In his contribution on the Pauline and Petrine Letters for the Oxford Handbook of Deification, Ben Blackwell identifies participation in the death and life of Christ as the “central framework” of the Pauline epistles and claims that much of the language that Paul uses to describe this concept is “evocative of deification” (65). Participation, he claims, fundamentally entails the reception of certain ‘divine attributes” from God through assimilation to Christ, facilitated to human participants through the vital Spirit which dwell within them, resulting in “moral and noetic transformation in the present” and “somatic transformation in the future” (66). Justification, accordingly, is not merely a forensic declaration but a consequence of sharing in the divine life (70). Each of these claims is, I believe, correct, and Blackwell rightly locates them at the core of the Pauline evangelion.
However, while Blackwell focuses primarily on the interior aspects of participation, he devotes comparatively little attention to its corporeal and cosmological dimensions. Regarding the future transformation of the body, Blackwell contends that this process does not involve the conversion of the flesh into a superior body of spirit, but rather the “lost and restored presence of the life-giving Spirit of God” (67). In this respect, he aligns with a longstanding Christian tradition which insists that the divinized human body is adventitiously endowed with contranatural divine properties while remaining unaltered in substance and form.
In contrast, I argue that Paul adapts a Platonic discourse in which deification involves the supersession of the flesh by a new divine body. For Paul, the human mind is beleaguered within the earthen body which is intractable to its benign intentions. Participation in Christ’s death and resurrection entails the extirpation of the flesh and the transformation of the body into a new divine form—immortal, luciform, and composed of a heavenly substance—no longer subject to the conditions of sin and death. While Blackwell rightly emphasizes Paul’s use of εἰκων, he does not pursue its ontological implications. For Paul, assuming the image of Christ entails the assumption of simpler and more primitive ontological state in which the binaries of ethnicity, caste, and biological sex are transcended. Justification follows from deification because the participant in Christ will soon assume a mode of existence in which the regulations of the law are not applicable.
Short Bibliography:
Litwa, M. David. We Are Being Transformed: Deification in Paul's Soteriology. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012.
Novenson, Matthew V. Paul and Judaism at the End of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Stowers, Stanley. "The Dilemma of Paul’s Physics: Features Stoic-Platonist or Platonist-Stoic?" In From Stoicism to Platonism: The Development of Philosophy, 100 BCE–100 CE, edited by Troels Engberg-Pedersen, 231-53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Van Kooten, George H. Paul's Anthropology in Context: The Image of God, Assimilation to God, and Tripartite Man in Ancient Judaism, Ancient Philosophy and Early Christianity. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008.
Wasserman, Emma. The Death of the Soul in Romans 7: Sin, Death, and the Law in Light of Hellenistic Moral Psychology. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008.
In his contribution on the Pauline epistles, Ben Blackwell identifies participation as a kind of deification and as the core of Paul’s Gospel—relocating justification as a consequence of this more fundamental concept. These claims are critically correct. However, when explaining this process in more detail, Blackwell aligns with a longstanding Christian tradition that insists that the deified human body remains unaltered in substance and form. Instead, it retains its mortal nature but is infused with contranatural divine properties by the Spirit. I argue that this framework, despite its venerable Christian pedigree, is foreign to the Pauline idiom. Rather, Paul conceives of participation in Christ’s death and resurrection as involving the abolition of the flesh, which is irremediably intractable to the noble volitions of the mind, and the assumption of an ‘aethereal and luciform’ body—a more ontologically primitive form not subject to the law nor the condemnation it effects.