What's the best way to approach people with this

so they kind of get familiar with what the church is actually teaching? I don't tend to dress up a relatively new audience and hit them hard with the language of theification. I prefer to speak about the destiny of the human being to be sons and daughters of God together, but God became like we are that we might become like he is. That's the core of theification. I like to communicate that because the language can be a little bit of wilderness. Or can send them off on the wrong tracks like

what's out of you. we might become like he is, that's the core of theification. I like to communicate that because the language can be a little bit

will-during or can send them off on the wrong tracks like,

oh, it's not really like the Mormons or, you know, are we,

and I've seen people get fascinated by theification and effectively

become pantheists.

I'm like, that's not what it means, you know?

This is the art of Catholic. The doctrine of deification, sometimes called divinization. Even if you've heard of it, it's a doctrine that's not all that easy to explain. Now, that said, it's perhaps one of the most important doctrines in the Church

because it's the beginning and basically everything in between of a Catholic faith, why don't you understand it? And that is the topic of this episode of the Art of Catholic. So let me just give you a couple of quotes to kind of set this stage on this, so you know where we're coming from. This first one is from the 4th century, St. Athanasius. The word became human that we might become divine.

There's another one. He gave us divinity. We gave him humanity. That's that from of Syria. And one more. The only begotten Son of God, wanted to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature so that he made man might make men gods. That is St. Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. But what does that mean? I mean, certainly there's a mystery to all this, but what does it mean when Aquinas says so that he made man might make men gods? Well, as I said, it's called the doctrine of deification

or divinization.

I've been wanting to do another episode on this

for a long time because it's something that is so central to our faith. Yet, so very few Catholics, especially in the West, have ever heard anything about it, even though it's found all throughout scripture, it's in the liturgy, it's in the church fathers as we're gonna talk about here. I would be stunned if you have ever had a homily on this your local parish.

And I'm going to tell you right now, when this episode is over, you may be picking your jaw up off the ground because beginning to understand this will radically reshape how you view the Catholic life and what it's all about. And I can't think of a better guess to talk about this than Dr. Dan Keating, who is a professor at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, where he teaches on Scripture, the Church Fathers, Ecumenism, and the New Evangelization. Now, he has written several books. One of them I have here in front of me called Deification and Grace. He's also written first and second Peter, Jude from Baker, the Adventure of Discipleship, and he co-authored The Nicene Creed, scriptural historical and theological commentary. So Dr. Keating, welcome to the art of Catholic. Thank you. It's great to be here. Now as I said a lot of people have never heard of the doctrine of deification. I didn't come across it until I've been a Catholic for a number of years when I started picking it up and in some of the spiritual classics and I was like, what is this? So before we get into the need of this, I'd like to know like how did you get interested in this topic because you write a fair bit about this. Like many, I think I kind of backed my way into it or or or maybe to say I started through a set of doors and found that this was a key door that I had to open and see what was going on. As you laid it out, Matthew, it is the case that, once you see it, and once you attune your ear to the language, it's all over the place. In the tradition, it's in the liturgy, it's in the fathers, it's in a coiness, it's in

modern theologians, it's, you know, but until you learn to pick it up, it kind of hides in the margins, it sits there and does its work, but it isn't obvious. So I think that was true for me. I certainly knew the term, but I didn't really pursue it very much. Honestly, it was as I pursued in the Church Fathers, what it means to receive the Holy Spirit and the full fruits of the Holy Spirit that I ran into this as a larger subject and had to kind of readjust my categorization of things like, okay, it's not just the Holy Spirit here. What is the Spirit doing? What does the Eucharist accomplish? What does the Word of God seek to do in our hearts? What's happening there? And then you find out you're in this wild world of deification. And it's like a good modern game. It has pitfalls. It has places you can fall in. You can end up in deep dark dungeons if you're not careful. And I think that can happen to people. So it's also, it's not dangerous, but it's got cautions around it. You have to be a little bit careful when you navigate your way around this or else you slide right into a lot of popular new age kinds of approaches. And it all sounds new age-ish if you're not carefully lodging

it and anchoring in the tradition. Well, let's start to unpack that because that is certainly the case. Why don't you explain to us kind of as basically as you can what is the doctrine and what is not of the doctrine of defecation? Sure. The um, deification is a way to describe God's fundamental intention and purpose for us. I sometimes like to begin with Genesis chapters, you know, two and three, when the serpent is tempting Eve and basically says to her, and you can become like God. And we tend to look at that That, as well, that's just idolatry, and it's pantheism, we're seeking to be something or not. And certainly, in the devil's temptation, it was. He tempted Eve and Adam successfully to seek after this on their own terms rather than in the fear of the Lord and in wisdom. But there was truth in his words, or else it wouldn't have been so effective, that God's purpose is that we become like Him. We are made in His image and likeness, and we're called to become fully conformed to Him. Theification is a way of capturing, maybe to say it this way, that the end goal is not just a human being who is transformed humanly, but the very fulfillment of the human being is a graceful fulfillment that involves participation in the very life of God, that we're not fully human beings as we are the creatures we are until and unless we're participating in some real way in God Himself. That's what theification lifts us to and insists that we don't stop short of that. So what is it not then? Where does some confusion come in? This is really quite, quite important. It can sound like a kind of a backhanded well. Everybody knows it's not this. Well, in fact, I watch and I say even when I see people right about it. It's not, I mean, it's not that hard to slip into a deep, hard tunnel. Deification is not the doctrine that we are all God and that basically Christianity is just making us to be the gods that we are a little bit like a pantheon of Greek gods. We're all a bunch of world-un bunch gods. We become God. In fact, we remain ever and always the human creatures we are, even in the resurrection, even in the new age, new life. We always remain the creatures we are. We don't pass our kind of boundary into the nature of God. So, classically in the tradition, it's said like this, Deification means that we become God not by nature, but by grace. And that grace isn't just a pathway, it's actually defining how we become like God, to become God in this sense, to be deified, is to become like God. And when it speaks in the New Testament, it being conformed to the image of the sun, this is speaking the language of deification

without using the word.

So it's really crucial to see that deification is not

to use a fancy phrase,

a kind of ontological promotion to another kind of nature.

We don't become something or not,

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