This breathtakingly rich and complex handbook, which employs truly expert people to cover so much ground –it does not seem pretentious to speak in terms of ‘new paradigm’. What follows might seem like ‘rearguard action’ of a reactionary against the revisionists. However, if ‘deification’ is to do some of the ‘heavy lifting’ that the somewhat discredited legal models (satisfaction, substitution, vicarious representation) used to do in Western soteriology, then it’s Christological and soteriological foundations need to be able to bear examination. God might well be ‘with us’ (Emmanuel) but he also may not be, if his commitment to humans and creation is on the basis of a covenant. The question of God being bound to ‘human nature’ is also important. In the recent discussion of ‘partakers of the divine nature’, the emphasis has been possibly too much more on exploring ‘nature’ than on ‘participation’ . The non-Copernican universe of Early Modernity is one shared by the Hebrew bible, if not by certain parts of Apocalyptic, and so the idea of spatiality for Christ’s humanity is not one of being ‘up beyond the clouds’. In any case, one might want to resist readings of the NT which begin and end with Cosmology. `
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