works indicates awareness of Harnack’s significance for modern histories of dogma, and he maintains that “dei-
fication is not a physical or magical act on a person.” Sergius Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church, trans. Lydia Kesich
(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), 107. Bulgakov’s language precisely reproduces that of Harnack,
who portrays deification as “physical and magical” in his History of Dogma (II, 223). Lossky casts Harnack as one of his
principal foils at the outset of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, and he arguably borrows from Harnack to
advance his own position concerning the centrality of deification for patristic doctrinal debates. Although deification
does not receive definition at any church council, nor is it the focus of any sustained treatise by a patristic theologian,
Lossky somewhat incredibly holds that the doctrine was the “constant preoccupation” of the church throughout the de-
bates with Arianism, Nestorianism, Apollinarianism, and Monothelitism, and he goes on to announce, “All the history of
Christian dogma unfolds itself around this mystical centre.” Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern
Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 10. Such an unrestrained claim for the importance of
deification tellingly echoes Harnack, who expanded greatly on Ritschl’s assessment of the doctrine’s significance by
placing it in a newly central position in the history of Christian theology. Harnack views deification as the covert engine
animating the central doctrinal formulations of the early church, particularly in its anti-Arian impulse, and he holds that
deification was “the ultimate and supreme thought” among patristic figures. See Harnack, History of Dogma III, 31, 164,
n. 2.
15
Lot-Borodine vigorously insists that deification cannot be present in the West because its soteriological focus falls
on justification, which in her treatment entirely precludes deification as a theological option. Lot-Borodine, “La Doctrine
de la ‘déification’,” Revue d’histoire des religions 106 (1932): 547. Lossky, too, opposes the “rationalism” of the West
to the “mysticism” of the East, and he makes clear that deification fits in the latter theological model. Lossky, The
Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 196-99.
16
Mosser, “Recovering the Reformation’s Ecumenical Vision,” 19. See also Mosser, “No Exotic Flower,” 43;
Mosser, “Deification,” 13.
17
Albrecht Ritschl, A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, trans. John S.
Black (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1872). Originally published in German as the first volume of a three-part
study, which in its entirety is titled Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung (Bonn: Adolph Marcus,
1870-74). The third volume was published in English as The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The
Positive Development of the Doctrine, trans., ed. H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay (Edinburgh: Edmonston and
Douglas, 1902). The second volume has not been translated into English.

6 Mark McInroy
reconciliation.18 In this insistence, as Johannes Zachhuber has observed, Ritschl seeks to distin-
guish his position from that of his mentor, the eminent Tübingen historian of doctrine Ferdinand
Christian Baur.19 Ritschl regards Baur’s Die christliche Lehre von der Versöhnung (1838) as of
“epoch-making importance,” yet he firmly holds that Baur adopts too warm an attitude toward
deification.20 Most importantly, Ritschl contends that Baur misunderstands the place of deifica-
tion in Christian theology. According to Ritschl, Baur casts deification as a “mystical doctrine of
reconciliation,” but in so doing mistakenly includes deification within reconciliation.21 Baur
thereby “mars [the] orderly unity” of his study, on Ritschl’s reckoning.22 In a clear indication that
deification will need to be expelled from a proper treatment of reconciliation, Ritschl explains,
“The Christian notion of reconciliation can only be understood as a removal of the one-sided or
mutual contrariety between the Divine and human will. Accordingly, the fancies of the Church
Fathers . . . about the deification of the human race as a natural unity, do not fall under that no-
tion.”23 Ritschl derisively characterizes deification as a “chemical process of nature.”24 As such,
it has no place for the will, and Ritschl even suggests that such a mystical model absorbs the
human being into the divine, causing him or her to lose all individuality.25
Deification not only aims toward a fundamentally different goal than do justification and rec-
onciliation; to Ritschl the two approaches represent mutually exclusive understandings of the
God-human relationship. Deification requires “the reduction of relations which pertain to the
will,” and the doctrine elevates instead “the forms of a natural process.”26 Whereas justification
and reconciliation are “ethical,” deification instead is “physical.”
Ritschl thus introduces an exceptionally influential paradigm, according to which deification
and justification compete with one another in a zero-sum soteriological game. According to this
interpretation of the doctrine, an emphasis on justification inexorably leads to the elimination of
deification. In spite of the fact that Augustine and other major theologians uphold both deifica-
tion and justification, Ritschl flatly insists that deification has diminished in those portions of the
Christian tradition in which justification and reconciliation have been upheld.27
Behind the phrase “natural process” lies considerable animosity; deification so characterized
represents the bête noire of Ritschl’s entire theological project. Ritschl was deeply concerned
about the rise of a scientific worldview that reduces human beings to mere products of nature,
and his ever-present worry that “mind” (Geist) would be absorbed into naturalistic explanatory
18
Alister McGrath notes that Ritschl understands justification (Rechtfertigung) and reconciliation (Versöhnung) as
synonymous for the most part; the distinction is that, whereas justification refers to the divine judgment independent of
any appropriation by the Christian community or an individual, reconciliation has to do with the subjective appropriation
of that judgment. Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, fourth edition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 374-75.
19
Johannes Zachhuber, “Albrecht Ritschl and the Tübingen School: A Neglected Link in the History of 19th Century
Theology,” Journal of the History of Modern Theology 18 (2001): 51-70.
20
Ritschl, Critical History, 10.
21
Ibid., 7-8. In keeping with other treatments of deification throughout the history of Christian theology, Ritschl uses
a range of different terms for the doctrine. Broadly speaking, Ritschl understands deification as a model of reconciliation
that requires union with God for its fulfillment. In speaking of a “mystical doctrine of reconciliation (Versöhnung),”
Ritschl is referring to deification as he understands it.
22
Ibid., 11.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid., 8. The second edition of the Critical History removed this phrase. The Critical History later has “chemico-
physiological process” (524), and Ritschl inveighs against viewing reconciliation as “physical” at a number of other
junctures (e.g., 233, 363, 468-70, 533-34).
25
Ibid., 106.
26
Ibid., 8.
27
Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, 33-50, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New City
Press, 2000), 381.

schemes serves as an illuminating hermeneutical key to his oeuvre. It drives, for instance, his
critique of the Hellenization of patristic theology, as the central fault of Greek philosophy is
precisely that it is “physical;” it transposes a method appropriate for investigating the natural
world onto the human person (and the God-world relation), and in so doing fails to advance a
properly “ethical” view of the human being as one who transcends nature. As Zachhuber ex-
plains Ritschl’s worry, “[For Ritschl,] the use of effective causality in the construction of doc-
trine is always suspicious and, more often than not, evidence for borrowings from philosophies
that corresponded, historically, to nature religion and will therefore, by default, be unsuitable for
the elucidation of the Christian truth.”28
In opposition to such a view, Ritschl insists that human beings are spiritual (geistlich) crea-
tures who are free from the necessity of nature. Such rising above “the laws of mechanism” is the
prerequisite for regarding the individual as an ethical being.29 Soteriologies that rely on natural
processes fail to transcend the mechanism of nature. There is no role for the ethical, the will, or
even for the personal in such schemes. According to Ritschl, the patristic emphasis on deification
betrays the fact that Christianity had not fully extricated itself from pre-Christian models of sal-
vation. Deification, then, must be eliminated for reasons that touch the very heart of Ritschl’s
theological program.
These views of salvation are not only fundamentally different and mutually exclusive; accord-
ing to Ritschl, they also fall along neatly demarcated geographical lines:
The history of the doctrines of justification and reconciliation has its sphere within the
Western Church alone. The theology of the Greek Church has not, as a whole, set before
itself the problem which is involved in these ideas . . . I take up only those trains of thought
which have been actually worked out in a methodical way, and which strive after conclu-
sions which are logically necessary. But such trains of thought have been constructed only
by the theologians of the West. The doctrines of reconciliation and justification are pre-
cisely those which have found their development exclusively in this portion of the Church.
Whereby we may discern—what indeed is a conclusion warranted by everything else—that
Western Christianity in general stands on a different niveau from that of the East, and that
the separation of fellowship between the two groups has not its explanation in politics
alone.30
According to this sweeping and novel characterization, the division between Eastern and Western
Christianity has as its substantive theological ground their mutually exclusive understandings of
salvation. Justification and reconciliation are entirely absent from the East, and Ritschl later explains
that deification is opposed to the theology of the West: “The Greek Catholic formula, that God be-
came man in order that man might become God . . . has remained on the whole unproductive for the
Western Church.”31 Ritschl thus assigns two distinct soteriologies to East and West, and he develops
a narrative according to which the proper, Western understanding of salvation has been progres-
sively liberated from the distortions it has endured throughout the history of the church. On his
reading, Eastern patristic figures have the most inadequate and immature soteriology precisely be-
cause they endorse deification and do not possess an understanding of justification and reconcilia-
tion. Roman Catholicism progressed past the “Greek Church” by adopting the correct soteriological
28
Zachhuber, “Albrecht Ritschl and the Tübingen School,” 55.
29
30
Ibid., 19, 21.
31
Ritschl, Positive Development, 389.

