THE ONTOLOGICAL DEIFICATION OF MAN IN CHRIST - CONDITION OF FULL COMMUNION WITH GOD IN THE LIFE OF THE MISSIONARY CHURCH
THE ONTOLOGICAL DEIFICATION OF MAN IN CHRIST - CONDITION OF FULL COMMUNION WITH GOD IN THE LIFE OF THE MISSIONARY CHURCH

Summary/Abstract: In Orthodox missionary theology, redemption is based primarily on the effects that the hypostasis of the God's Son induced in His human nature: inflexibility before sin and every temptation ultimately led his human nature to a transformation from the ground up, to a transfiguration in the sense of eliminating the consequences of sin and raising it to the level of the deification because Christ, the Word of God, "introduces us into a truth that has ontological implications" as Zizoulas points out. Thus, although the human being remains created nature, "Christified humanity", according to Fr. McGuckin, acquires through uncreated energies certain supernatural qualities which make the process of the deification of human nature not merely a pious metaphor, but a true reality and for man this transfiguration can only be realized in communion with Christ, Whose deified humanity is the source of sanctifying and deifying divine life, by which Christ creates in man a new spiritual organism through which man lives the spiritual life, with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, which makes him become a christophor or theophor, and a christification of the human person takes place, which is the anthropological content of the deification.

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