This blog explores both historical and current events guided by the thought of the leading thinkers, past and present, of this school or movement of theology. Refer to the Classic Posts, Great and Contemporary Thinkers, various links of all kinds, in addition to the Archives themselves. David is the founder and manager of this website, but many friends contribute to it on a regular basis.
The alternative between relationality and substantiality is a false one, unfamiliar to St Athanasius and other Eastern fathers. The central question in dispute is what was meant by the Gk words they used for participation (metousia, methexis), which is how they characterized what we call deification, namely, as participation in God or in the divine nature. Does such a glorious holiness, identified by all fathers with adoptive divine sonship, involve only the indwelling of God's uncreated Spirit, or does it also involve created causality, such that God's uncreated operations become the agent of a dynamic, analogical likeness between creature and Creator, or child and Father? A dissertation entitled "Sanctity as Participation in the Divine Nature According to the Ante-Nicene Fathers, Considered in the Light of Palamism," by Jeffrey D Finch (2002), demonstrates that it was the latter for Athanasius and his Eastern predecessors.
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The alternative between relationality and substantiality is a false one, unfamiliar to St Athanasius and other Eastern fathers. The central question in dispute is what was meant by the Gk words they used for participation (metousia, methexis), which is how they characterized what we call deification, namely, as participation in God or in the divine nature. Does such a glorious holiness, identified by all fathers with adoptive divine sonship, involve only the indwelling of God's uncreated Spirit, or does it also involve created causality, such that God's uncreated operations become the agent of a dynamic, analogical likeness between creature and Creator, or child and Father? A dissertation entitled "Sanctity as Participation in the Divine Nature According to the Ante-Nicene Fathers, Considered in the Light of Palamism," by Jeffrey D Finch (2002), demonstrates that it was the latter for Athanasius and his Eastern predecessors.
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