8 Mark McInroy
categories, yet its view of salvation remains muddled in that deification lingers among various influ-
ential figures, especially the “mystics.”32
It took Luther to make a decisive step toward justification; in Ritschl’s narrative he pushed
the church to a third stage of development through an approach that fundamentally contrasts
with the “mystical” model of deification described above. Against contemporaries such as Carl
Ullmann (1796-1865), who had insisted on continuity between Luther and the late-medieval
German mystics who preceded him, Ritschl maintains that the Reformer dramatically broke
from them concerning the human being’s approach to God:
The problem how to get rid of one’s personal individuality, as created, in order to attain to
union with God, and absorption in His Being, is quite distinct from the problem how to re-
nounce one’s own merit in order to gain by confidence in Christ’s merit a standing before
God, and peace of conscience in spite of the sense of sin. . . . The religious task of the mystic
is based upon a comparison between the Creator and the creature, metaphysically consid-
ered, and is designed to do away with the distance that the fact of creation establishes be-
tween the two. The religious task of the Reformer proceeds upon the moral contrast between
the man who, while actually in the state of grace, is yet imperfect and sinful, on the one
hand, and the lawgiver, on the other . . . .In the one case it is sought to extirpate the individ-
uality of man altogether; in the other case, what is desired is the maintenance of his ethical
personality in the strictest sense.33
Ritschl later claims that, when it came to deification, “Luther had no such idea in his mind” be-
cause such a “mystical view is out of harmony with the doctrine of justification.”34 Luther had no
interest whatsoever in a mystical doctrine of deification according to which the human being is ab-
sorbed into God. To Ritschl, deification not only eliminates the individual personality; it even more
problematically seeks to overcome the distance between creator and creation. Luther’s soteriology,
by contrast, centers around retaining one’s ethical personality and the contrast between God and the
human. Even after Luther, however, deification is not eliminated from Protestant theology. Instead,
major portions of Protestantism descend into mystical ways of thinking with Pietism, in which dei-
fication and justification once again intermingle.
Ritschl sees his own work, then, as marking yet another, fourth stage in the history of Christian
theology (one that is vigorously opposed to Pietism). Whereas previous theologians throughout
the history of the church have simply juxtaposed different soteriologies in collages of various
sorts, Ritschl views himself as, for the first time, placing these models of salvation in the neces-
sary, logical relationship with one another.35 Ritschl famously viewed the Reformation as unfin-
ished. He thought that the Reformers themselves did not follow through on the principles they
articulated in the sixteenth century, and he even went so far as to describe Protestantism as a
“stunted growth” (Verkümmerung) and “deformation” (Missbildung).36 Ritschl’s theological
project, then, can be understood as his attempt to finish what Luther began. The central critical
goal of this effort is the comprehensive expulsion of deification from Protestant theology.
Crucially, however, although Ritschl criticizes Baur for not seeing clearly that deification has
no place in a treatment of justification and reconciliation, he nevertheless takes from Baur what
32
Ibid., 99, 389.
33
34
35
36
David Lotz, “Albrecht Ritschl and the Unfinished Reformation,” Harvard Theological Review 73 (1980): 338.

deification is in the first place. For all his effort at surmounting Baur, then, Ritschl nevertheless
remains within Baur’s definitional constraints for the doctrine even as he attempts to surpass his
former teacher. Baur’s view of deification, furthermore, is not without its own idiosyncrasies.
Specifically, I maintain that Baur’s retrieval is itself extensively shaped by German Idealism,
which leads him to mischaracterize the very aspects of the doctrine to which Ritschl objects.
This claim must be advanced with care so as to avoid falling into some well-charted pitfalls in
interpreting Baur. In the first place, although Baur was seen early in his career as having been
excessively influenced by Hegel, this assessment has been vigorously contested in recent schol-
arship. A number of figures have noted that Baur arrived at positions that happen to bear affini-
ties with those of Hegel before he actually encountered Hegel’s works in 1831 or 1832, and they
suggest that Schelling exerted more influence than previously recognized, perhaps as early as
1812.37 Some recommend viewing Baur as broadly Idealist in his outlook rather than specifically
Hegelian. Most significantly for our purposes, scholars such as Martin Wendte maintain that
Baur does not in his inquiries into the history of Christianity simply deploy an a priori concept
into which he shoehorns his findings, as he has often been accused of doing.38 Wendte instead
insists that Baur, especially beginning in 1852 or 1853, pioneered a distinctive version of Idealism
that was historically informed, not overly dictated by philosophical or theological presupposi-
tions. And yet, although this is certainly the case for Baur’s later work, many acknowledge that,
in the period in which he composed his Versöhnung, Hegel’s influence was at its height.39 I
demonstrate below that Baur’s interpretation of patristic figures in this work does indeed fall
prey to the characterization often leveled on him as one who allows Idealist categories to deter-
mine his interpretation of those whom he examines.
Before discussing Baur’s retrieval, however, we require an understanding of the lens through
which he views patristic versions of deification, namely, the notion of reconciliation as divine-
human union developed in German Idealism.
3. Divine by Nature: Deified Humanity in German Idealism

German Idealists advance a set of ideas that, when seen in the right light, suggestively parallel
central elements of the Christian doctrine of deification,40 and in fact Idealism appears to have
sparked much modern interest in the doctrine in both Eastern and Western Christianity.41
Although deification is most evident in Hegel’s works, the theme is by no means absent from
37
See, for instance, Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 67-72. Schleiermacher is also a significant influence on Baur.
38
Martin Wendte, “Ferdinand Christian Baur: A Historically Informed Idealist of a Distinctive Kind,” in Ferdinand
Christian Baur and the History of Early Christianity, eds. Martin Bauspiess, Christof Landmesser, and David Lincicum,
trans. Robert F. Brown and Peter Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 67-79.
39
See Peter Hodgson, The Formation of Historical Theology: A Study of Ferdinand Christian Baur (New York:
Harper and Row, 1966), 26.
40
Although Vergottung, Vergöttlichung, and Gottwerdung (i.e., deification) are not typically the terms of choice
among Idealists, those figures do in remarkably bold tones speak of a divine-human union according to which human
nature is in fact divine. Most importantly for our examination, Baur sees Idealist accounts of reconciliation and patristic
versions of deification as both speaking of the same reality, namely, a union between divinity and humanity according to
which human nature is in fact divine.
41
Idealism’s role in provoking Eastern retrievals of deification has been charted, as a number of studies have outlined
Schelling’s influence (and, behind him, Jacob Boehme) on Russian Orthodox figures such as Vladimir Soloviev, Fyodor
Dostoevsky, and Sergius Bulgakov. Curiously, however, the influence of Idealism on interpretations of deification among
modern Western figures remains untreated. For the former, Eastern route of Idealism’s influence, see Ruth Coates,
Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905-1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2019), 77-80, 145-52.

