One of the chapters that I read in my latest reading of The Cambridge History of Christianity: Constantine to c. 600
was Alan Brown's "The intellectual debate between Christians and
pagans". An issue that Brown discusses is the deification of human
beings through Christ.
Brown states on page 273 that, according to
Christianity, Christ has united creation to divinity, healing such
divisions as that between the sexes (through the virgin birth) and that
between the observable world and the angelic. Through baptism, human
beings are incorporated into Christ, providing them with the potential
to be deified. They receive the Holy Spirit, and "their mode of
existence [is] transformed from its previous lustful, unholy,
vice-ridden, ignorant and self-loving mode to the mode of being
manifested in Christ, which is non-sexual, holy, virtuous, knowing the
true logoi of beings and possessed above all by a selfless love
for God." Brown states on pages 273-274 that "To the extent which the
baptised person, by the power of the Holy Spirit, actively achieves this
in his own freedom, his potential deification is actualised, as Christ
becomes incarnate in him."
This topic is of interest to me because
of my background in Armstrongism, which asserted that true Christians
will become god-like beings in a God-family. But that does not appear
to be what ancient Christians (and even modern Catholics) mean when they
talk about people being deified. Rather, they mean being united with
God, partaking of what is divine (i.e., the Holy Spirit), and having
divine attributes of character. My impression is that people don't
become spirit beings, per se, for union with God entails the redemption
of the physical, not the discarding of it. (But I realize that there
was debate in early Christianity about whether our resurrected bodies
will be physical or spiritual.)
Brown distinguishes between the
Christian view of deification and that of the pagans, but, if I'm
correctly understanding the information that he presents, there appears
to be some overlap. Both are about healing differences and bringing
people and things into union with the one. Both assert that, on some
level, this union is possible even now, in a world that still has
limitations and differences.