10 Mark McInroy
Schelling’s writings, and some see Fichte as also espousing the idea.42 We begin with Hegel and
then proceed to Schelling, as these two exert the clearest and most well-documented influence
on Baur.
A major theme in Hegel’s system concerns the reconciliation (Versöhnung) of finite, estranged
humanity with the infinite Absolute.43 In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel char-
acterizes reconciliation as the “coming to consciousness” of divine-human union. He even de-
picts this union in terms that can be viewed as a philosophically reconstructed version of the
exchange formula (i.e., God became human so that human beings might become divine). As
Hegel intriguingly rearticulates this idea, “The substantiality of the unity of divine and human
nature comes to consciousness for humanity in such a way that a human being appears to con-
sciousness as God, and God appears to it as a human being.”44
The expression “comes to consciousness” gestures toward an extraordinarily high anthropol-
ogy. To Hegel, the union of divine and human nature need only come to explicit conscious
awareness because humanity and divinity have always shared the same substantial nature, even
if only implicitly at first. Hegel is not shy about his soaring view of humanity. His 1821 lecture
manuscript reads, “Humanity implicitly bears within itself the divine idea, not bearing it within
itself like something from somewhere else but as its own substantial nature,”45 and in his 1824
lectures he holds that “divine and human nature are not intrinsically different.”46
The 1827 lectures offer a more complex formulation, but the underlying claim remains the
same. Hegel begins with reflection on the antithesis between divinity and humanity, and he ex-
plains, “That the antithesis is implicitly sublated constitutes the condition, the presupposition, the
possibility that the subject should also sublate this antithesis explicitly.”47 In other words, an
implicit, preexisting unity is required for the possibility of an explicit awareness of that unity.
Hegel continues, “Implicitly this antithesis is not present. Put more precisely, the antithesis arises
eternally and just as eternally sublates itself; there is at the same time eternal reconciliation. That
this is the truth may be seen in the eternal, divine idea: God is the one who as living spirit distin-
guishes himself from himself, posits an other and in this other remains identical with himself, has
in this other his identity with himself. This is the truth.”48 To Hegel, humanity and divinity are
united at a deep level; in fact, human nature cannot be separated from divine nature. The antith-
esis between the two is eternally sublated. There simply is no mere humanity, no humanity with-
out divinity. After all, humanity is God’s “other” that, in spite of being other, ultimately remains
identical with God. To put the point in terms most helpful for our inquiry, to Hegel humanity has
always been deified. The only question is whether that deification is implicit or explicit.
Before describing the transition to explicit awareness, we must emphasize just how radical is
Hegel’s view of human nature. To this end, it is helpful to note that his lofty anthropology is
42
Cyril O’Regan, “Reception of Eckhart in the 19th Century,” in A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah
Hackett (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 654.
43
For a particularly lucid description of Hegel’s account of reconciliation, see Peter C. Hodgson, Hegel and Christian
Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp.
155-76.
44
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vols. I–III, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans.
R. F. Brown et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984-85), III, 312, emphasis added.
45
Ibid., 109, emphasis added.
46
Ibid., 214.
47
Ibid., 310.
48
Ibid., 311. The latter portion of the quotation gestures toward the centrality of deification to Hegel’s system, as it
constitutes the resolution of God’s self-diremption into finite being. That is, God externalizes God’s self as not-God,
which ultimately returns to God and in so doing completes the process through which God arrives at full
self-understanding.

shaped by a range of influences, among whom Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme stand out as
especially significant.49 In the 1824 lectures Hegel quotes Eckhart with approval as follows:
“The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him; my eye and his eye are one
and the same. . . . If God did not exist nor would I; if I did not exist nor would he.” 50 Cyril
O’Regan holds that this formulation (and Hegel’s endorsement of it) “goes beyond anything
actually sanctioned or sanctionable by the Christian mystical tradition even in its most exagger-
ated deification thrust.”51 As important as Eckhart is for Hegel, a more proximate influence from
the Christian mystical tradition is Jacob Boehme, whose anthropology draws from Eckhart and
in a similar fashion transgresses the creator-creature distinction.52 With Eckhart and Boehme as
inspirations of sorts, then, Hegel far exceeds the Christian doctrine of deification, which in its
orthodox forms upholds the distinction between God and humanity.
With an understanding of Hegel’s anthropology in place, let us return to the movement from
implicit to explicit divine-human union. To Hegel, the unity of divine and human nature “comes
to consciousness” through Christ, who demonstrates not just that such a union is possible, but
that it has become actual. In Hegel’s way of thinking humanity requires certainty about the
divine-human union, and this certainty cannot be achieved through “philosophical specula-
tion.”53 Instead, as he puts it in the 1827 lectures, “This content—the unity of divine and human
nature—achieves certainty, obtaining the form of immediate sensible intuition and external exis-
tence for humankind, so that it appears as something that has been seen in the world, something
that has been experienced . . . In order for it to become a certainty for humanity, God had to ap-
pear in the world in the flesh.”54 The divine idea is realized concretely in Christ, who is the intu-
itive exhibition of divine-human unity. Hegel sums up this feature of his thought as follows:
“What has thereby [i.e., through Christ] been brought into human consciousness and made a
certainty for it is the unity of divine and human nature.”55
How important is Christ, ultimately? The question pushes us into exceptionally subtle inter-
pretive terrain, and the divergence of Hegelianism into left, right, and middle trajectories testifies
to the complexity of the issue. On the one hand, it must be said that Christ to Hegel does not so
much effect the divine-human union as exhibit it. That is, the union of divinity and humanity is
already established ontologically, as we saw above; Christ could be said to instantiate it, but he
does not bring the union about.56 Instead, Christ is a “concrete verification” of divine-human
49
Cyril O’Regan ventures the following: “It could be argued that much of Hegel’s enthusiasm for Eckhart is based
upon his perception that in Eckhart one finds a religious thinker brave enough to announce not merely commensurability
between the divine and human but actual ontological identity.” Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1994), 254.
50
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, I, 347-48.
51
Cyril O’Regan, “Hegelian Philosophy of Religion and Eckhartian Mysticism,” in New Perspectives on Hegel’s
Philosophy of Religion, ed. David Kolb (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 112. Similarly, in The
Heterodox Hegel, O’Regan maintains, “For Hegel, mystical union and mystical vision point to a divinization so radical
that the ontological difference between finite and infinite can be thought to be overcome” (254).
52
Jacob Boehme, The Way to Christ (Canterbury: G. Moreton, 1894), 55-56. O’Regan explains, “The Eckhartian
symbol of ‘spark’ (Fünklein or spinter) plays an important role in Boehme’s anthropology. It suggests that there is an
element in human being that is not ‘created,’ and that it belongs properly to the eternal rather than temporal dimension
of reality.” Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 2002), 97. Hegel does signal some reservations about Boehme’s “wild and fanciful” manner of expres-
sion. Nevertheless, Hegel endorses much of the content of Boehme’s thought, including his notion that the Trinity “must
be born in the hearts of human beings,” a formulation seen as derived from Eckhart’s Gottesgeburt, or the divine birth in
the soul. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion III, 289.
53
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, III, 312.
54
Ibid., 313.
55
Ibid., 315.
56
Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology, 163.

12 Mark McInroy
unity.57 Such verification is required for humanity’s consciousness of its redemption, yet in the
end Christ seems simply to provoke humanity’s self-understanding such that it perceives its own
true nature. After all, the divine and human are always united, not in Christ alone, but in human-
ity as a whole. David Friedrich Strauss notoriously took this line of thinking and pressed it to the
point that Christ is regarded as superfluous and even contradictory to the idea of a union of be-
tween divinity and humanity.58
With that said, the new self-understanding should not be minimized, nor should Christ’s role
in bringing it about. To Hegel, the unity of divinity and humanity must be exhibited in a single
individual, for “in several, divinity becomes an abstraction.”59 That is, if the coming to con-
sciousness of the divine-human union depends on the concrete manifestation of that union, then
to Hegel’s mind it must be exhibited in a single divine-human, since “humanity as a whole” is an
abstraction that cannot be concretely presented. To Hegel, at least (if not to some of his follow-
ers), Christ is both unique and essential.
Additionally, the “coming to consciousness” of divine-human union should by no means be
characterized as a trivial afterthought to the only thing that is actually important, namely, the
implicit unity that underlies explicit awareness. Reconciliation only occurs when humanity
comes to understand that it shares the same substantial nature as divinity. Explicit awareness of
divine-human union therefore constitutes the indispensable subjective component of reconcilia-
tion in Hegel’s thought. This subjective understanding is a necessary step in reconciliation be-
coming fully actualized.60
Many features of Hegel’s thought are anticipated by Schelling, yet key differences can be
observed, especially concerning the role of Christ and the place of the individual human being.
Before describing these points of distinction, however, we should note that Schelling, like Hegel,
reserves a central place for reconciliation, which Schelling also sees as effected through union
between God and finite being. In his On University Studies (1803), which Baur read with great
interest,61 Schelling explains, “The reconciliation of the finite which had seceded from God, a
reconciliation effected by God’s birth in the finite world, is the basic idea of Christianity.”62
Unlike Hegel, however, Schelling explicitly holds that this birth of God is not confined to a sin-
gle exemplar, but instead occurs repeatedly, as expressed for instance in South Asian religious
thought.63 In fact, Schelling controversially contends, “The process of God’s becoming man has
been going on from all eternity. The culmination of this process is Christ’s assuming visible
human form, and for this reason it is also its beginning; starting with Christ, it has been going on
ever since—all His successors are members of one and the same body of which He is the head.”64
Here Schelling reinterprets the “body of Christ” as the expression of a perpetual incarnation of
sorts according to which individual Christians are the deified products of God ceaselessly be-
coming human.
If the individual human being appears rather grandiose in the above understanding, such an
impression is mitigated by what follows. Whereas Hegel goes to great lengths to develop the
57
Ibid., 159.
58
David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. George Eliot
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1972), 780.
59
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, III, 112.
60
It is required, moreover, not only for humanity, but also for God, as it is only in the divine-human unity becoming
actual that “God fully becomes God,” in Hodgson’s formulation. Hegel and Christian Theology, 156.
61
Baur, Versöhnung, 709.
62
F. W. J. Schelling, On University Studies, trans. E. S. Morgan (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1966), 91.
63
Ibid., 95.
64

relation of the particular vis-à-vis the universal, Schelling does not exert comparable effort on
the problem, and instead one finds a number of instances in which the individual is simply dis-
solved into the Absolute. For instance, Schelling explains that as reality is transformed into ide-
ality through the return of the finite to the infinite, what takes place is “an absorption of the
particular in the universal.”65 Even more strongly, in Philosophy and Religion (1804) Schelling
remarks, “The ultimate goal of the universe and its history is nothing other than the complete
reconciliation with and re-absorption into the Absolute.”66 On the basis of passages such as
these, scholars such as Norbert Guterman maintain that Schelling “sacrificed . . . the concrete
individual to the world spirit.”67 Such an outcome is the cost of reconciliation.
4. An Idealist-Inspired Retrieval: Deification According to Ferdinand Christian Baur

The deification motif in German Idealism was not lost on Baur.68 In fact, he views Schelling and
especially Hegel as working out with greater precision the understanding of divine-human union
that was inaugurated in the early church. To Baur, these issues have “never been conceived of
from a higher and more comprehensive point of view than in the most recent time, in which
philosophy and theology unite with the result that the Christian doctrine of reconciliation . . .
receives its necessary destiny.”69 Accordingly, the Versöhnung culminates in a treatment of
Hegel and the critical engagement with his thought that had taken place up to 1838. For Baur the
great advantage of Hegel over Schleiermacher is that, whereas the latter limits his inquiry to the
subjective and is therefore unable to establish an objective state of affairs, Hegel offers an ac-
count of what is objectively the case in the relationship between God and humanity. Additionally,
Hegel progresses past previous understandings of reconciliation—among which are patristic ver-
sions of deification—in that he offers an account of subjectivity not previously achieved. To a
great extent, then, Baur views the entire history of Christianity as a seamless garment that works
out the doctrine of reconciliation with greater and greater success. This Idealist model of a uni-
fied history that progressively unfolds leads Baur to regard patristic figures as proto-Idealists in
many respects.
In his direct engagement with Hegel, Baur emphasizes both the objective and subjective di-
mensions of reconciliation. To Baur, Hegel establishes in the first place that “objectively it [i.e.,
reconciliation] comes about by the fact that God, as God-man, enters the world, and already
thereby shows himself reconciled with the world.”70 With reconciliation already accomplished
from an objective standpoint, Baur hastens to add, “But the main thing is that it is also subjec-
tively realized . . . religion in general, whose center is the doctrine of reconciliation, by its nature
is nothing else than the coming to consciousness of the unity of God and man.”71
65
E. S. Morgan’s translation reads, “the particular is conceived of as absorbed in the universal.” Schelling, On
University Studies, 13. Schelling’s original German has “eine Aufnahme der Besonderheit in die Allgemeinheit.” F. W.
J. Schelling, Vorlesungen über die Methode des academischen Studium (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung,
1803), 21.
66
F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophy and Religion (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2010), 31.
67
Norbert Guterman, “Introduction,” in On University Studies, ix-xxii, at xix.
68
Baur sums up a key portion of Schelling’s writings with a version of the exchange formula. He holds that, for
Schelling, “God must become human so that the human can return to God.” Baur, Versöhnung, 711. Baur also conveys
that, for Schelling, “Christ is identified as the summit of the becoming of humanity, but not as the sole God-man; here
God becoming man is eternal, Christ is regarded as an eternal Idea” (710). Baur, then, understands that for Schelling
humanity as a whole is joined to God.
69
Baur, Versöhnung, 742-43.
70
Ibid., 718.
71
Ibid.

14 Mark McInroy
As Baur moves into critical engagement with Hegel’s thought, he suggests that even Hegel’s
account of the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity can be further refined.72 At the
objective pole, Baur expresses what is an essentially Hegelian anthropology in a yet more arrest-
ing form than it takes in Hegel himself. For instance, Baur advances a sweeping characterization
of Christian thought in which he contends, “It is an essential truth of Christian faith that the
human being is divine in nature or one with God,”73 and he later concisely adds, “In themselves
all human beings are divine.”74
What follows from this understanding, according to Baur, is a relationship between God and
the individual human being that is necessarily mediated through the “species” (Gattung). That is,
the intrinsic union of God and humanity means that “the mediator between the individual and the
Absolute can only be the species to which the individual belongs, the universal, under which,
according to its concept, the particular and individual must be placed.”75 God relates to humanity
as a whole, and the individual is subsumed under this category. This viewpoint leads Baur to a
universalized Christology according to which what is true for Christ automatically applies to all
of humanity: “The God-man in this sense is the universal, original, archetypal man, created in the
image of God.”76
Such is the objective state of affairs; what is troubling to Baur is that, if God relates to human-
ity as a whole, then the human being does not experience reconciliation as an individual, and the
subjective dimension of reconciliation therefore remains incomplete. Baur takes the issue up in
the lengthy penultimate footnote of the Versöhnung, in which he states the problem as follows:
“But let us say that the species of humanity is God-humanity (Gottmenschheit), then we have
really only indicated the place where the idea of God-humanity is to be realized. . . . The partic-
ipation of the individual in the species is not a personal, but only substantial, participation, and .
. . man does not know himself as subject in union with God.”77 If the requirement for the actual-
ization of reconciliation is conscious awareness of union with God, then substantial union alone
does not suffice. What is needed is “the certainty on the part of human consciousness, that even
the atomic individuality of subjectivity does not absolutely separate man from God, but that, on
the contrary, this highest peak of finitude is recognized and preserved in divine life. Only per-
sonal unity has an absolutely reconciling power.”78 For the remainder of the footnote, Baur ex-
plores further the model of personal unity required for reconciliation, often oscillating between
a treatment of individuality and a discussion of universal human nature (or, more precisely,
“God-humanity”). Throughout his treatment, however, one detects an inexorable pull on the in-
dividual exerted by the species, and Baur ends his study on the surprisingly unresolved note that
the solution to the problem he has so painstakingly outlined remains to be satisfactorily achieved.
If even Hegel and those in his wake have not fully met the challenge of successfully relating
objective and subjective dimensions of reconciliation, then it will come as no surprise that Baur
views the early church as not achieving resolution on these intricate soteriological problems.
Although Baur assesses patristic versions of deification positively, he ultimately views as in-
complete those efforts at articulating divine-human union. They do have value in that they move
understanding forward (in this regard Baur differs from Ritschl), but they stop well short of a
72
Ibid., 736.
73
74
Ibid., 736.
75
Ibid., 734.
76
Ibid. In this regard Baur aligns with Strauss, and in fact Baur is typically seen as having inspired Strauss’s more
widely known expression of this view. See Zachhuber, “Albrecht Ritschl and the Tübingen School,” 64.
77
Ibid., 737-38, n. 1.
78
Ibid., 738, n. 1.

satisfactory treatment. And yet, the Idealist lens through which Baur views deification leads him
to distort central features of its patristic expressions.
The shaping presence of Idealism on Baur’s retrieval can be observed at a formal level through
his pervasive use of its terminology. For instance, he describes patristic views of deification as
the joining of “the finite with the Absolute,” he explains that the doctrine of deification requires
a “dialectical process,” “dialectical movement,” and “dialectical development,” and he even
portrays divine and human nature as existing in a “sublated union.”79 Idealist categories are con-
stantly at work in Baur’s interpretation of ancient church figures. One recalls the remark of
Baur’s student Otto Pfleiderer: “We are not told what the real meaning of the Fathers was—for
their opinions are always translated into the language of Hegel.”80
More substantively, underlying the terminology of Idealism is an interpretation of patristic
figures that displays unmistakable signs of Hegel’s influence, and Schelling’s presence can also
be detected. One sees Hegel at work in Baur’s description of Irenaeus’s view of reconciliation.
Baur explains that, for Irenaeus, “Humanity is thus, as it were, the God-man himself, and the idea
of the God-man realized in Christ through the Incarnation of God is actually only the unity of the
divine and the human that has come to consciousness through Christ and is in itself present.”81
In close keeping with Hegel’s model of reconciliation, Baur suggests that the central develop-
ment in deification for Irenaeus is not in fact reuniting that which was separated (i.e., the divine
and the human). Instead, according to Baur’s reinterpretation, humanity and divinity have al-
ways been united, and the idea of the Incarnation is simply that fact “coming to consciousness”
and achieving explicit expression.
The influence of Hegel becomes even clearer as Baur moves to fourth-and fifth-century ver-
sions of deification. In this portion of his study Baur depicts both the objective unity of divine
and human nature and the subjective “coming to consciousness” that reconciliation requires. He
periodically steps back from treating particular figures such as Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers,
Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, and Leo the Great in
order to characterize the period’s soteriology in broad brushstrokes. According to Baur, in the
fourth and fifth centuries there is a “general point of view” that claims “that the human being is
already reconciled with God through the Incarnation of God in Christ and the unity of the divine
and human that has thereby come to consciousness.”82 As in Baur’s treatment of Irenaeus, the
primary work of Christ appears to be merely bringing divine-human unity to consciousness, not
actually joining separate divine and human natures.
The pre-existent unity of divine and human nature becomes yet more apparent in Baur’s use
of Augustine, and the phrase “comes to consciousness” once again figures prominently in Baur’s
portrayal. After quoting a passage in De vera religione that describes Christ, Baur remarks, “In
him the dignity of human nature, i.e. the unity of humanity with God, came to consciousness in
a concrete way.” 83 Baur subtly suggests that the divine and the human are already joined through
his interpretive decision to elevate the “dignity” of human nature such that it is equivalent to
humanity being united with God. Simply to be human is to be divine-human. Christ only concret-
izes this idea and brings it into explicit awareness.84
79
Ibid., 107-11.
80
Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant and Its Progress in Great Britain since 1825
(London: S. Sonnenschein & Co.; New York: Macmillan & Co., 1890), 286.
81
Baur, Versöhnung, 42-43, emphasis added.
82
Ibid., 109-10. Baur later adds that the death of Christ performs an important function in uniting humanity to God.
83
Ibid., 110, n. 1.
84
He continues, “Therefore, the more one became aware of this oneness of humanity with God in Christ . . . the more
one became aware of the reality of reconciliation.” Ibid., 110, n. 1.

16 Mark McInroy
Baur most overtly declares that humanity and divinity share the same nature when describing
the “mystical” character of the period’s models of deification. He conveys the central features of
such an understanding as follows: “The essence of the mystical consists in the fact that the unity
of the divine and the human . . . is conceived as an inner and essential (wesentlich) one, already
determined in itself before every temporal appearance.”85 According to this view, there is in fact
no opposition between divinity and humanity; they exist in an essential union that has already
been determined prior to being worked out in time. Baur expounds on this unity in a passage
thick with Hegelian categories. He explains that the mystical view of reconciliation can be found
among those “who seek to place the two natures in the person of Christ in as inner and organic a
relationship as possible, so that they regard the two natures as two related principles that, al-
though they constitute an antithesis, it is only one that also includes the unity that sublates the
antithesis.”86 This passage closely follows Hegel’s conception of the eternal sublation of antith-
eses in the union of divine and human nature, as examined above. Baur takes this interpretive
grid and imposes it on the thought of the early church, in which he claims that divine and human
nature are conceived as standing from eternity in a union that sublates the antitheses between
humanity and divinity.
Although Christ brings the essential union of divinity and humanity to consciousness, Baur
views the process as unfinished in the patristic period because its theologians could not suffi-
ciently develop the subjective dimension of reconciliation. To Baur, the entire age was “not yet
able . . . to follow the dialectical movement of the self-communicating concept.”87 Patristic fig-
ures were aware of “the fact of reconciliation as an objective truth given by Christianity,” but
they were limited in that they could only “think again and again of the particular . . . as the uni-
versal.”88 Because of the unresolved and undeveloped model of the particular in relation to the
universal, patristic theologians could not help but “regard the doctrine of reconciliation as al-
ready contained in the doctrine of the person of Christ and identical with it.”89 On this reading,
when patristic theologians claimed that Christ’s humanity is deified, their insufficient model of
the particular led them to claim that all human beings are automatically deified as well.
Instructive on this point is the portion of Baur’s treatment that immediately precedes his re-
prise of Athanasius’s exchange formula. Baur explains, “The relationship in which the human
stands to the divine in the person of Christ extends to humanity as a whole, and humanity as a
whole asserts the same (dieselbe) relation to the divine.”90 Remarkably, Baur here claims that for
Athanasius humanity as a whole has “the same” relation to divinity as does Christ’s humanity.
Along similar lines, in describing the view of Gregory of Nyssa, Baur claims, “What is true for
one [i.e., Christ] must also be true for all others.”91 It is curious, to say the least, that in his read-
ing of patristic figures Baur does not describe any difference at all between the humanity of
85
Ibid., 111.
86
Ibid.
87
Ibid. The organization of the Versöhnung reflects this characterization: Baur divides the Christian teaching on
reconciliation into three stages, and patristic versions of deification fall within the first period, which he describes as the
“Standpoint of Unmediated Objectivity” (ix). It is not until the Reformation that the church enters the “Transition from
the Standpoint of Unmediated Objectivity to the Standpoint of Subjectivity” (xiii), after which Kant begins the
“Standpoint of Objectivity Mediated through Subjectivity” (xvii). The patristic doctrine of deification, on this (highly
schematized) model, falls firmly within the “objective” period of Christian teaching on reconciliation.
88
Ibid., 109.
89
Ibid. Similarly, in a later summary of patristic teaching on deification, Baur makes clear that, “In Jesus, the Logos
has united himself not simply with individual human beings, but instead with the substance of human nature, with hu-
mankind itself, in the most intimate and inseparable way” (118).
90
Ibid., 111.
91
Ibid., 113.

Christ and the rest of humanity. Baur’s account does not include, for instance, a distinction often
made in discussions of deification, namely, that although Christ is divine by nature, human be-
ings participate in divinity by grace. Instead, Baur’s reading of patristic figures strongly suggests
that there is no meaningful distinction between Christ’s humanity and ours. Both are deified on
the basis of their nature. The fact that Christ’s humanity and ours share the same nature guaran-
tees that divinity will be mediated to all of humankind.
According to Baur, then, patristic figures did not have adequate resources to think of the role
of the individual human being in the process of deification, and as a result they simply claimed
that the union that occurs in Christ extends mechanically to humanity as a whole, with no role
for the individual human being to play. I suggest that it is precisely in this interpretation of pa-
tristic figures that one finds the origins of Ritschl’s charge that deification is a “chemical process
of nature,” which itself influences Harnack’s view that deification is a “physical” doctrine of
salvation.92
Baur’s further remarks in this section of the Versöhnung indicate that the place of the individ-
ual human being is even more tenuous than described thus far. In his treatment of Gregory of
Nyssa, he explains, “Through the incarnation of the Word a higher spiritual principle has been
conveyed to humanity, and through it humanity has been absorbed into the divine.”93 Later he
suggests that individuality itself disappears as union between the divine and human occurs. He
claims that, in Christ, “every individual is absorbed into the unity of the divine and the human.”94
Baur also holds that, as the human being is “penetrated by the divine principle of life . . . the
mortal is swallowed up by the immortal.”95 Baur’s formulations are reminiscent of Schelling’s
model in which the particular is absorbed into the universal, and one cannot help but wonder if
the individual human being persists at all as he or she is deified.96 Given Baur’s insistence that
patristic thought in general has great difficulty in conceiving of the particular in relation to the
universal, it is highly plausible that he envisions a patristic model of deification in which the
individual human being simply dissolves into divinity.97
Under the palpable influence of German Idealism, then, Baur portrays patristic versions of
deification in a number of curious and ultimately misleading ways. First, Baur claims that pa-
tristic figures view divine and human nature as standing in an eternal, essential union with one
another. According to this interpretation, the divine and human do not exist as two distinct na-
tures, but as a single “God-humanity.” Second, a direct consequence of the claim of substantial
union between the divine and human is the view that deification entails an automatic extension of
92
Somewhat strangely, and in ostensible tension with his claim that patristic figures view reconciliation as mechan-
ically accomplished through Christ’s deification of humanity as a whole, Baur indicates that an emphasis on subjective
awareness was developed to some extent within patristic models. And yet, his depiction of the patristic understanding of
this subjective dimension is profoundly limited. He holds that, for patristic figures, “Man is reconciled with God when
he is penetrated by the divine principle of life, which was communicated to humanity by Christ, when he knows that the
mortal is swallowed up by the immortal in himself, or when the sensual, the God-resisting in him is subjected to the di-
vine” (115). Ultimately, Baur’s treatment only furthers the concern that the individual human being does not actually
have much of a role at all in the process of deification.
93
Baur, Versöhnung, 113.
94
Ibid., 115.
95
Ibid.
96
Baur’s preferred term for the relation of the human to the divine throughout his patristic treatment of deification is
aufnehmen, which admits of a wide range of English translations. Possible renderings include to “take up” or “take in;”
in the present context “absorb” is warranted. On this terminological point, it is significant that Schelling uses the very
same term in his description of the absorption of the particular in the universal. Cf. ibid., n.65.
97
Both Hodgson and Zachhuber maintain that Baur does not sufficiently preserve the place of the particular in rela-
tion to the whole. See Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology, 139; Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as Science in
Nineteenth-Century Germany, 66.

18 Mark McInroy
divinity to humanity as a whole, with no role for the individual or the will in deification. Third,
Baur’s tendency toward mechanical inclusion of humanity in divinity reaches its most extreme
expression in his interpretation of patristic figures as holding that the individual human being is
simply absorbed into God.
5. Correcting Baur: The Patristic Evidence

How else might Baur have portrayed deification? Why, indeed, does this study depict him as
mischaracterizing the doctrine? It could be the case that German Idealism simply alerted Baur
to certain tendencies in patristic versions of deification that can be found in the texts of those
figures themselves.
Such is in fact not the case. Instead, Baur’s depiction remains deeply incomplete and mis-
leading. Although space constraints preclude a comprehensive treatment of deification among
patristic figures, we can briefly demonstrate by reference to both key patristic texts and scholarly
treatments of those figures that Baur misrepresents their understandings of the doctrine. In par-
ticular, Baur neglects major strands of the doctrine that (1) uphold the distinction between God
and human beings, (2) resist the mechanical, automatic deification of humanity as a whole, in
part by explicitly maintaining a role for the will of the individual human being, and (3) guard
against the dissolution of the human being into God.
Upholding the distinction between God and humanity stands out as a predominant concern for
many of the exponents of deification whom Baur treats. Although the doctrine’s arresting termi-
nology runs the perpetual danger of being understood in too elevated a sense, precisely for this
reason do these figures go to great lengths to articulate what being “deified” does—and does
not—mean. Irenaeus, for instance, clearly holds that when human beings are called “gods” in
scripture (Psalm 82:6), the Bible does not “declare them as gods in every sense, but with a certain
addition or signification, by which they are shown to be no gods at all.”98 Similarly, he insists
that the immortality of the soul is granted by God’s grace, and that it is not within the nature of
humanity to be immortal.
Even more emphatic is Athanasius, who as Norman Russell observes responds to the biblical
notion that human beings are “gods” by clarifying, “But if some have been called gods, they are
not so by nature, but by participation.”99 Again and again, in fact, Athanasius insists that human
beings are not divine by nature: “We cannot become like God in essence;”100 “We are called
gods, not like the true God or His Logos, but just as God has wanted, who has given this grace
to us.”101 Athanasius repeatedly insists that human beings are fundamentally different in nature
from God, and he will not accommodate any bridging of that crucial ontological divide.
Along similar lines, Donald Fairbairn points his reader to Cyril of Alexandria’s Commentary
on John, in which Cyril guards against misunderstanding the sense in which human beings can
be called gods: “Shall we depose the Word of God from his very sonship and sit in place of him
with the Father? . . . May it never be! Rather, the Son will remain unchangeably in that condition
98
Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 3.6.3; ET in Carl Mosser, “The Earliest Patristic Interpretations of Psalm 82, Jewish
Antecedents, and the Origin of Christian Deification,” Journal of Theological Studies 56 (2005): 70.
99
Athanasius, Ep. Serap. II.4. ET in Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 181.
100
Athanasius, Ad afros epistola synodica, 7. In Select Writings and Letters of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, ed.
Archibald Robertson, NPNF, second series, vol. 4 (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1892; reprint, Edinburgh,
1987), 492.
101
Athanasius, Or. c. Ar. III.19; ET in Jules Gross, The Divinization of the Christian according to the Greek Fathers,
trans. Paul A. Onica (Anaheim, CA: Affirmation and Critique Press, 2002), 172-73.

in which he is, but we, adopted into sonship and gods by grace, shall not be ignorant of what we
are.”102 To Cyril, we are not “sons” by nature; instead we are adopted into sonship by God’s
grace.
Augustine, too, spends enormous effort in articulating the fundamental difference between
God and the world, and his anthropology abides by the distinction. When Augustine speaks of
deification, he makes clear that we are not divine by nature: “Only the Son of God [is] God. . . .
The rest that are made gods are made by his own grace, are not born of his substance, that they
should be the same as he, but that by favour they should come to him, and be fellow heirs with
Christ.”103
In clear opposition to Baur’s depiction of a single divine-human nature, then, patristic figures
emphatically and repeatedly maintain that humanity does not stand in a substantial union with
God. To these theologians of the early church, human beings are not divine by nature. Instead,
the doctrine of deification entails our participation in divinity through God’s grace, an incorpo-
ration often depicted as our adoption as children of God.
The second aspect of Baur’s mischaracterization requires a subtle response. One might be
inclined to argue that the church fathers’ own Platonism, and not Baur’s German Idealism, gives
rise to the characterization of patristic figures as advocating an automatic deification of all hu-
manity that unavoidably follows from Christ’s deified human nature. To be sure, Platonic cate-
gories play a role in many patristic versions of deification. However, major patristic theologians
clearly hold that Christ’s deified humanity does not simply extend to us mechanically and result
in our unthinking deification. Instead, those figures maintain that the deification of the partic-
ular human being depends on a number of factors, among which is the moral striving of the
individual.
In the late nineteenth century, Hermann Sträter suggested that Athanasius understands deifica-
tion as consisting of an “ethical” dimension, and a substantial body of scholarship has since
drawn attention to this feature of Athanasius’s thought.104 A number of Athanasian texts uphold
the significance of moral striving for deification, perhaps most clearly his Festal Letters. In those
writings, as K. E. Norman observes, Athanasius instructs with the following words: “Let us
cleanse our hands, let us purify the body. Let us keep our whole mind from guile . . . occupying
ourselves entirely with our Lord, and with divine doctrines, so that, being altogether pure, we
may be able to partake of the Logos.”105 To Athanasius, participating in the Word depends upon
the ability of the individual Christian to keep him-or herself pure. Along similar lines, Jeffrey
Finch draws attention to a portion of the Festal Letters in which Athanasius discusses the will:
“Our will ought to keep pace with the grace of God, and not fall short; lest while our will remains
idle, the grace given us should begin to depart.”106 Contrary to Baur’s characterization of deifi-
cation, Athanasius views continual human effort as indispensable to sustaining union with the
Word. To Athanasius, then, Christ’s deified human nature establishes the possibility of our deifi-
cation, but each individual must appropriate the divine life through ethical formation.
102
Com. Johan. 1.9; ET in Donald Fairbairn, “Patristic Soteriology: Three Trajectories,” Journal of the Evangelical
Theological Society 50, no. 2 (June 2007): 306.
103
Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, 49.2; ET in Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 331.
104
Hermann Sträter, Die Erlösungslehre des hl. Athanasius (Freiburg: Herder, 1894), 11.
105
Ep. Fest. 6.5; ET in K. E. Norman, “Deification: The Content of Athanasian Soteriology” Ph.D. dissertation
(Durham, NC: Duke University, 1980), 116.
106
Ep. Fest. 3.3; ET in Jeffrey Finch, “Athanasius on the Deifying Work of the Redeemer,” in Theōsis: Deification
in Christian Theology, eds. Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2006), 104-
21, at 111.

20 Mark McInroy
Similar emphases on the ethical and sacramental aspects of deification can be found in figures
such as Irenaeus,107 Origen,108 and Cyril of Alexandria.109 Even Gregory of Nyssa, who is some-
times cast as standing at the apex of the “mystical” trajectory of the doctrine,110 has been charac-
terized as not in fact holding a “physical” view of salvation, most notably by Reinhard Hübner.111
Concerning the question of the will, it is unfortunate and somewhat odd that Baur does not in
the Versöhnung make use of Maximus the Confessor in his effort at developing the subjective
dimension of reconciliation. Maximus famously defends the human will of Christ against the
Monothelite view that Christ had only a divine will. Correlatively, when he treats deification he
explicitly retains an integral place for the will of the individual human being. Elena Vishnevskaya
has recently demonstrated that Maximus views God and the human being as reciprocally respon-
sible for deification. Maximus clearly states, “Our salvation is contingent upon our will,”112 and
in his Ambigua he maintains, “Deification by grace [could not occur] without first being born by
the Spirit in the exercise of free choice, because of the power of self-movement and self-
determination inherent in human nature.”113 Importantly, too, for Maximus the human being
does not simply offer a one-time assent, thereafter becoming passive as deification occurs.
Instead, deification requires continual effort on the part of the human being.
Crucially, too, Maximus was far from an obscure Byzantine figure in the early nineteenth
century. He was in fact known among contemporaries of Baur such as Augustus Neander (1789-
1850), with whose work Baur was intensely occupied throughout his career.114 In his six-volume
General History of the Christian Religion and Church (1825-1836), Neander treats Maximus’s
model of deification, and he describes Maximus’s opposition to Monothelitism along lines di-
rectly related to our inquiry:
Many among the Monothelites supposed the final result of the perfect development of the
divine life in believers would be in them, as in the case of Christ, a total absorption of the
human will in God’s will; so that in all there would be a subjective as well as objective
identity of will, which, consistently carried out, would lead to the pantheistic notion of an
entire absorption of all individuality of existence in the one original spirit. Maximus well
understood this, and contended earnestly against the notion. He maintained that . . . the
107
K. E. Norman notes that for Irenaeus “deification is not automatic; man is required to attain moral perfection in
this life through imitation of Christ” (Ad. Haer. 5.7.2.; Norman, Deification, 57).
108
Origen of Alexandria, De Principiis IV, 4, 9. ET: On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (London: SPCK,
1936), 326.
109
Fairbairn has charted what he calls a “personal trajectory” that begins with Irenaeus’s view that deification is first
and foremost the communion with God that human beings are offered through adoption as sons and daughters. This
personal aspect is developed by Athanasius and Cyril.
110
See, for instance, Wilhelm Herrmann, Gregorii Nysseni Sententiae de Salute Adipiscenda (Halis Saxonum:
Karrasian, 1875). I am grateful to Carl Mosser for calling my attention to this work. It should be noted that Herrmann is
influenced by Baur for his characterization. See esp. pages 27-30.
111
Reinhard M. Hübner, Die Einheit des Leibes Christi bei Gregor von Nyssa. Untersuchungen zum Ursprung der
“physischen” Erlösungslehre (Leiden: Brill, 1974).
112
Liber ascetic. 42. ET in Elena Vishnevskaya, “Divinization and Spiritual Progress in Maximus the Confessor,” in
Theōsis: Deification in Christian Theology, 135.
113
Amb. 42. ET in Vishnevskaya, “Divinization and Spiritual Progress in Maximus,” 135.
114
Baur was positively disposed to Neander early in his career, but during the 1830s he became more critical. See
Baur’s letter to L. F. Heyd, July 10, 1840 (U.B.T., Md 619r, 26), in Hodgson, The Formation of Historical Theology, 159.
On this point, it is not insignificant that Neander resisted the Hegelianizing trend in German historical theology in the
mid-nineteenth century, opting instead for what he saw as a more empirically-based approach.

subjective difference would ever remain, the difference, namely, between the will in God,
which works salvation, and the will of those who receive it from him.115
Neander addresses with remarkable precision the very issue at hand, and his treatment demon-
strates that a different version of deification was on offer in the early nineteenth century—one that
unambiguously preserves a place for the will of the individual human being in the process of salva-
tion. And yet, Baur neglected this model of deification in the Versöhnung, and as a result the misper-
ception of deification as an automatic subsuming of the human within the divine gained purchase
among modern scholars.
Concerning the third aspect of Baur’s mischaracterization of deification, namely, the absorp-
tion of the individual into God, it should be said that the possibility of total absorption is assidu-
ously denied from an early point in the history of the doctrine. In the first place, the above
treatment of the ethical dimension of deification guards against such an interpretation. (After all,
exerting one’s will typically involves a situation in which one’s individuality is retained.)
Additionally, often through the language of participation, patristic advocates of deification insist
that their understanding of the doctrine does not involve an obliteration of the self, and they in-
stead explicitly maintain that a distinction remains between the individual and God. Origen, for
instance, holds in On First Principles that participation in God grants the human being a share in
immortality and incorruptibility, which results in the ongoing integrity of the individual human
soul as it partakes of the divine.116 The doctrine of deification, then, can be disentangled from a
mysticism of radical, absorptive union, and in fact early Christian theologians exerted consider-
able effort in making just such a distinction.
Another major element of the doctrine of deification, one that works against both a “physical”
understanding and the absorption possibility, concerns the centrality of the term “children of
God” for the doctrine. Patristic figures make frequent use of Psalm 82:6, along with the Pauline
language of adoption and Johannine models of birth “from above” in order to claim that being
“deified” involves standing in a filial relation to God the Father. This filial dimension of deifi-
cation retains a place for the individual human being, and it also suggests that the will has an
ongoing role as one is drawn more deeply into the divine life.
With a sense of the other versions of deification that lay before Baur as he conducted his
retrieval, we can clearly see that he puts forward a highly questionable portrait of the doctrine.
Other models of deification—which had the benefit of textual support—were available to him,
both in the patristic materials themselves and among contemporaries such as Neander. And yet,
Baur chose to depict deification in a manner that cannot actually be supported by reference to the
writings of patristic figures. The explanation for this curious, unsustainable interpretation is most
plausibly located in the influence of German Idealism on his retrieval.
6. Correcting Ritschl: Deification, Justification, and the West

Baur’s retrieval of deification decisively shapes the history of scholarship on the doctrine, as
Ritschl views deification through Baur, and in so doing mischaracterizes the doctrine for genera-
tions of scholars in his wake. Most notorious is Ritschl’s claim that deification is a “chemical
process of nature,” with which comes the inaccurate view that deification necessarily replaces
the individual will with a mechanistic soteriology. Ritschl also appears to borrow from Baur the
115
Augustus Neander, General History of the Christian Religion and Church, vol. 3 (Boston: Crocker and Brewster,
1856), 183.
116
Origen of Alexandria, De Principiis IV, 4, 9. ET: 326.

22 Mark McInroy
notion that deification elides the distinction between God and creation, and we see in Ritschl’s
wholesale identification of deification with radical mystic union that he mistakenly views the
doctrine as involving the absorption of the self into the ocean of the absolute.
As much as Ritschl simply replicates aspects of Baur’s view of deification, he makes his own
distinctive contributions to the modern misconstruction of the doctrine. Two items stand out as
particularly untenable. First, Ritschl claims that deification is Eastern and justification Western.
Oddly, however, Ritschl blurs his own sharp geographical delineation by acknowledging that
deification appears in the West—repeatedly, as it turns out. Ritschl discloses that deification can
be found among Western medieval figures and Pietists, and he even concedes that Luther betrays
an “echo” of deification in his hymn, Vom Himmel kam der Engel Schaar.117 Ritschl’s initially
clean division between East and West is therefore troubled by Ritschl himself, and the picture of
deification that emerges from the pages of his study is not a doctrine that can be comfortably
confined to the Christian East. Instead, Ritschl depicts deification as a view of salvation with
remarkable staying power and ubiquity, as it perennially recurs throughout the history of
Christianity. During the past few decades a number of studies have confirmed just how wide-
spread deification is throughout the West, as dozens of major Western theologians have been
shown to advocate the doctrine.118
Although Ritschl’s geographical demarcation has been exceptionally influential, it is but a
consequence of the theological claim on which the distinction between East and West relies,
namely, that deification and justification are mutually exclusive soteriological options. However,
Ritschl’s stance itself depends on the inaccurate understanding that he receives from Baur,
namely, that deification is a mechanical extension of divinity into humanity that eliminates the
will. Furthermore, although the intricacies of the relationship between justification and deifica-
tion cannot be examined in detail here, we can demonstrate that Ritschl’s position is confronted
by a number of figures who view deification and justification as intimately related to one an-
other. Most clearly and succinctly, Augustine straightforwardly claims, “He who justifies is the
same who deifies because by justifying he made [human persons] into children of God. . . . If we
are made God’s children, we are made gods: but this is through the grace of the one who adopts
and not through the nature of the one who begets.”119 To Augustine, deification is the direct result
of justification; to be justified is to be deified. The two understandings do not compete with one
another. Instead, they cohere in a unified soteriological vision. Cyril of Alexandria, too, accord-
ing to Daniel Keating, incorporates deification and justification: “Properly speaking, Christ in
us—through his Spirit and life-giving flesh—is the source and ground of our divinization, ac-
complishing our justification, our sanctification, our divine filiation, and our participation in the
divine nature.”120 Along similar lines, Edith Humphrey has recently drawn attention to John
Chrysostom’s emphasis on both justification and deification.121 Thomas Aquinas also views de-
ification and justification as intimately related to each other, as Keating has elsewhere demon-
strated.122 Bonaventure, too, puts forward a vision of salvation that, in the words of Christopher
117
118
See n. 3 above for a list of relevant works.
119
Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, 33-50, 381.
120
Daniel A. Keating, The Appropriation of Divine Life in Cyril of Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004), 193.
121
Edith Humphrey, “Orthodox Christian Reception of the Pauline Teaching on Dikaiosynē: Chrysostom, in
Conversation with Calvin, on Romans 1-3,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 20, no. 2 (April 2018):
267-84.
122
Daniel A. Keating, “Justification, Sanctification and Divinization in Thomas Aquinas,” in Aquinas on Doctrine:
A Critical Introduction, eds. Thomas Weinandy, Daniel A. Keating, and John Yocum (London and New York: T&T
Clark, 2004), 139-58.

Cullen, “while consisting in the grace of justification, also involves being made God-like.”123
The precise relationship between justification and deification varies among these figures, to be
sure, but they do not view the two as mutually exclusive possibilities for understanding salva-
tion. In fact, in a number of cases the two ideas are inextricably intertwined with one another, as
justification brings with it incorporation into the divine life.124
Remarkably, however, to Ritschl the fact that major Christian theologians have endorsed both
justification and deification is not evidence that the two doctrines stand in harmony with one
another. Ultimately, despite the number of figures in the West who view deification and justifi-
cation as related to one another, Ritschl explains away these persistent features of the history of
Christian theology by simply claiming that all figures before him have been muddled in their
thinking. They have not achieved a “self-consistent arrangement,” in Ritschl’s estimation.125
This assessment, as we have seen, problematically relies on the questionable definition of deifi-
cation that Ritschl receives from Baur, namely, as a doctrine with no place for the will. When this
misunderstanding is eliminated, concord can be achieved between the two doctrines.
As a final remark, I would suggest that as much as Ritschl objects to deification as he under-
stands it, he ironically places a major strand of the doctrine at the very center of his theology.
Without calling it deification, and in fact after stripping it of its “mystical” and metaphysical
features, Ritschl situates our adopted status as children of God at the heart of his model of justi-
fication. The following from his Instruction in the Christian Religion is striking: “In adoption
(acceptance as children of God) the gracious purpose of the judgment of forgiveness or justifica-
tion is put into effect, so that God confronts the believer as a father and gives him the right to the
full confidence of a child.”126 To Ritschl, adoption entails acceptance, which is precisely what
justification establishes for the individual Christian. Ritschl ostensibly rejects deification, then,
yet he actually sanctions a central component of the doctrine by emphasizing the filial status of
the human being in relation to God. Ultimately, then, Ritschl does not in fact comprehensively
eliminate deification from Protestant theology once and for all, as he intends, but instead allows
traces of the doctrine to endure in his own theology.
7. Conclusion
A proper understanding of deification requires shedding to a great extent the hermeneutical lens
that has been used since the nineteenth century to examine the doctrine. That interpretive ap-
proach, as this study has argued, arises through the influence of German Idealism on Ferdinand
Christian Baur, whose retrieval of deification fundamentally determines the understanding of
the doctrine held by Albrecht Ritschl and those in his school. This Liberal Protestant characteri-
zation, in turn, decisively shapes the view of the doctrine held by twentieth-century Orthodox
theologians, who overturn the negative assessment of the doctrine advanced by the Ritschlian
school yet ultimately reinforce the deeper claim that deification does not fit within Western
soteriologies.
Ultimately, then, it is Baur’s Idealist-inspired retrieval that lies at the root of the widely
held perception of deification as an exclusively Eastern doctrine that precludes justification,
123
Christopher Cullen, Bonaventure (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 156.
124
Roland Chia, “Salvation as Justification and Deification,” Scottish Journal of Theology 64 (2011): 125-39.
125
126
Albrecht Ritschl, “Instruction in the Christian Religion,” in Three Essays: Theology and Metaphysics,
“Prolegomena” to The History of Pietism, Instruction in the Christian Religion, trans. Philip Hefner (Minneapolis, MN:
Fortress Press, 1972), 237.

24 Mark McInroy
mechanically divinizes human nature as a whole, bridges the creator-creature distinction, and
absorbs the individual human being into God. As we have seen, however, these characterizations
do not in fact follow from rigorous scrutiny of ancient Christian figures. Instead, they arise
under particular historical conditions that ultimately distort perceptions of the doctrine in the
modern period. Deification to patristic figures is not exclusively Eastern, it does not preclude
justification, it is not a “physical” doctrine of salvation, it does not disregard the distinction be-
tween God and creatures, and it does not dissolve the individuality of the human being. Having
established an account of the trajectory through which these misunderstandings have arisen, this
study equips future examinations of deification to avoid the misperceptions of the doctrine that
have been prevalent in the modern period.

Mcinroy 2021

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Modern Theology Month 2021 DOI:10.1111/moth.

HOW DEIFICATION BECAME EASTERN:

© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

2. Albrecht Ritschl and the Expulsion of Deification from Western Theology

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3. Divine by Nature: Deified Humanity in German Idealism

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4. An Idealist-­Inspired Retrieval: Deification According to Ferdinand Christian Baur

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5. Correcting Baur: The Patristic Evidence

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6. Correcting Ritschl: Deification, Justification, and the West

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© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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4. An Idealist-Inspired Retrieval: Deification According to Ferdinand Christian Baur